Seeking God’s will was the best decision I’d ever made.
“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36)
I gave up on dating when I was twenty-eight years old. Or, I should say, I gave up any hope of ever meeting someone to settle down with.
I had always wanted to have a family, but things just never seemed to work out in the romance department.
There was always something standing in the way. Some of the women I got involved with were religious and would only marry other members of their religions, which I wasn’t too keen on joining, no matter how much I liked someone.
Others were already seeing someone but flirting with me on the side.
And, when I was an American living abroad, I had to be on guard against those who only wanted me for one thing: my U.S. citizenship.
What did I expect? No one was after me for my looks, which I didn’t have, nor were they after me for money, which I didn’t have either.
It didn’t help that I was nearly thirty years old, going to night school, and living at home– this was before the dawn of the “boomerang kid” generation and the proliferation of personal cell phones. You know what it’s like to have a girl call your home number and have your mom answer the phone at a time when other twenty-somethings were raking in boatloads of cash during the dot-com boom?
I was a loser, and I knew it.
To further complicate matters, my mother was fiercely protective of me, her youngest child.
She was like Ripley in Aliens, but without the awesome forklift suit, and every girl I liked was, to her, the alien queen: a treacherous, parasitic, monster-spawning harlot who’d best be blasted into the lethal black vacuum of infinity.
My mother had suffered three miscarriages before I was born, so I could see why she was so overprotective, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to deal with it.
Between this, my on-hold career, and the realization that I was a nerdy, video game-addicted, adult ninja wannabe still living at home, my prospects of marriage seemed hopeless, so one day, I just gave up and resigned myself to a lifetime of celibacy — sort of like a monk, but with no religious affiliation. And, even though I was wavering between New Age mysticism and agnosticism, I still found it within me to surrender this to God.
I prayed, “God, I give up. I’m not even going to try to meet anyone anymore. If Your plan for me is to remain single– well, that wouldn’t be my first choice, but I’d accept it if that’s what You want. Your will matters more than mine.”
These words may have sounded like the hopeless mutterings of defeat, but I sincerely meant them.
And God would soon test me on it.
3 Comments