I was meant for marriage. I’ve long known that and it only became more apparent to me as I got older. Now what I have to do is figure out how to negotiate that with my current situation. Stephanie was the same as me. We both knew for our entire lives that we wanted to be married some day. Married and raising kids was a lifelong dream.
We both also went through at least a couple years of being single during our early twenties that gave us some time to figure out who we are for ourselves. God taught us how to be content having no one else but Him in our lives, and we were both so thankful for that. We got to a place where we were no longer expecting to get married and could be content if we never did.
One of my favorite lines from a book about marriage (“Sacred Marriage” by Gary Thomas) goes something like “If we want to serve God, we should remain single; if we want to be like Jesus Christ, we should get married.” I love that quote because neither option is greater than the other. Both honor God so highly and serve Him in every way. For me, it was particularly exciting to think about the prospect of being more like Christ, and saw how marriage could really make a person more like Christ because of the intensely close relationship that marriage is. “As iron sharpens iron,” right?
Anyway, the point is that now I have to figure out how to reorient my life. Taking that quote, it would seem that now would be a great opportunity to serve God more directly. The one thing I didn’t expect in the equation was the fact that I have already been married and I now have kids. I don’t have any answers to these questions now, but I do feel like God has been helping me to serve Him more and showing me how to use my additional time for His glory (though that extra time is minimal because of the kids). I think my life has to make a shift, but I have to figure out what that’s going to be exactly.