A blog about love and being bold enough to not settle for less than God's best.
Before I met my husband, I didn’t have a great mindset about love.
I knew I wanted someone to care about me, and I didn’t particularly worry too much about who. I wanted attention that I may have felt was lacking from one part of my life or another.
I had always heard in church that “God should write your love story” and that you want the first person that you say you love to be the one you marry.
That is all great advice but I never seemed to get the practical application or practices to implement so that I could guard my heart against something that may not be right or good. It’s great to have goals such as your first kiss to be your husband, but what safeguards do you put up at 13 years old to get from point A to point B? Thats what I didn’t know.
So a friend sets me up with a guy the summer before my sophomore year. He was cute, played baseball, what more could you want as a 14 year old girl? So we “dated” if you can call it that, for a long time. Almost two years. We set boundaries and barely saw each other anyway, but it was high school and I was selfish and so was he.
Before anything really serious could form, my family moved to Kansas (a story for another time). I was heartbroken, of course, but a fresh start was something I didn’t know I needed but that was set in my lap anyway. So to Kansas I went. There I finished high school and went to college about 4 hours away in Missouri. A Bible College.
I had heard that you shouldn’t date your freshman year. But again, practical application was something that was lacking in my little world and I went ahead and started dating a guy.
For the next 11 months of my life, I was in a toxic relationship that changed the way I saw dating and marriage. I can’t say all the blame can be placed on this guy, but we were just bad for each other. Long story short, that relationship ended soon after I moved to South Carolina the summer after my freshmen year at college (again, another story, another time).
Now I’m heartbroken all over again and I know I need to change how I viewed everything related to dating and marriage.
Being the enneagram 1 that I am, I decided I wanted to make a list. A list that would detail everything I knew I needed and that God would want in my future spouse.
I mean, everything.
From the color of his eyes to the interworkings of his heart, I wrote it down. I committed to myself that I would pray over every one of these attributes each night before I went to bed. I also wrote out things that I needed to work on within myself that I felt were necessary for me to be ready for marriage.
So on October 24th, 2015, I started praying. I didn’t search, I didn’t look, I just prayed and waited. Then in late February of the following year, I met Kyle.
I didn’t really “notice” him until June, when we were in the singles group at our church and he was talking about staying pure for his future wife and that he would get to tell his wife that she is his first and only love. That perked up my ears and I began to highlight the things I had listed and prayed for every night for almost a year now.
From the span of June until August, every single bullet point on that list (over two big sheets of paper) was highlighted without him even knowing about it. He was everything. So we started dating August 18th, 2016, with the mutual understanding that our intention was marriage and we were in it for the long haul. On June 10th, 2017, we got engaged. May 26th, 2018, was the best day ever, the day I married my best friend and soulmate.
Now you’re asking, ok, that’s a sweet story, but what was the point in all that? Well, take from it whatever you can get, but I hope this reaches a soul that is hurting. Maybe you just broke up with someone you thought you’d marry. Maybe your relationship is on hold because you just don’t know if they are the one God has for you, or if you want the same things in life. Maybe your trying to be content in your singleness.
I want you to know I see you and I’ve been there, but you don’t have to stay there because God promises he will make something good out of the mess.
“You just have to be bold enough to ask for it.”
You just have to be bold enough to ask for it. You have to be bold enough to demand God’s best. It might not be easy. The journey can get long, but its so worth it in the end. Telling God your heart’s desires is important. He knows them already, but He desperately wants to here them from your lips. He wants to honor your wishes, but you have to put them into words and never settle for anything less. God said He’d make it good, let Him.
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