Does God Really Provide a Soulmate?
I Give You The World
Recently I attended an event with a group of Christian women who prayerfully watched the documentary film Soulmate… Everywoman’s Journey to Finding True Love. The film’s description as listed on Amazon.com is “For those still waiting to exhale, Soulmate is a gripping cinematic journey into the realities facing today’s successful, saved and single African American women. This deeply personal portrait reveals the trials and triumphs of unforgettable women while offering hope and practical advice on such issues as loneliness, the desire for sexual intimacy, men on the down low, the ticking biological clock and the uncertainty of the future. This inspiring film offers some surprising revelations about the quest for ones true…Soulmate” Directed by Andrea Wiley, the film although interesting to watch did not offer up the spiritual aspect of what a soulmate should be.
A search could not find a true dictionary definition of the term however; I did find a description online via Wikipedia… “Soulmate (or soul mate) is a term sometimes used to designate someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality and/or compatibility.”
If I ask myself the question does God really provide a soulmate, I also must answer myself yes. The description given in Wikipedia is what I have always believed is the true meaning of the term. What I also believe is God supplies all our needs and gives to us the mate he desires in our lives, even when we are least aware.
On September 23, 2008 I received a phone call from my daughter hysterically informing me that her father had just died. Immediately, I went numb and reached deep into my spirit to garner enough strength to calm the hysteria and the tears pouring through the phone I held in my hand. Upon closing my eyes to fight back my own tears, I realized that not only had my adult child lost her father, I too lost someone special. Images of every meaning of the term soulmate came flooding back… the natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, compatibility and so on.
Now that my daughter’s father is gone, I realize he was my soulmate. In the back of my mind I have always known he was the one, the soulmate by definition, which is something I’ve rarely spoken about openly. There has never been anyone in my life that fits the description completely. I might even reason that is why I have remained single, after having married a second time, for much of my life.
The Back Story
We were very young, I in the eleventh grade of high school and he in his first year of college. I was working as a clerk in the neighborhood drug store when an older female co-worker touched my arm and said she wanted me to meet someone. There standing in the aisle just in front of the pharmacy counter was a tall young man with the brightest smile I had ever seen. The co-worker said she knew him; speaking highly of him, and that he wanted to meet me. Introductions are made, and I go back to work. Day after day whenever I was on the schedule, he would come into the store -sometimes only buying a package of gum, while making sure I noticed his effort to smile and speak. The co-worker finally convinced me to go ahead and talk to him; which I did with some apprehension.
It was 1966, a time when life seemed so much simpler. The tenor of those days was at best, the epitome of family where children are parented being governed by strict values. Although age 17, I was not allowed to date; in fact dating was not even part of my vocabulary. This presented a problem needing some imagination, and the help of my older sister, so that I could arrange meetings with this new young man. Eventually I had to move in with my sister so that a continuing relationship could blossom. And, blossom it did. His name was Donald; D.J. for short, and we became inseparable.
D.J. was not only his name it is what he did to make ends meet while attending college. He was a disc jockey at a radio station located just eight blocks from my sister’s home. He also came from a rather intense family where he was the middle son of six children -two brothers and three sisters, a very laid-back father and an extremely controlling mother. In fact, his mother ruled his house and everyone in it.
For more than a year, our relationship developed into being in love. The memories are full of long conversations, laughter, and exploration -not physically of each other but of the things we had in common, and building family ties. We spent more time with each other than we did away from each other at his house and mine. There were dinners with the families, movies, amusements, concerts and my introduction to broadcasting. He worked five nights a week from 6pm to midnight. After asking his boss at the radio station for permission to have me as a visitor, he picked me up each day to walk to work together lugging schoolbooks, so that both of us could keep up with our studies.
We began to make plans. He asked me to marry him after I graduated from school and began teaching me the requirements needed to obtain a commercial broadcast license (back then you had to be licensed to be an on air announcer)… just in case I ever want to work with him in the business. In fact, I had gotten so good at working the broadcast board and turntables; there were nights I ran his show except for opening the mike. D.J. would be in the production room studying for an exam. People at the station started referring to us as Mr. and Mrs. Life was great, our love for each other was growing so we moved to the next level.
One of the biggest smiles I remember came when I told him I was pregnant. He ran around the station telling everyone to get out the champagne because not only was he getting married, he was going to be a father. The smile disappeared when we told his parents. His mother’s words were… “Well, it seems these two have got to get married. Humph, there will be no wedding here.” She even asked me, “Missy, how did you get pregnant? It is Donald’s?” At that point, we were forbidden to see each other. His mother hated the fact that he was a disc jockey, a profession she felt incorrigible; beneath his upbringing and would not elevate his status in the ‘black elite’ community. In fact, she blamed me for encouraging him and now that I was pregnant, his mother developed a total disdain toward me, and the relationship I had with her son.
His mother requested a meeting with my parents, without Donald present, to let them know how she felt, and again she reiterated that there would be no marriage. My parents were not in agreement with her.
Donald dropped out of school and disappeared. During my pregnancy, I contacted everyone we knew to help me find him. I was able to contact him the week before our daughter was born. He had run off and gotten a job at a radio station in North Carolina. My mother called him when the baby arrived and he immediately dropped everything, came back and held his daughter with tears in his eyes. In fact, he could not take his eyes off her and he was cautious about how anyone else held her. Three months later, we ran off to my uncle’s home in South Carolina and were married.
We were happy; we were a family of our own. Our stay in South Carolina was easy until we discovered how difficult it was to find jobs. My aunt was willing and able to watch the baby but without finding work, we were strapped for money. Eventually we came back home. The reception by his family was respectful, but cold.
Donald did get a job briefly working at another radio station in town with very low wages, and we lived in our own place as husband and wife for a while. Then all the pressure from his mother demanding that he go back to school, leave ‘that girl’ and let her take care of the baby starting getting to him. Discussions became arguments and we separated.
Weeks went by without a word from him and my attempts to speak to him went unanswered. Then, on a rainy evening, he came to me with tears in his eyes to ask that I come away with him; he was leaving town forever. I didn’t know what to do. He said, “It’s now or never.” Perhaps it was fear; I was 19 by then with no high school diploma because pregnant girls, in the 60s, had to drop out of school. So, I stayed.
Eventually we were divorced; both of us remarrying. There have been times over the years when we did connect. In person briefly, but there were many times we had long phone conversations about our lives with constant reflections on the love we had for each other. There was also the continuing interference from his mother over the years, which deepened the wounds from earlier times as she worked hard at driving a huge wedge between my daughter, her father and me. In fact, his oldest and second oldest sisters gave their mother willing assistance. The redeeming factor for D.J. and me was his father who, before his own death secretly made sure we could continue to establish communication, I suppose because he knew what his son and I had lost.
Circumstances in our lives prevented us from getting back together, even though we talked about doing so once. I was divorced from my second husband, going to school and busy providing a cultured life for our daughter, and he was constantly moving around the country trying to get a permanent foothold in broadcasting.
Donald, after all these years I still hold a special love for you in my heart. I cherish the beautiful daughter we made, who is the part of you I have always been able to hold onto. Where we failed was not in growing with each other, or in loving each other but in allowing others to influence our life decisions. The vows we took instructed us… “What therefore God has joined together, let no one put asunder.” Mark 10:9
May you rest in peace, my soulmate, my D.J. With Love… SAM
I wish I had written this story while D.J. was alive so that he would know exactly how I feel, although somehow I believe he always knew.
© 2008 – Sharon Moore Stenhouse – All Rights Reserved
