Let me be very clear as I begin this article:

19 year-old Mikayla Darnall of Benton, Kentucky, was most definitely not the "marrying-kind"

In fact, if you had told me that I would be married at 20 years old, and be expecting a baby by age 21, I would have laughed in your face so hard and insisted that there was no way you knew anything about me, because I wasn't really fond of the idea of marriage and definitely was not fond of the idea of marrying young. What I find even more hilarious, is if you had talked to 19 year-old Chance Marshall (my wonderful, then stranger, now husband) he would have said the exact same thing. We had both waged a war on marriage due to scaring and dream-crushing long-term relationships that had left us... well, less than excited about the possibility of spending a lifetime with someone.

Most of my nineteenth year of life was spent entertaining less than meaningful flings with guys who, more often than not, were not really interested in anything serious, either. I tried to focus more on myself, and recovering from the emotional scars I had sustained my Freshman year of college, and one of the scars I found most difficult to deal with was the remnants of what had been an extremely manipulative relationship. After I escaped that awful relationship, I was more sure than ever that marriage, or even my next serious relationship, was very far away.

However, God knew that a very important encounter was just down the road for young Mikayla Darnall. And, trust me, it was a much needed encounter. You see, at 19 I was... to be completely honest, cynical. I didn't believe in grasping at the straws of hope or love that had let me down so many times before. God knew that I needed someone in my life to reignite the loving gentleness I had once carried with such pride; He knew that I needed someone who could lead me back to hope and extinguish my fears.

It was the beginning of my Sophomore year of college. I had moved home and transferred to WKCTC, hoping that my second year of college would be less stressful than my first. I had my schedule in hand all day, terrified of getting lost, and I walked into my last class for the day.

I thought I was just walking into Human Ecology, God knew I was walking towards the rest of my life.

I picked my seat in very typical Mikayla fashion: towards the front of the class off to the side, so that I could hear the professor well but people didn't think I was a super nerd. We sat in the class for a while and listened to the professor talk about the syllabus and her classroom expectations, and then we made a trip down to the computer lab so that we could look at the online learning tools offered on the digital version of our text book. So, in true science-nerd fashion, I was genuinely taking the time to look through the virtual text book and see how it could aid me in my future studies, and what did I find? Online flashcards. But no, not just any online flashcards: pre-made online flashcards! I was excited, super excited, so I expressed my excitement to my new classmates, and THAT moment of geeky excitement is when my future husband took notice of me.

For the next couple of weeks, we left class together and talked until we reached our cars, and finally after about three weeks of class, he asked me out. Within a month, Chance had led me to The Lord, and we established God as the cornerstone of our relationship, which gave us a wonderful foundation. I could write 20 articles about our first few dates and the beginnings of our relationship, so I will leave the details for another day, but I will tell you this:

Never in my life had I known someone with such a love for life and people.

I spent every day with him absolutely amazed at how someone could be so positive and hopeful, and I haven't stopped being amazed by that wonderful man since. The months together flew bye, and my love for him grew and grew, and it didn't take long for us to know that if marriage was ever going to work for either one of us, we were going to married to each other.

I honestly can't tell you when we decided we wanted to get married so young, and honestly I don't know if either one of us ever really thought about how young we were, we just knew that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, and that seemed like enough for us. We were often told by others that marrying young wasn't a good idea, and though my feelings were hurt many times, it never made me consider waiting to marry the love of my life. So, we got married. I was 20 and Chance was 19. We moved in to an awesome apartment in Grand Rivers, Kentucky, and our lives together began.

And, boy oh boy, it was not what we expected.

I love my husband more than anyone on this earth, but the stresses of life are very real, and we took very quickly to taking out those stresses on each other. Our first few months of marriage were spent in what seemed like constant combat, never really happy, never truly miserable, just hanging on for dear life.

We went to church every Sunday, we prayed for God to bring us together, and finally by our third month of marriage it seemed as if our prayers had been answered. We were reading a devotional together every night and praying together, our marriage actually started to resemble the God-led relationship we had cherished before. And then tragedy struck, and our hearts were broke, and everything we had built crumbled to our feet.

We had not planned on being parents so early in the beginning, in fact we had a five year plan. Yet, at 4 months of marriage, in one night we were forced to face the reality of being parents sooner than expected and handing that beautiful child over to The God of the Universe. It's a kind of brokenness you hope you never encounter, watching your husband cry over the loss of a child you never got to know and wanting nothing more than to reach out and comfort him, but knowing that you can't. And just like that, the hopeful loving person I had become was gone, and the angry, cynical person I had once been came back to life.

And now looking back, all I can say is: Thank the Lord for a husband who is stronger than me.

Because, once again, it became my husband's job to retrieve this sad broken women and remind her one bad day did not a lifetime make. After he pulled me out of the darkness, once again, we decided that we would try to have a baby, not to replace the baby we lost, but because our doctor's believed that the sooner we tried the better our chances would be of maintaining a pregnancy.

And now here I sit, several months later, waiting on our wonderful baby Will to make his appearance in the world, and in six days, I will have spent a year with his amazing father.

So, what advice do I have for you, the young women whose browser history is covered in "Marry the guy who..." articles, or the young women who has spent years alone for fear of choosing the wrong person, or the young women who is drowning in a marriage that she doesn't know how to save?

Marry the guy who loves the Lord, because out of that love is the spout from which all other love flows. Don't live in fear, because fear is a tool of the enemy, and God doesn't work on your time line, so who knows when he will bring love to you. Lastly, there isn't a marriage sanctioned by God that God can't save, if your drowning reach out for Him and He will show you the way.

It's been a good year, Y'all. The best year of my life.