Ever notice that in the movies, the guy always gets the girl? Love overlooks no one in the two-dimensional world of the silver screen. The Beast eludes reality to find his Beauty, heck, even Forrest Gump managed to find love!

Unfortunately, this is not always real life.

 

Let me tell you a story. The names have not been changed to protect the humiliated. This is a story about a man named Isaac Watts. Isaac was born in Southampton, England in July of 1674. The guy was any woman’s definition of a romantic because, hey, he was a poet. In fact, he wrote over 600 hymns, many of which, I am sure you have sung in church at one time or another. Joy to the World sound familiar? He wrote it. O God Our Help in Ages Past, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Alas and Did my Savior Bleed, to name just a few.

 

Some beautiful, moving ditties there and I am not the first one to say so. Miss Elizabeth Singer seemed to think so too. She wrote Isaac a letter and told him how moving his writing was. Not a shallow compliment considering Elizabeth was also a noted poet in her own right.

 

They began to write back and forth for many months. It wasn’t long before the two of them fell and love and the “M” word came up and before you know it, Elizabeth was on her way to meet Isaac in person. When they met face-to-face, Isaac proposed marriage and they lived happily ever after…(insert loud sound effect here of a car screeching on its breaks).

 

Upon being asked if she would marry him, Elizabeth said to Isaac, “If only I could say that I admire the casket as much as I admire the jewel it contains.”

 

(Insert, “Oh no you didn’t, girlfriend!” here).

 

Yes, girlfriend, she did. I should point out that “casket” in Elizabeth’s time was not referring to a coffin, but a very ornate box used to put rings and jewelry inside. So, in essence she was saying, “You’re one ugly dude, Isaac, but hey…at least you’re beautiful on the inside!”  Yeah…that line was as lame in the 1600s as it is now.

 

Hold up a second now, it does get worse. She never had a change of heart and Isaac lived until he was 74 years old and he never married.

 

Hollywood would never pass that script through to production!

 

The fact is, God does not guarantee us a “Happily Ever After” storybook ending. Or, I should say, God’s “Happily Ever After” for your life may not be wrapped up in the package that you are expecting. The fact is, Isaac’s suffering is now over and the part of his life that lives on 200 years later, is not his grief, but the unchanging truth and beauty of the cross that he so eloquently immortalized for us in his hymns.

 

The moral of this story is NOT, “No one ever loved Isaac, and therefore, there is no hope for me either.” As girls, we need to put ourselves in Elizabeth’s shoes, not Isaac’s. Isaac would have been a wonderful godly husband. However, Elizabeth passed him over because he was only five feet tall, had a hooknose, and a big head. As women who profess to love Christ, we should strive to look beyond a man’s physical appearance. After all, we are not perfect and if we expect a guy to overlook all of our imperfections, we are hypocrites if we refuse to overlook his.

 

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”  1 Samuel 16:7