The One Thing Not On The List

A friend and I were speaking recently about our dreams and goals for the future. I am definitely a goal-setter and I've become more of a "goal-reacher" since I've gone to college. Anyway, I told this friend about the list I'm making of all the things I want to do in the next 10 and 1/2 years. Eventually, I want to complete thirty goals before I turn thirty. So, my friend immediately told me the goal that would be number one on her list: Getting married.

Ironically, that was the one thing I decided not to put on my list.

I've wrestled with the idea of marriage for a long time. I guess since I was 13, when I wrote the first letter to my future husband. That was also the year my mom gave me a purity ring and I made the decision to save my first kiss for my fiance. Since then, dating and marriage have been familiar, yet strangely foreign, topics to me. Like knowing how to cook, but never having cooked yourself. You might know the steps to making scrambled eggs, but it takes experience to get it right.

Of the little experience I have with guys, I feel like it's all been a big mess. I know that I have grown a lot because of the icky and awkward situations I have dealt with and I know that they have prepared me for what is to come. But that doesn't change the fact that they were still icky and awkward and often painful situations. Yet after all of that awkwardness, I've still had comparatively little experience. I have yet to enter a dating relationship. It's a little disheartening.

I'm torn between two thoughts: I'm nineteen and I still have the rest of my life to find a great guy, get married, have kids, and settle down and I'm a college sophomore, the chances of meeting a guy after college are small and I want to get married so I can have kids before I'm thirty.

But the honest-to-goodness fact is that I can't control my love life. I can't make anyone like me. I can't manufacture an awesome guy and waltz him right on into my life at the perfect time. It doesn't work like that. Relationships are one of those things with which we must trust God. That does not mean I'm called to be an indifferent, uncaring, boring, turtleneck-wearing, nun... you get the picture. So, yeah, my list of 30 things to do before I'm 30 currently does not include anything that would require a man by my side. I'm not finished writing it yet, so that may change later. Right now it simply includes things I want to do for me and others before I reach the big "3-oh." I have time. I have a little less than 11 years.

Does this mean that if, within the next 11 years, God brings my future husband into my life, I can't marry him? Of course not. It simply means that I'm not going to put a time limit on God's schedule for my life. I'm not going to tell God that he has to work within these parameters and this calendar. I'm going to let God have his way with me. And if his way is that I live in a shack in the middle of India when I'm thirty, where I can't own a piano, open a long-term savings account, or any of the other things on my list (excluding visit more countries or go on another mission trip), then so be it. Because his plans are going to be so much better than mine.

On the other hand, just because I'm letting God take control, that doesn't mean I don't care. I was visiting a church for a service for college-aged young adults. The topic for the night was marriage and someone asked, "I'm 18. Why do I need to talk about marriage now?" The pastor answered, "Because if you wait until you're twenty-five, it will be too late." God's got a plan and I'm going to pray hard and prepare diligently (and let myself be prepared) so I'll be ready for what he has for me and even for what Satan throws me at me.

This means that whether I start dating in two months or in two years, or whether I get married in five years or in fifteen years, God is still in control. And that's why I'm not putting it on my list. Because God is still in control. And with something as big as marriage, I don't want to jeopardize God's plan with my desire to beat a timeline.