Vanzant - In the Meantime

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this book is dedicated in love and with love to

D R . B ETTY S HABAZZ , who taught the world how to live in the meantime and do something very valuable with it;

C OLEEN G OLDBERG , who prayed for me without ceasing and spent the last days of her life traveling to my wedding;

R EVEREND F ERNETTE N ICHOLS , who brought forth the sermon that gave birth to this book;

what do you do in the meantime? Somewhere in the back of your mind you know the day will eventually come when the relationship you are in will become all that you want. Or all that you want in a relationship will one day show up. The question remains, however, what do you do in the meantime? Theres a funny thing about love. It will find you in the most unusual circumstances, at the most unlikely times. Love will come upon you, throw its arms around you, and transform your entire existence. Unfortunately, most of us wont recognize the experience or understand the impact when its happening. Its like being in therapy. You keep talking, searching, questioning whats going on with you and in you while being totally ignorant of the fact that you are being blessed. Perhaps its because love rarely shows up in the places that we expect it to or looks the way we expect it to look.

He was my love counselor. Tall, slim, very quiet, almost shy. I was short, stout, and quite, shall I say, boisterous. I was forever doing, saying, or experiencing things that attracted attention to meusually negative attention. He was seventeen. I was thirteen. He was a group leader at summer camp, and I was a summer worker who had not gotten paid. An administrative foul-up deleted my name from the payroll roster. He was assigned the task of making sure I got paid.

It seemed that no one knew what was going on, except him. As far as I was concerned, he knew everything. He walked me through a process that took two weeks to unravel. As we went from office to office, supervisor to supervisor, he was patient, always amenable. I was angry with a lot to say. He was comforting, and did I really need comforting! My love counselor constantly reassured me that it would all work out just fine. I believed him because it gave me the opportunity to be in his presence. That belief and his persistence finally paid off. I was issued three Summer Youth Corps paychecks for forty-five dollars each. It was a thrilling moment for me. It was an accomplishment for him. He was just doing his job. I was just being in love. He had twenty-five other youth workers to think about. I could think about nothing else but him. Now that I had my paychecks, I realized there was one small problem I would now need to resolve. This young man, with whom I was madly in love, was dating one of my best friends. It was the beginning of my meantime.

I spent thirty years of my life being in love with this man. I call him a counselor because he helped me search, question, and heal myself. He taught me many lessons about life and love. When we met, other people had me convinced that what I felt was not love. They said it was infatuation. Because they were older and, I thought, wiser than me, I believed them. I thought it best to ignore what I felt. I moved through that phase of my life believing that I knew nothing about loveafter all, I was just a child. I concluded that we would never, could never be together. He was too old for me. I moved on with my life feeling hurt and being angry about what I had been told and what I believed I had lost. In the end, I concluded that I was not good enough to be loved by him or anyone. In this moving, believing, conclusion-drawing process, I also made some decisions.

I decided I would never be hurt by love again. Although I wasnt quite sure what it was about love that had hurt me, I knew I never wanted to experience it the way I had when I was thirteen years old. I also decided that no man would do to me what my father had done to my mother. What he had done was none of my business, but I made it my business by watching, judging, and trying to figure out what no one seemed able to come right out and tell me. Who knows the truth about love, loving, or relationships? Was I really wrong about what I felt, what I saw, what I believed, and what I concluded from the relationship models I had seen? Good questions! But, in the meantime, I had to figure out the answers.

At age sixteen, I really thought I had found love. Instead, I got pregnant and was left alone to raise a child. At nineteen, I just knew I had found love, so I married it. Wrong again! At twenty-one, love called me up on the telephone, took me out on three dates, and moved in. That was when my meantime got real ugly. In the process, I got very, very clear. I became clear that all the things I thought about love had nothing to do with it. I realized that I couldnt recognize love because I had never actually seen it. Oh, I had a picture in my mind of what it should look like, but that picture had been cracked a long time ago. I also discovered that love is more than just a good feeling. It is more than just being needed or having your needs met. In a thirty-year meantime experience I came to realize that love is an inner, personal experience of total well-being that did not match any picture I had ever seen.

When I was with him, my love counselor, I felt like I could fly, and it didnt even matter if the people on the ground could see my panties while I was flying! The mistake was believing that he made me fly. After many crash landings, I realized that flying was something I did for myself, within myself, when I was able to relax. Thats right, relax! Relax all the fears, hurts, angry decisions, judgments, and conclusions. Relax the demands, expectations, and fantasies. Love, I discovered, is being still enough to feel all that is going on inside you and then learning how to acknowledge and accept what you feel.

In the presence of my love counselor, I was okay. Unfortunately, I thought he made me okay. In the meantime, I spent fifteen years trying to find someone who could do the same thing he had donemake me and life okay. Once I realized that I was just fine just the way I was, things got a lot better. The meantime got a lot easier. It was then that he walked right back into my life.

The age gap between us had miraculously closed, and we thought we were ready for loveand each other. We thought that because we needed and wanted each other everything would be just fine. Thats what we thought! In reality, we were still too confused, too needy, and too afraid that we werent good enough for each other. All of our toos were topped off with a lot of other baggage we were both carryingchildhood baggage, image baggage, you name it, we had it. We spent five years together acting out our stuffanger, guilt, shame, love fears, and love fantasies. Eventually the stuff fell in on our heads. We were in the meantime together!

Thats what usually happens in the meantime. Things fall in on you and they fall apart! In the meantime, you will have an experience, or a series of experiencesearth-shattering, heartbreaking experiences that are designed to eliminate your false needs. It is a process divinely designed to help you clear out your stuff. Clearing out stuff is hard work. It is like spring cleaning where you have to pull everything out, sort through the mess, throw stuff away, and get the entire house in shape. In the meantime, cleaning, clearing, and elimination can look like dishonesty, infidelity, betrayal, and abandonment. Its not! It is all the stuff that you hold on to that keeps you from a true and honest experience of love.