After Karen went to sleep a few nights ago, I kept on watching Sleepless In Seattle.  We’d started it at about 10:20 and I figured going into it that she’d be zonked by the time Meg Ryan gets on the plane to Seattle to try and meet Tom Hanks. Karen went up to bed, but I wanted to see them get together on the Empire State Building.

The director teases you the whole movie long. Obviously these two are fated to get together, but they spend the whole movie just trying to meet. And at the very end they almost miss each other yet again, one going down the elevator as the other goes up.

But in all good romances, there’s this concept of kismet. Call it fate or destiny. The eight year-old son, Jonah, knows it and everyone in the audience knows it. The only two people who seem to be oblivious are Ryan and Hanks. And when they do get together, even though we all know they’re going to hold hands and stare at each other with the, “Where-have-you-been-all-my-life” look, still we cry (yes, it’s ridiculous I admit - me with Karen now in bed, having seen this predictable movie at least twice already, and crying anyway).

And I’ve been wondering, “Why does this happen?” What makes me, a grown man perfectly in control of his faculties, respond like that?

Certainly there was my own harrowing near-miss in courting Karen (recounted here) when she got engaged to another guy.  It was a narrow escape that can still send a chill down my spine like the scene in The Lion King when the one hyena says “Mufasa” and the other hyena responds, “Oooh. Say it again!”

But I think there’s something more spiritually visceral going on here. When a person finds his or her perfect fit in life, with a person or a calling; when that person’s destiny clicks in, it’s like a kingdom exchange just took place. Something in the heavenlies got restored, set in its proper order, and creation knows it. Our spirits inside us sigh with recognition. Something inside says, “That’s the way it was supposed to be.”

Too many of us, especially us guys, have lost all touch with that spiritual sense of shalom, of right-fitting. It’s the impulse to unity that Jesus prayed for us to have. Tears are but one symptom that we’ve recognized the kingdom coming.