Patience in Love

I have been thinking a lot about marriage lately. Perhaps this because one of my best friends recently got engaged, perhaps because another friend has a wedding coming up in two months, or perhaps because I'm still pretty new at marriage myself. I've been thinking a lot about God's plans for us in the romance and love and how quickly so many of us in our single lives have dismissed God's plans in favor of our own agenda. For myself, I know that pre-John, I was quick to buy into the Hollywood idea of marriage as an end rather than a beginning. In fact, in much of my dating life before John, I would look at a guy and wonder immediately if he was "the one" and if we would live happily ever after. Immediately. Looking back now, I realize how naive I was, how duped I was by society's ideas of romance. Our culture encourages us to become too close too quickly, and I certainly adhered to this pattern in many ways. When I reflect on the times my heart has been broken, I realize I was hurt because I was chasing after and clinging to less than God's best for me. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it and I didn't want to listen to God telling me to wait. I have seen so many of my sisters in Christ fall victim to this same mentality. But when we come to the other side, as I have also been blessed to see many of my sisters do, we discover that all along God really has known what He was doing. He didn't forget about us or ignore our prayers, He was just waiting for us to get to the place where we could be truly ready for His answer.

By the time I met John, I had been so burned by my own foolish decisions that I was ready to surrender to God. For the first time in my life, I let myself be courted without trying to rush or force things into place. I let a man pursue my heart and I found God's love for me in my surrender. Sometimes I wish I had trusted Him more completely earlier on with this area of my life. I would certainly have saved myself a lot of tears if I had. Other times I think that God knows how bull-headed I am and that all the while that I was getting hurt, He was waiting patiently for me to get tired of trying to do things my own way. If I have children, the virture I would pray for them to acquire earlier than I did would be patience, to write in their hearts Psalm 27:14, "Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." I know how difficult it is to be patient in matters of the heart, but I have also learned what a blessing it is to trust Him for His best in this area. God brought me to a place where marriage became an honest and true expression of my love for another person and for God, a wonderful landmark in my journey rather than a culmination to my journey. He brought me to a place where marriage became a means to better glorify Him rather than to satisfy my worldly wants. We live in a world that unreasonably glorifies male-female relationships and usually cuts God out of the picture entirely. My heart breaks when I watch some of my students falling into the same mental traps that I fell into when I was younger because I know they are setting themselves up for pain. God has a simpler way, which we discover by patiently and faithfully waiting on Him. Society complicates matters of the heart, but John and I stand together as a living testimony that God is faithful even when it takes us awhile to trust Him instead of the world.

One final note for today, people often want to put a timeline on human relationships, forgetting that God exists and often works outside of our time. When we are involved in a romantic relationship, we sometimes want to speed up the process. When we are watching those we care about in a relationship, we sometimes want to slow the process down. In both cases our intentions are may be good, but we have to remember that God's timing may not look like ours. Trust in Him and know that as humans we are often wrong when we draw conclusions beacuse we don't see the whole picture that God sees. Part of faith is allowing God to move in spite our limited understanding. We need to be patient in trusting Him just as He is patient with our ignorance as we watch His plan unfold.