before I met you
“Riley, before I met you, I was all alone,” Josh says gently, his voice a quiet trumpet.
He stands in the middle of our Baltimore hotel room, gesturing toward her with one hand clawed around a balled-up t-shirt. The thought has made him pause in his packing, as though it must be acknowledged before he can continue.
It is not good, God said in the beginning, for man to be alone.
Familiarity floods as Josh speaks, as I recognize the Word tumbling out with his words, the spill of living water rushing through the voice of man. I hear in his humility the relief that must surely have also come when Adam faced his Eve, looking into her eyes for the first time.
This thing Riley and Josh have, that overflows them, is love as old as time.
I glance at Kevin, and we share a smile over Josh’s openness, his honest, tender testimony to our daughter.
Before I met you, I was all alone.
Those words, I was all alone, the deep resonance of chronic human heartache, thrum low beneath every kind of love story. They could be the four-word summary of my own story and Kevin’s, the one his dad told as he officiated our wedding, and not just the story beneath our love for each other but of our spiritual poverty before God. In fact, those four words linger as the base note of fallen human history.
Before I met you, I was all alone.
The English word alone developed from a Latin contraction of the word all and the word one, in combination meaning, entirely individual, creating a stark contrast to union, that is, the uniting of individuals into one. That phrase, all alone, quite literally means entirely entirely individual, communicating a certain depth of feeling, a longing, by way of the superlative, which is completely undone by the conditions of the opening clause.
Just so, at first look, Adam said responsively to Eve, “You are bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.” You are part of me, and I am part of you. Or, to further quote the romance of scripture, I am my beloved’s, and he is mine.
Across the ages, this is the vocabulary of union, the response to our aloneness, the language of man overwritten by the holy intentions of the God who, in the freshness of our days, observed, “It’s not good for man to be alone.”
It’s interesting that in the creation story, aloneness, the ‘entirely individual’-ness of man stands out as the not good succeeding and contrasting God’s repetitive, pointed descriptions of all that He has made as good. Light is good, trees are good, water and fish are good, people are very good, but for man to exist apart from community is not good. Also noteworthy, the ancient Hebrew word for alone transliterates in English as bad, literally means separation, and by implication, can refer to a part of the body or the branch of a tree, to parts only tragically and unnaturally lobbed off from the whole, in the way that man can be disconnected from God. All this rushes with an undercurrent of divine speech, proclaiming that humans were created for communion, for abiding, with God and each other, and that the marriage covenant exists as one articulation of that fact.
I will make a suitable helper, God continued after making His observation, and not merely as part of some interior monologue, but within the intimate, creative collaboration of His own union. This is the “one as we are one—I in them and you in me” complete unity to which Christ referred when He prayed before going to the cross, and so, the word translated suitable in the narrative record literally means in front of or opposite, imaging individuals turned toward one another, creating an integral, synergistic one.
Hearing her name spoken thus in love, Riley pauses her own diligent search for hidden, unnoticed, and unpacked things, lifting and turning her body, her attention, toward Josh. She listens, stilled, her gaze fixed on his face.
Before I met you, I was all alone.
“Yes, you were. That’s true, Josh. You were all alone before you met me,” Riley agrees thoroughly, never one to minimize the facts, her voice confident, strident with truth, as though in a whirl of ever-challenging uncertainties, this reality builds her a brave shelter. “And before I met you, I was all alone too.”
For a beat, they stand smiling at each other, seeing nothing and no one else. Josh reaches out and Riley reaches back, clasping his hand, weaving her fingers through his until their arms bridge the distance seamlessly, like flesh and bone cord. He brings their connected hands to rest a moment, just above his heart. Her smile stretches, broad and contented, and she says only, “Hello, Josh.”
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I am yours, and you are mine.
Down the city streets yesterday on our way to the baseball game, I watched them, treasuring up this emerging oneness, for it is not a thing that happens in a moment, but a grafting that blends two lives over time. They walked through the dusty heat sometimes hand-clasped in just this way, fingers carefully threaded, at other times leaving space to go at different paces, linked by an awareness of each other that turned their bodies and their minds.
Slowly now, hand slipping free, Riley bends, looking beneath the bed for anything we might forget when we leave the room, and Josh leans away, stuffing that balled-up t-shirt into his duffle bag.
But I do not for a moment believe they are any less connected.
Somewhere silent, the call and response of love, ours and God’s, continues between them, grace, on repeat.
Before I met you, I was all alone.
Yes. But I am yours now, and you are mine.
