20170221_234241

Hi Ladies,

You’ve been praying for your future mate, for his wellbeing and for his arrival. You’ve made the desires of your heart perfectly clear to God.  You are refraining from premarital intimacy, and are letting The LORD run every other area of your life.  And you know in your very soul that the answer to your mate prayer is imminent.  So now you’re debating what to do.

“Well”, you reason, “my husband is not just going to come up and knock on the front door. I should be doing something.”  I’m not going to tell you that this urge is wrong.  In fact, I believe it is a nudge coming straight from God Himself.  You did not commit yourself to be a hermit, nor did He call you to hide away in a convent.  You can enjoy your life and find pleasure in it with Our Father’s blessings.  And, no, a husband most likely will not arrive on your doorstep.  You’ve got to be “about our Father’s business” (Luke 2: 49), living your life and interacting with the people in it in order to be a happier and more well-adjusted person.  The surest path for not realizing God’s purpose is to sit at home, waiting for Him to spring it into being without any effort on your part.  That won’t happen in any area of your life.

So What Can I Be Doing?

For starters, call off the mate search. God doesn’t need your assistance.  This can be hard for an independent Christian woman, because you must be willing to relinquish your own control, and to change your attitudes and actions in areas where you previously functioned on your own.  When mating urges struck me, after years as a mother made single through divorce, I saw no reason to contain my inclination to help God out.  “Okay God,” I thought, “just show me where to go and what to do, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Because my previous dating experiences had been in the worldly arena, I went back to the old places to look around. Very bad move!  It’s hard enough to find any man in the nightclub, party, and bar scene; it is impossible to unearth a Believer there.  When guys approached, I ended up scaring them off by announcing that Jesus Christ was the Lord of my life.  And I now felt out of place sitting with a friend in a smoky club filled with drinkers, listening to music I no longer enjoyed, suppressing the urge to go up and preach to everyone around me.  That’s not God’s way to meet people – it’s the worlds’, and as a Believer, it just won’t work for you.

Setting out to find a mate is the worst possible thing to waste time and energy on. Every man is not “maybe the right one.”  Turning over every rock on the beach rarely leads to the discovery of anything precious.  You are God’s Pearl of Great Price, and the search is not yours to make.  When I finally realized the futility of trying to extract God’s best from the dross of the world’s worst, I threw up my hands in defeat, which was exactly what needed to be done all along.  Out of frustration I took my hands off the situation, stopped trying to control it, and let God begin to work things out His way.  I can just hear The LORD saying, “It’s about time.”

I continued on with my life, going places and participating in everything that interested me. The difference was that I no longer had one eye open for a mate.  I stopped measuring every man for his potential as my husband, and I ceased to anticipate that the perfect guy was always just around the next corner.  I even quit praying “mating prayers”, and stopped trying to hold God to any promise that I would marry at all.  Any answer was solely up to Him.

It is truly amazing what God will do when you submit yourself and your problem to Him. Until next week… Joy and Shalom!