Hi Ladies,
Okay, so you’ve made the desires of your heart perfectly clear to God. You’ve been praying for your future spouse, for his well being and for his arrival. You are refraining from premarital intimacy, and letting the Lord run every area of your life. And you know in your very soul that the answer to your mate prayer is imminent. So now you’re considering 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 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 my Father’s business” (Luke 2: 49), living your life and interacting with the people in it in order to be a happy, well-adjusted person. The surest path for not realizing God’s purpose is to sit home alone, waiting for Him to spring it into being without any activity on your part. That won’t happen in any area of your life.
So, What Can I Do?
A great start is to call off the mate search. God doesn’t need our assistance. This can be hard for an independent Christian woman, because we must be willing to relinquish our own control, and to change our attitudes and actions in areas where we previously functioned on our own. This is especially true if we lived unsaved as a young adult. We recall how we used to do it, and possibly aren’t sure how to proceed now. When my own desire to marry struck again after years as a divorced, single mother, I saw no reason not to help God out. “Okay, Lord, just show me where to go and I’ll handle the rest.”
When God didn’t immediately answer, I ventured back to the old places to look around. Very bad move! It’s hard enough to find any man in the nightclub, party, or bar scene; it is impossible to unearth a believer there. When guys approached, I only scared them off by announcing that Jesus Christ was Lord of my life. I now felt strange sitting with a friend in a smoky, noisy, raucous club, suppressing the urge to go up and preach to everyone around me. That’s not God’s way to meet people, and worldly ways won’t work when you’ve been redeemed.
In fact, setting out to find a mate is the worst possible waste of your time and energy. 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. It’s the task of His guys.
When I realized the futility of trying to extract God’s best from the dross of the world, I threw up my hands in defeat, which was exactly what needed to happen all along. Out of frustration I let go of the situation, stopped trying to control it, and waited for God to work things out His way. I can just hear Him saying, “Great. It’s about time.”
I continued with my life, going places and enjoying everything that interested me. The difference was that I no longer kept one eye open for a suitable man. I stopped measuring every guy for his potential as my husband, and I ceased anticipating that the perfect fellow was always just around the next corner. I even quit praying for marriage 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 can do when you submit yourself and your heart’s desires to Him. He hears, and He answers.
Until next week… Joy and Shalom!
Jo Lynne Pool
jo lynne pool - Love in The Book.org 