Sara Cox sits in

Pause For Thought with author, screenwriter and magazine editor Martin Saunders

Just like Paul McCartney sang, she really was ‘just seventeen’ – as was I. Fleetingly, I saw her standing there across a crowded party, and on some deep level, I knew. I knew I was falling in love at first sight.

I was right, too. We met again a year later, and after a few years, I convinced her to marry me. So was my first thought just an instinct, or something more?

Do you believe in love at first sight? In some deep, divine connection with another person, like Kate and Leo felt on the deck of the Titanic? Or perhaps you’re more comfortable with the idea of an instant infatuation with a place; that flat you looked around with a shifty estate agent that still felt like home?

I wonder what that spark is all about. That sudden unexpected moment of such richness and depth, that feels so incredibly heightened and unreal. Perhaps it feels this way because these are the times when we stumble right into the middle of God’s divine, majestic plan for our lives. When things feel exactly right… because they are. Because they’re exactly how God intended them to be.

In the Creation story, God doesn’t wait to affirm His love for the things He has made. No sooner has He invented man and woman at the end of Genesis chapter one, than He makes a declaration. They’re not just good like the rest of His creation… they’re very good. It’s love at first sight – the first instance in history.

I believe that when we experience that sense of finding perfection in our own lives, it is an echo of that moment. We look at another person; a place… even a pet and realise that they are very good. There is a sense that we’re staring at something wonderful and definitive. Like in Jesus’ parable about the Pearl of Great Price, for which a man gave everything he had, some things feel priceless the moment we set eyes on them.

Ten years after we married, someone told my wife and I that we were made for each other. I tend to take that idea literally. So I have been fortunate; love at first sight worked out for me, and turned out not to be just a fickle or vacuous thing.

Far from it in fact: it might just have been my clearest glimpse of the very hand of God.