I recently finished “Love Does” by Bob Goff. The book contains a number of short chapters that frame an experience and then draw a spiritual lesson from it. The BEST chapter is Chapter 7 – Sweet Maria, and it’s in this chapter I find a lot of hope as a single guy.
Bob was a college student working at a summer Christian youth program, and they needed some single ladies to help, so a recently graduated young lady named Maria joined them to help with the program. When she first walked in, Bob broke a string on his guitar, leaned over to a friend, and whispered, “That’s Mrs. Goff.” She, on the other hand, didn’t remember much about her first encounter.
Bob decided he needed to let his future wife know how much she meant to him, so a couple weeks later he made a gigantic Valentine’s Day card. Think a massive card the size of a refrigerator box. He naively traipses up the office building where she works, wrestling the card up through the elevators up to where she is. Of course she was mortified when he showed up.
He then cooks up another brilliant way to show her his affections. He knew where she parked her car, so he would put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich underneath the wiper blade of her car each day. Sometimes he would leave a note in the sandwich.
And she married him. Now he calls her as Sweet Maria.
I’ve had a difficult time finding a match, i.e., it hasn’t happened yet. I have an inner fear that someday God will arrange for me to meet a great girl, someone really special who would be great to spend more time with, and then I’ll do a bunch of stupid stuff and scare her off. It could happen. I have a gift for putting my foot in my mouth.
Bob gives me hope. If he can be strange in such large doses and still win the girl, then I can be Bob Goff weird (hopefully quite a bit less weird) and still win the girl. Until such a time, his success despite his nutso behavior helps to relieve my anxiety a bit.
(Of course, to actually get the girl he had to do a lot of other things right, which he surely did. But the fact that the above events really did happen, and she did marry him is relieving to me.)
Laying Foundations 
Where do you even get paper big enough to make a refrigerator-sized card??
It was two sheets of 4×8 cardboard glued together.
Dude, appreciate the candidness of this post!
I’d just say, from a girl’s perspective, all a woman wants to know (other than that you’re stable and godly) is that you love HER. No matter how whacky a guy you are, I believe you can win any woman’s heart with prayerful perseverance ;-)
Prayerful perseverance, hmm I’ll have to write that down. ;)