Hey God, Can I Get a Girlfriend?

Dear God,

Thank you for this day that you have made. Thank you for the ways in which you have worked and continue to work in my life. I pray that your Spirit can move in me and transform me to be more like Christ. At this time Lord, I just pray for this one request… God, pleeeease help me find a girlfriend. Yet-not-my-will-but-yours-be-done.

Amen.

Look, I'll be honest. This is something I've prayed for… more than once. Actually, more than I'm willing to admit. Call me foolish or desperate or whatever, but I'll still be huffing that Mark 11:24 hopium in between every breath of prayer. And I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people, at least once, have done the same. I mean, it's natural. We pray for what we desire. I'm at the point in my life where I've almost got my master's degree, I have a job lined up, a good church community and friend group… There's only one thing missing, so that's what I pray for.

For all the sad, lonely people who are already regretting their decision to read this piece, don't worry. I won't be flaming the desire to be in a relationship. Then I'd just be flaming myself—not cool. Instead, I want to talk about what it means to desire, and where this comes from: to desire in general, not for anything in particular. But in order to do that, I'm going to start from a really long time ago. Like, 2004.

Enter three-year-old me: already a little walking menace to society. My dad is finishing up his PhD in physical therapy and my mom just gave birth to my sister, so they already have their hands full of responsibilities. I don't personally remember what I was like back then, but I know from both my parents that I was—as the kids these days would say—a certified yapper. Like most children, what I desired most was attention: the attention of my parents, or the aunties and uncles at church, or strangers in the grocery store. Obviously, I was too young to pray for that, but I think if I'd been able to back then, I would have.

Skip another three years, and now I'm in elementary school—first grade. Our family had just moved, which meant I was switching schools. As a new student at Indian Trace (okay but why is that name kind of insensitive?), I really only had one desire: friends. I remember this was what I would pray for at night before bed, earnestly asking God for friends so I wouldn't become some edgy emo kid.

Fast forward to me as an edgy emo kid in middle school—but don't worry, it's just a phase. Growing up in a typical Asian household, the importance of grades and academic excellence were drilled into me from a young age—so you can guess what I started to pray for then. I think you can see where this is going now.

In high school, I prayed for my robotics team to do well. I prayed for my class rank. I prayed for college acceptances. In college, I prayed for interviews, then internship offers, then full-time jobs. And now we're all caught up.

In every season of my life I had some prayer, some desire that I raised to God. They started out small—attention, grades—and gradually became larger as I got older and asked for career opportunities, a job, and now—well, you read the title. The thing is, everything that I wanted was for myself: my grades, my job, my relationship. It's not like they're bad things to pray for—I mean, God says to be fruitful and multiply, right?—but I think there is a danger in this cycle of pursuit.

Now I'm not writing this to tell people not to pray for things. I joked about Mark 11, but it's not the only verse that talks about God answering prayers—look at Philippians 4:6, or Romans 8:26, Ephesians 6:18… there's a lot. We're supposed to lift our requests up to God, and He does say He will provide—not always in the ways that we want, but in the way that He decides. So by all means, pray for what it is that you want, as long as it's not something illegal like drugs, or the book of Judas.

It's perfectly fine to pray for things. But why do I never seem to have enough? Why is it that as soon as God answers my prayer, I move on to the next thing on the list? Once I got into college, I prayed for an internship. Once I got internships, I prayed for a job. And now that I have a job, I'm once again praying for the next item on my checklist, so to speak. Is this cycle going to keep on repeating until I die? Will I pray for a wife, a new car, a kid, a house, a kid, another kid, on and on forever?

Well, the TLDR is, yes. Yes I will. But it's a bit more nuanced than that.

I think the danger I see for myself is when my desires become the reason for my prayers, and the reason for my thankfulness to God. When I pray because I'm requesting something from God, and not because I want to talk to God, He stops being God and starts becoming a genie - and that's not the relationship we're supposed to build with Him. I start to pray, not for God, but for myself. It seems like the best way to overcome this is to just never desire anything then, right?

The problem is, I'm human. I'm also not Buddhist, so that whole detachment from desires thing? Yeah, I'm good. I will naturally look towards the next goal, the next milestone in life that I'm reaching for. Is that unhealthy? I don't think desiring what is to come is unhealthy, but maybe that continual pursuit, over and over, is. I mean, we pray and pray for something to happen. Then when it does, what do we do? Maybe we're thankful for a while, but eventually something new comes up, and we pray and pray again. That's not how we're supposed to live out our life.

So how do I break out of this pattern of desire? This is something I'm still struggling with today, and honestly I'm not sure if it's one I'll ever overcome. But I'll try. I know that what I pursue, first and foremost, cannot be my worldly desire. Every time I've done this I've been left unsatisfied no matter the result. Instead, breaking the cycle of pursuit requires me to pursue God above all. If you think about it, that makes sense. I'll never reach God—not on earth, anyways. So I'll always be reaching towards Him, running to Him, but never coming even close to God. It's no longer a cycle, because it can't be one if it never repeats, am I right?

Then the question becomes, what is the pursuit of God? What does it look like? And to that, I say… I don't know. Or rather, I don't know the full scope of it all. It means to put Him first. It means to seek to become more like Christ. It means that in everything we do God should be the reason, and the way. And it means so much more that I just don't know. How is it possible to do all that, to be all that? Well, like the incredibly based Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

I guess pursuing God is a daily process—one I'm still trying to figure out. That's kind of its own cycle in itself, except I'm always reaching towards the same goal. I still desire the things that I want, and I still pray to God about them. But I hope to reach the point where I'm lifting up my requests in prayer because I am talking to God, and not the other way around. It's like what Jesus said in the sermon on the mount: “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). Only then can I break out of this cycle of worldly pursuit and instead pursue God. With a heart desiring Him and my eyes focused on Christ, I will once again ask:

Hey God, can I get a girlfriend?

Amen.