"Who are we to be too good for the personals? What makes us so great that we have to meet in the most magical, creative way?"

Larissa Kaye Batten (LLbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.

28-year-old, soulful, green-eyed writer seeks spiritually oriented man for friendship and whatever is meant to be. No heavy drinkers please.

"This is the most unspiritual thing I have ever done in my life," I told myself after I placed my personals ad in the local paper.

I was bored and restless, and the ad was free, but still -- there seemed to be no excuse for such an "unspiritual" action.  

God would never want me to meet a man this way, I thought. I had really messed up this time. There was only one solution: I would have to quit this craziness.

Unbeknownst to me, the editor of the personals section had run the advertisement in a wide variety of small newspapers throughout New York City and New Jersey. I was given a 1-900 number to call to retrieve the voice mail messages left by men interested in meeting me. A 1-900 number? Talk about unspiritual.

I only called back about 2.5 of the many men who left messages before I quit the whole process. I say 2.5 because I played phone tag with one man before I gave up on him.

One other man and I played phone tag for a while, but for some reason I chose to persist with getting in touch with him.

So much for my earlier decision. I returned this man's call. He wasn't there so I left a message.

"Hi, my name is Lara. I'm returning the message you left about my personals ad. I feel really weird about doing this. I've never done anything like this before really, but I wanted to answer your call."

I waited. I didn't hear anything for a week or so. He had gone away, I later discovered. Then he left me a message.

"I know I sound like Demi Moore right now," he laughed on his message. "That's what I sound like when I have a cold. I'll call you when I'm feeling better."

I liked his sense of humor, but I didn't dwell too much on his call.  He called again and left a message. I called him back, but some problem with his new answering machine
prevented us from talking.

He called me back.

I don't know why we persisted, especially after I had decided to return to my spiritual work.

"Hi," he said over the telephone when we finally spoke for the first time. "This is Dan."

By that time, I knew his voice fairly well from his messages. We chatted nervously for a little while. He was funny. He lightened the tone of the conversation.

We talked, and we talked. We talked some more. And talked. I had a very strange feeling.

At the end of the conversation, I told him about the feeling. "This is really weird, but I feel like I've known you. Like this isn't the first time we have talked. I feel like I've always known you."

Ahem. Great way to get rid of a guy, right?

He didn't flinch. "That's just because you're a nice person."

"No, I don't think so. I just have this weird feeling."

We said goodbye, and I planned once again to return to my "spiritual" life.

He called again. We spoke again.

"When will you be in New York City again? Do you want to get together?" I asked him at the end of our talk.

"Uh, ah, I don't know," he replied.

Great. So much for being forward. It was clear to me he wasn't interested in meeting me. Well, at least I would be able to get back to my spiritual life. God had won after all, right? God would never want me to meet a man this way.

"I'm not sure," he said finally. "But I'll let you know, okay?"

Sure enough, he did let me know.  In fact, he drove an hour so we could meet each other.  We had pizza at a great little joint and took the bus to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I shared with him a spiritual experience on our very first date

In fact, I had never met a man more spiritually and soulfully in tune with me. I had never felt so comfortable, so me, so real, so relaxed and excited at the same time, with a "stranger".

In fact, I don't think we were strangers at all. I feel we had always known one another.

In fact, me and this man from the personals, well, we married each other a few years later.

We couldn't tell anyone, of course, how we had met. Maybe we could whisper the story to our best friends, but that was about it.

We didn't want anyone to know what losers we were. We had met each other through the personals. That's not something to brag about, right?

To top it off, I was on a spiritual path. Dan was, too. How could we tell our friends what an unspiritual thing we had done?

We discussed the situation.

"I feel humbled by this," I told Dan. "Who are we to be too good for the personals? What makes us so great that we have to meet in the most magical, creative way?"

Dan agreed with me. "We're just like everyone else," he reminded me.

"So maybe this was a lesson in humility," I said. A spiritual lesson, perhaps.

"Do you realize?" I said. "Do you realize that I quit the personals? I might not have even called you back again. But God wanted us to meet. He made sure we did. God didn't care how we met, he just wanted us to be together."

"Maybe we should tell our friends," we agreed. "Maybe even one of our friends will meet a soulmate through the personals. Maybe we have a message to carry."

We laughed a lot about it.

Dan still claims that he only read my personals advertisement because he was setting his newspaper down for his dog to pee on.

God sure carries messages in strange ways, doesn't he?

And there it was. The truth. God had planned our meeting all along. God didn't think of us as too good for the personals. He thought of us as two of his children who would love and grow together, who would be good and whole together, who would pass on his message of grace and truth together.

"This is the most unspiritual thing I've ever done in my life," I had told my friend Patty.

But just what is spiritual?

Is it my job to define "spiritual", or is it my job to let God continue to do his beautiful works?

I try hard today to let God define his own principles. I try a lot harder, too, to live by them.

God keeps filling my heart with grace.  All I have to do is keep my heart open to him.

May my heart be open, my God, to your wonderful works.

Amen.

back to "Soul Food" index ->