Elizabeth Versus Elizabeth

Sometimes when it comes to relationships, I feel like Captain Oblivious.

Haha, like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs!
He's pretty oblivious sometimes :D
  

This is mainly because I don't see when other people like each other and then when they get engaged or date or something, I'm like, "Huh?!" One of my friends can spot it from like ten miles away. Today one of my friends got engaged. I was like, "I TOTALLY DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING AT ALL!" 
Granted, this was one of those rare moments where the guy just up and proposes without dating beforehand. So that was harder to spot, but still. WOW! 

I wondered why that bothered me so much and then I realized why. One train of logic could be as follows: 
If I get good at predicting when other people will match up, I can thus predict when I will get matched up and predict if a guy likes me. If I predict that a guy likes me, I can thus have hope that someday he will be my prince charming and I will be a beloved princess. 

Kira Knightley as Miss Bennett

I just realized, that is sort of what Elizabeth Bennett did in Pride and Prejudice.  She would size up guys at gatherings and say, "This one is quite a gentleman." or "This one is terribly arrogant!" or "Ew." She and her sisters agonized over who would be 'the ones' for them. Of course Miss Bennett's Prince Charming came out of nowhere and it took a family crisis for her to see that she wrote Mr. Darcy off completely wrong and then had to be humble and accept his help and stuff. 

Elizabeth Elliot 

Elizabeth Elliot on the other hand was doing life as she knew it when her Prince Charming came out of nowhere and was like, "Hey! You wanna be a missionary, I wanna be a missionary! Wanna get hitched??" and she was like, "Sure." She writes in her books about just doing your own business and letting Prince Charming come in whenever God tells him to. 

In The Rock I followed Elizabeth Elliot's (and my older sisters in Christ who mentored me) advice. Outwardly. I became better at not outwardly flirting with guys. Of course me having autism spectrum disorder that made it hard to read social cues didn't help me see when I was flirting even though I was trying to be stealth.... Anyway, I got better at that and blending into the group. 

However, I would think, "THIS GUY right THERE is possibly THE ONE!" and then get bummed when he wasn't. That happened a few times. Quite a few times. 

Now I'm learning to follow Elizabeth Elliot's advice inwardly. To focus on paralegal school (right now) and the working world and whatever else God has me in right now. I decided not to play the Elizabeth Bennett game where I think, "Is HE the one? What about THAT ONE over there? What about...." Because I realize that for Prince Charming to be the one, God would probably make it pretty darn obvious a) so my heart won't be pulled off astray by my own faulty guesss work and b) because the way my mind works, stuff like that just needs to be obvious. 

I am thankful God is teaching me these lessons and that when it boils down to it, I am HIS princess and HIS beloved, so I don't have to really clamor for an earthly prince charming to love me. The King of Kings does, so truly, all my fairy tale dreams ARE true in Him :) :)