The one thing that really only matters.

Michael Kuznicki
Child of God, Engineer, and ETERNALLY Christocentric.

We are all searching for love.

We all have this desire to love and to be loved and not just a surface-level kind of love. We desire to be completely loved. We wish to be loved unconditionally and without boundaries. This desire is a part of our human nature, and we long to experience this unending, limitless love. Because of this inclination, we seek this kind of love in a lot of areas of our life. Many search for it in other people while some substitute it for material things.  
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 Some of us attempt to give this kind of love to the people we care about the most, and sometimes this love is fully reciprocated, and sometimes it’s not.

A little over a year ago, I had the privilege of beginning a relationship with my best friend in the entire world. She was THE person I would go to talk to and had become the one person that I could trust with anything, no matter what it was. Whenever I was happy, sad, excited, worried, or distraught, she was there with me, and nothing could ever change that. Eventually, all the time we had spent together turned into something much more than the fantastic friendship that we had developed over the years. 

We began dating, and our relationship was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The love that I had for her was something that I didn’t even know was possible before I began my relationship with her. We couldn’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together, and we dreamed of the day that we could call each other husband and wife.

Unfortunately, we did not spend the rest of our lives together. We didn’t get married, and our relationship didn’t last. For many reasons, our relationship wasn’t perfect. While we agreed on almost everything, the one thing that we knew we didn’t agree on was our faith. I held out hope that we would figure out a way to make this work. 

However, the most central part of my life was not something I shared with the one person that I cared about most.

During our relationship, I certainly had my own issues, as did she, and eventually, they caught up to us. When we began a period of turmoil, she didn’t have the foundation of faith to fall back on. We didn’t have a way to recover from the wounds that we were experiencing, and it meant the end of our relationship. This left me so lost. I found myself in the worst mental state that I had ever been in. I had no motivation for the things I was doing, and I found it very difficult to move past this relationship. I had lost the most important person to me, and I blamed myself for all of it.

A couple months after our breakup, I began to fully realize the impact that it was having on me. I realized that I needed to do something about it. I had become so desperate that I would have tried anything to find the love that I had once had.   I needed help. Through countless hours of reflecting on my relationship with my best friend, I began to see some of the faults that had manifested over time and they all had one thing in common. Our faith foundation was weak. We did not put God first in our relationship. I realized that I never want to do that again. So, naturally, I needed to do something about this. 

I needed to shift my focus back to God in every aspect of my life, including my relationships with other people.

To help shift this focus, I began a fast from dating. I specified an amount of time where I would not only not enter into a romantic relationship with anyone, but not pursue the possibility either. The dating fast allowed me the freedom to focus on putting God at the center of my life instead of searching for love in another person. I was able to learn to find fulfillment in God’s love, instead of only finding that in the love of another. This fast allowed for a ton of spiritual growth in countless ways, but the predominant area of growth was in my understanding of romantic relationships. Without the distraction of trying to develop a relationship with a specific person, I was able to discover the kind of relationship that God has called me to be a part of. I recognize that I do not know precisely where God is calling me.  
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 If I am called to the married life, I know the kind of marriage that is best for my faith-life.

I had tried to put my best friend first in our relationship. She was everything to me, and I found myself sacrificing many aspects of my life that I hold very dear to myself, including my faith. In the kind of relationship that I am called to, my future wife and I will share the same unwavering, limitless, and almost reckless love for Christ that I am striving to achieve. 

• She will understand why participating in the Mass brings me to tears over and over again. 

• She’ll know why I spend so much time in adoration with our Lord and that He is truly present here on Earth.
  
• She will know the redeeming power of Reconciliation and how God’s forgiveness is limitless.
  
• She will understand why I have entirely given over my life to Christ and His Holy Mother.
  
• She will appreciate my willingness to suffer and die for the sake of Love-itself, in the very same way that Love died for us all almost two thousand years ago.
  
• She will desire for our children to seek this relationship with Christ too.
  
• She will understand that I am far from perfect, but know that I am striving to become the saint that God each of us to become. 
  
• She will strive for sainthood as well, and bringing each other to heaven will be our primary goal. 

As I said before, I do not know for sure that God is calling me to marriage, but I do know that the desire for this kind of relationship is in my heart. I also know that this experience has led me so much closer to my heavenly Father. 

Lastly, I have come to understand that we must occasionally experience the loss of everything in order to fully understand what it means to gain the one thing that really only matters: Him.