The Two Weeks

This episode will zoom into the two weeks after Huanyan met up with Angelina with his initial request. 

Huanyan's side of the story:

After the time has come to make a move, there were still some obstacles which I had to go through before I get the "yes" to go on further with the relationship. 

Firstly, it was the timing to meet her. It was perhaps very difficult to find a time to meet Angelina back then. I was (and still am) a busy bird running all over the place doing ministry. Also, during that time, I had to prepare for my upcoming mission trip to the land where Facebook is banned, on top of the normal church stuff. Hence it was a bit difficult to arrange a common time. 

Secondly, it was the premise for meeting up. There was a lot of apprehension before even asking her to meet, as I needed to find a 'non-threatening' premise to meet her. It was a good thing that her birthday was around the corner, hence I could use that as a premise to ask her out. 

Thirdly, I had to overcome the possibility of rejection. At that point before 30 November, I did not know whether any other guys are chasing after her or whether there's anything happening between her and other guys. But such is the risk of getting into a relationship that a guy has to undertake. More to be elaborated upon towards the end. 

Nevertheless, by God's grace, I managed to ask Angelina out to talk about it. And she asked me to wait for one month so that she can think through and pray about her reply to me. I accepted that effort.

In some sense, the following two weeks was a difficult period to go through. It was a nerve wrecking wait, as I did not know what the reply would be. Hence, my mind was almost always occupied. Not to mention that during this period, I had to think about all the Christmas stuff and the New Year. My worst nightmare back then was that I will be rejected on Christmas Eve or New Year Eve. My work productivity back then was almost equivalent to zero since this was almost occupying my mind all the time. I remember I was walking all over the place and was unable to settle down at one place as I needed to calm myself down from the very very fast heart beats despite myself in resting position. 

On hindsight, that was indeed the risk that a guy has to take. John Piper has defined biblical masculinity as “a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationship.” This means that the man ought to exercise a personal directive leadership in his own life and in his future relationship which will allow the woman to exercise her roles well in the relationship. On the contrary, John Piper defined biblical feminity as  “a freeing disposition to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships.” This means that a woman best expresses herself in the acceptance of her complementary role and ministering as his helper and assistant even when she is searching for her life partner. Such a woman is free to allow the man she is considering to provide “the pattern of appropriate initiatives in her relationship while joining in this process of leadership and helping to strengthen the masculinity of the man.

Hence, in view of the differing roles of man and woman in a relationship, it is truly appropriate that a man just has to take the initiative in his relationship, and indeed once he takes the initiative, he is also taking on the risk that comes with taking the initiative. Most of the risk, if I may argue, comes in the possibilty of rejection. And I have indeed seen people being rejected before. As Erik Thoennes said it in Dating 101, a relationship seminar conducted in Biola University in 2011, it is the man's job to stick your neck so that it gets cut off. 

So, I think part of being a man is really to take the leadership and initiative in our relationship. This is, as I would argue, literally our God-given role. As the saying goes, we miss 100% of the shots we do not take. And as another saying goes, fortune favours the bold. We cannot perpetually sit there and refuse to do anything simply because we are afraid of rejections. You are going to set the pattern for your relationship and you cannot afford to allow the relationship to be defined as you being the passive half right from the start. And in any case, if you are so passive, you are probably not going to go anywhere.

And you know what, if you feel butterflies in the stomach, you are not the first one, and probably not the only one, and definitely not going to be the last one to experience this when you do the initial asking. For the first-timer (such as me), it was as terrifying as our first attempt at public speaking. I thought public speaking was bad but I never realized that I will go cold-feet at such a private setting – especially since I thought I had since overcome the fear of public speaking.

Little did I know that Angelina would have an answer so soon into two weeks....

Angelina's side of the story:

And so two weeks after I made the decision to surrender my future relationship (or maybe even the lack of it) to God, Huanyan met me on the pretext of celebrating my birthday. Given that Huanyan rarely met up with girls one-on-one unless there was work/ministry stuff to discuss, I found it rather weird that he would initiate a one-to-one meet up just to celebrate my birthday.

And so the night before the meeting, I was wondering about the possible reasons he would arrange such a meet up. One of the out-of-the-world (or maybe not so after all) possibility was to ask for a relationship, since I did know that there was someone he was interested in. But I didn't really place too much hope on that, given that there were hardly any signs from him that year (2013). Although we were still in the same office, we barely spoke or had lunch together ever since we went to different LGs. Surely, if you did like someone, you would have found excuses to increase interaction with the person, rather than to decrease it. At least that was how they always portrayed it in dramas. 

And so we met the next day for lunch. I felt a little weird having lunch with him without ministry or work related stuff on our agenda, since most of our previous interactions were centred around those two topics. It was the first time that I saw him so uneasy. After we were done with lunch, he got really tensed. After taking a few deep breaths, he asked. No frills, just straight to the point, and he explained how he came to this decision. I was surprised that the out-of-the-world possibility I had thought of the day before actually became a reality. My mind was just in a mess, with thousand and one questions. Too many for me to even ask all of them. Given that I rarely make decisions when I am in an emotional whirlwind, I told him to give me a month time to think and pray through. 

I was glad that it was service soon after that, because it gave me some time alone to think and process what just happened with God. Little did I expect that as I brought this before God during worship, God immediately showed me a picture of us standing together with light radiating out. The light from the two of us was wayyyy brighter than what we could ever achieve individually. The message was clear - the impact that we can make for God together is much greater than what each of us can ever achieve alone. 

Till that day he asked, I had never saw Huanyan as anything more than a leader. I spent the next two weeks asking God if this sort of synergistic impact could be achieved through a leader-member relationship. Though I had no clear answer, I knew that the synergy that God was referring to was more than a leader-member relationship, since we have had such a relationship for three years since our uni days.  I also revisited my original list of criteria (close relationship with God, family man, sensitive to my needs) and asking which "non-negotiable criteria" were really non-negotiable and which were actually negotiable. There were a lot of fears that came up during this period too: loss of my freedom as a single, fear of a failed relationship and the heartache that followed, the limelight of being together with someone pretty high profile in church. The more I thought about the issue, the more questions I had, so we met up again to clarify expectations on the relationship. 

I prayed through and sought counsel from leaders and parents. Various viewpoints were raised, all seemed valid. But one of my leaders sharply pointed out that while I can spend more time considering the various factors that people have brought up (personality, values, family background, depth of how much I know him etc), actually deep down I already had an answer, from the image that God has given. And since there were no major red flags that I could see, it was about responding in faith to Huanyan's invitation, and trusting that if God was the one who had brought us together, so that we can shine even greater for him, then God will take care of whatever concerns I had. 

It was with this understanding and perspective of trusting God that I decided to say yes to Huanyan.

It has been about one year since then, and we have seen so much of God's hands in this relationship. Like every couple, we have had our fair share of tensions, disagreements and cooling off periods. Yet through each of these uncomfortable episodes, we see how God has moulded us to be more like Him, as we turned to God to make sense of the situation and responded to God's promptings to put down our pride and serve the other person even though we don't instinctively feel like it. We pray that we can share some of these encounters in subsequent posts so that you will be encouraged by how it can be possible to emerge victoriously from not-so-rosy situations when we have God as the anchor in our individual lives and in the relationship.