Everybody day dreams. Maybe you day dream about graduating and never taking another final. Maybe you day dream about being famous. Maybe you day dream about your wedding day. Or maybe, you day dream about who your groom will be…
It is hard for me to recall a day that I have not questioned what my future will look like. Ideally, I have it all planned out and I know what I want, but there are key parts missing. For example, the identity to the father of the kids whose names I have already chosen.
I read an article in high school that said majority of people met their spouse by the age of 16. At the time, I had no trouble believing it. The odds seemed pretty high that I would fall in love with someone from my hometown and get my ring by spring of senior year in college. Honestly, you probably could not have convinced me otherwise.
And then life happened. College was a dose of reality for me, as I am assuming it is for most day dreaming high schoolers. Not everyone was cut from the same small town, private school cloth that I was. Checking the boxes of expectations I had for my relationships no longer seemed like a reality. I slowly, but surely, began to think I was going to have to compromise my “list” of ideal characteristics that I wanted in a husband, because I had not come across anyone in my two years of college that checked all of them off. I started longing for relationships with boys that I knew I did not want to marry. I began erasing the boxes that showed noble character and replacing them with boxes that reflected my immaturity and superficial desires. I had began to settle.
Then yesterday I sat across from a boy at Chick-Fil-A, eating nuggets and chatting about our ideal futures when he asked me something I had been scared to ask myself out loud.
“Do you think you have met your husband yet?”
I momentarily did not know how to respond before honestly answering with a simple, “I don’t know.” I went on to explain that while I did not think the boys I knew well enough to judge their character seemed like the man I wanted to marry, I was not ruling out all the boys I had met in my time at college. I had not yet been given the opportunity to get to know more than a fraction of the boys I have met in a way that I could base marriage off of and confidently answer that question.
The case seemed to be that I did not know enough boys on a deep level to truly know if there was someone out there that did indeed check my boxes. So why was I so willing to compromise my list of expectations? This made me realize that I was willing to settle. When had I become a girl that was willing to settle? When had I automatically ruled out all the boys I have yet to know on a deeper level as less than par? When had I began to think that God had not designed the perfect spouse for me?
The perfect spouse who is not perfect, and may or may not check all of my silly boxes, but is being molded into the man that I am searching for right now. The man that is busy working on himself to better himself for the wife that HE day dreams of. The wife that I can be ONLY if I do not settle.
I do not know if I have met my husband or not. I could have met him when I was 16 years old. I could meet him tomorrow. But what I do know is that no matter where he is or what he is doing, I have a God that knows our story… because he wrote it. And if that simple fact is not enough to give me peace in the waiting, than I am not yet the woman God desires for my husband.
Proverbs 31:10-12 says,
“A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life.”
