ine and a half years in this apartment. Five and a half years in this relationship. I think I've earned the right to say I'm a patient person. But now that M. and I are planning to move in together and actively looking for a place, my desire and readiness to move forward are making it a huge struggle to take it a day at a time. Of course I can't will a house into existence, so I'm stuck with good old faith that it will happen....sometime.

The thing about faith is that it wouldn't be faith if it didn't go hand in hand with doubt. In our case, shortly after we started looking we found a house through friends that wasn't even on the market. Sure, it was a little rough around the edges, but basically it was perfect, and the way it came to us seemed like it was meant to be. But of course we went through the whole bidding process only to find in the end that the owners weren't quite ready to let it go, and it fell through, and we haven't seen anything remotely as good since.

Is God so cruel that he would tantalize us with the perfect house, only to snatch it away when we were emotionally attached? Is this some divine statement on the appropriateness of our premarital cohabitation? No, of course not. For me faith isn't entirely about giving up and flinging the deck of cards into the air, letting them land where they may. It's about trudging through house after house of bad carpet, warped kitchen counters, and dry rot, with nary a price tag under half a million dollars, just hoping for another gem, because what else can we do?

Essentially, faith isn't a feel-good type of thing. It's a dark, gritty, persevering kind of thing. It's a thing you sometimes don't have on purpose, but must cultivate because you have no other option. And it's only much later, when the paint has dried and the garden has been planted and you clink glasses with your sweetie and sigh contentedly that you realize it all did happen, just the way it was supposed to. At least that's what I hope happens.