Why do we bother?
We pay our dues, we maintain our profile, we run our searches, make the effort to reach out…and nothing happens. We seem to be doing everything right, but no one responds, or if they do, nothing comes of it. So why bother to keep it up?
Do you remember the incident in the Gospel of John at the pool of Bethesda? A man had lain beside it for thirty-eight years hoping to be cured, but each time the angel disturbed the water, someone else got down first and he missed his chance. Or the woman with the hemorrhages, who had suffered for twelve years and spent all she had on doctors, only to be made worse.
I wonder how frustrated they must have been. How much they must have begged for God to take away their infirmities, no doubt wondering why He had abandoned them, what sin they had committed to suffer so.
But the truth, though they could not know it during their long years of suffering, was that God had heard their prayer, and He was preparing something special for them. He meant not only to cure them in His time, but at a time and in a manner that would glorify Him and them to the end of world. In fact, He was building them up to serve as types of every sinner and every suffering soul who seems left aside, passed over, and forgotten by God. One could almost put it that God forgot them for a time in order to show they were never truly forgotten.
The Almighty has His own purposes, which we cannot know ahead of time.
They may or may not correspond with what we want, and almost certainly don’t correspond with what we expect. Probably most of them we won’t understand until after death, when we see the whole form of our lives and of history itself laid out before us. But we can catch glimpses of it even now: how often do we want something badly and are denied it only to find something far better later on, or to discover some truth of ourselves or the world that we may never have realized but for the opportunity created by this disappointment?
Much about the dating scene today, online or otherwise, seems to encourage discouragement. Like the man by the pool or the woman with the issue of blood, the case seems hopeless and intensely frustrating. But also like them, no doubt God has His plan for each of us, which He will bring to fulfillment when the time is right.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean we just keep doing the same thing as we’ve always done. Perhaps we should vary up our approach, perhaps we should explore other avenues. That’s as may be. But we should continue to make the effort, even when it seems pointless.
You see, success in any endeavor is part effort and part what is called ‘luck.’
It is partly a matter of things you can control and partly of things you can’t (how much of each depends on the thing, but both are always involved). Columbus could discover the trade winds, could chart his course, could sail on and on, but he knew perfectly well that his success ultimately would depend on whether there was, in fact, any land there to find.
Likewise, you can make your profile and run your searches and keep your photos updated and all the rest, but you have no control over whether the right person happens to be on the site at this particular point in time. The whole endeavor cannot succeed unless that's in place, and whether it is so rests with God.
This is part of why we must emphasize again and again that it is God who gives the victory, not us. This is why the Medievals spoke so much of Dame Fortuna and why the Psalmist said that “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”
And this is why it makes sense to persevere in spite of discouragement and failure.
If it were entirely up to us, it might make sense to give up when we fail to meet with success. In such a case, whether we are doing the correct thing and whether we succeed would be synonymous; put in the right formula, the right result ensues. If it doesn’t work, you’re doing it wrong, or perhaps you’re just not cut out for it.
But since final success is out of our hands, then it only makes sense to remain ‘at our post’ in spite of our disappointment; to work to ensure that we are in the right place when the right time comes, ready and waiting with our lamps well-oiled.
This is the secret to success in every endeavor, or at least the one indispensable element: perseverance. The ability to show up and do your work day after day, with or without apparent reward. Because only then, you see, are you in a position to receive God’s answer to your prayer.
In the words of the Count of Monte Cristo, “All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘Wait and Hope.’”
