Precious Promises

I am a single woman who hopes to marry again someday. I have written, in my previous blog post, what I would love to experience in living out my vision of the lifestyle of a Christian married couple, and I do hope to find a man who would want to share it with me. After the long journey of the past almost 7 years since my husband died, I feel whole and that the many parts of me are integrated in a way that I have never experienced before. I can now say that I want to marry and experience being in love for the rest of my life.

But I don’t need to marry. I don’t need a man’s love in order to feel whole. My perspective is that I am whole, that any man I marry must also be whole, and that if we marry, we would be something new in our life together that would be greater than the sum of the parts. I believe that is a big part of the mystery and magic of marriage. I will only marry if I find a man who wants to be intimate in every part of himself and myself – mind, spirit, heart, and body. So, unless or until I find a man I would want to marry, I will choose to be content living alone and continuing to learn and grow and give and serve and love the people God has put in my life.

My role model, whether I remain single or marry, is Priscilla, mentioned several times in the book of Acts and elsewhere along with her husband, Aquila. If I ever do marry, a man would have to want to be my Aquila as I would be his Priscilla, partners in life and in personal ministry. Together, for instance, they “explained the way of God even more accurately” to Apollos, who needed to have his understanding of baptism corrected as Jesus taught. Of course, we can’t know the exact dynamics of that conversation, but the fact that they were together as a couple in this work and were even described by the apostle Paul as his “co-workers in the ministry of Christ Jesus” (Romans 16:3) is inspiring to me to see the equality and partnership that they exemplified.

So, until or unless I meet a man who wants to be my Aquila, I will nevertheless live my life as Priscilla, with the perspective that my Aquila will not make me any more whole or loved by God or competent to live out every aspect of my life. I want to find my Aquila and join our lives into a strong and happy union that will be even more of a powerful witness to the world of God’s love and blessings and design for marriage as intended for happiness, pleasure, and intimacy of mind, spirit, heart, and body. The union of 2 whole and healthy people is what makes marriage great. No person can fill any emptiness or make another person whole. Only God can fill each person and make each person whole. Then both people can and will be the kind of giving, considerate, thoughtful, and loving mate that will bring great happiness and pleasure and romantic love to the marriage.

I know that I have emotional needs that a husband would be able to meet in unique ways that no one else could, so there is a sense in which I will continue to go without the experience of those needs being met as long as I am single. But I also know that there is nothing more miserable than being married and still not having those needs met. So, I would rather remain single for the rest of my life than be in a marriage that doesn’t meet those needs. I can and will wait. And if I never have the opportunity to marry the kind of man in whom I could have confidence that he would be the kind of husband I need and want, then I can learn to be content without that, knowing that when I get to heaven, I won’t care and won’t miss it. Therefore, I will be Priscilla and love and serve God and share God’s precious promises with others either alone or with Aquila, but alone and content for as long as I have no Aquila.

I do want very much to marry someday! I pray about it daily and ask God to please grant that deep desire to experience what I know is a great blessing. I believe marriage can provide the greatest human happiness and source of pleasure in this life because it is the deepest intimacy and connection possible between 2 human beings. I hope that my husband’s death will prove to be God’s rescue of me from a marriage where that wasn’t true and I believe would never have been possible and that the rest of the story will be that someday God will also provide a husband with whom his promises can come true at last for me as his precious daughter. But I also know that heaven will be so much more full of happiness and pleasure in being in the presence of God forever that even the happiest marriage here will fade as a distant and inferior memory. So for now, I focus on enjoying my relationship with my Heavenly Father, on loving my brothers and sisters in Christ, and on growing in taking steps of faith to find ways to share the precious promises with people I have the opportunity to meet as I go about my life. I pray for my Aquila, if there is such a man, and I trust that someday I will look back on my life and see how God has worked everything together for my good. I will walk by faith and not by sight, until God brings his answer into my sight. And if my request is granted, I plan to enjoy marriage to the full, as God intended for his children to do that he makes so clear in the Bible. I will not believe Satan’s lies that being in love naturally fades with time. I know from the instructions of Dr. Willard Harley in his books and his MarriageBuilders.com resources and the example of his own 55-year marriage that it is possible to fall in love and stay in love and grow in love for a lifetime.

It has taken my whole lifetime so far to reach this point of wholeness and contentedness. I know myself better from all I have gone through with men, starting with boyfriends in high school, with my husband for 37 years, and with the men about whom I have asked since he died: “What if?”  I’m writing this now because I feel hopeful that I’m closer to being ready to experience a happy and healthy relationship with a man. I feel I’ve reached the “older and wiser” stage of being able to spot more and more quickly whether there is any real potential for happy compatibility and the mutual liking and attraction that I’m learning I need and must have. Only God knows when I will truly be ready. At each stage of my life I haven’t known what I didn’t know until I learned something new and then could see in hindsight how my ignorance affected my life. I realize that I have much to learn for the rest of my life, but I’m encouraged when I focus on how far I’ve come. I hope that I may soon be ready to make room in my heart and my life for a good and kind, godly and giving man who will be attracted to every part of me and who I will be attracted to in return.

There has been no man yet who has proven to be either interested enough or able to give me intimacy of mind, spirit, heart, and body. I’ve learned by experience that I can’t feel intimate in any one of those areas without feeling intimate in all of them in a healthy balance. As I have opportunities to get to know someone, I will not allow myself to hope he is Aquila unless he consistently shows interest in all of these parts of me and likes what he comes to know of me.

By “mind” I mean intellectually stimulating and exciting conversation that is best expressed by my favorite quote by Dinah Craik: “But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one’s deepest as well as one’s most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person – having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.” I have yet to experience that with a man with whom I hoped to have a relationship that could become romantic. I didn’t have it with my husband, which I discovered after we were married and didn’t know the reason for that until a week before he died, when I believe the Providential working of God prompted him to tell me about my dad telling him my IQ a few months after we met. Then I understood that for the whole 37 years of our relationship, he had allowed that to intimidate him, which caused him to overcompensate by squelching me and reacting negatively to many things I said, which I now believe was due to his pride and insecurity – two sides of the same coin – rather than humbly being open to considering my perspective. He assumed that I believed that I knew better than him (the irony is that my parents decided not to tell me my IQ to prevent that very temptation!) so he took personally any disagreement with him. I have experienced men being attracted to me, but only for how I look and for what I give to them, especially when I try to be a good listener and encourager. When I talk, I can tell that they aren’t really interested in what I have to say. So they reveal themselves to be takers, just wanting a woman to give them attention but not really caring about me for who I am as a whole person. I have experienced conversations where I have felt listened to and heard, which gives me hope that it is possible to find that, but every man who has cared enough to listen and even respect and respond positively to what I say has been married and therefore not a prospect for anything more. So, I must wait for a man to reveal that he is intrigued by me enough to want to know what I think and who will want to understand my perspective before I can entrust my deepest thoughts to him.

By “spirit” I mean literally my spirit, my soul. I have been a God-seeker ever since I can remember. My quest has taken me on a very zigzagging path that has compelled me to ponder and write and form convictions about what is true from my own understanding of what I see for myself in the Bible. I have made many course corrections and changes in my beliefs over the years whenever I have discovered that I had been wrong or ignorant before learning new biblical concepts.  I would be thankful to experience being able to enjoy together with a man a Christian lifestyle of learning and growing, praying, spending time with other Christians, and sharing the precious promises of God with others. I could never marry a man who wouldn’t want to enjoy those things together with me, also.

By “heart” I mean emotions. I have needed to thaw out and learn to feel deeply and honestly whatever emotions are aroused by whatever I am going through in my life. This is a major step of growth for me, because my whole life until my husband died, I stuffed my feelings down or felt squelched by others, either overtly or because of their lack of care or consideration or interest in knowing my feelings. I’ve always hated to be a bother to anyone and have never felt free to ask anyone for anything or to express my feelings unless I was sure that someone would want to know and care about them. I grew up in an emotionally inexpressive family. I was never given affection or expressions of love or encouragement. I was held up to my 6 siblings by my parents as the good girl that never disappointed them, so I never felt free to fail or to be less than perfect. My life has been a gradual process of facing my weaknesses and accepting my humanness. I have sinned in ways that are humiliating and therefore humbling, and I have experienced the mercy of God revealed in ways that have been so clearly his Providential hand of rescue. Living alone for the past 6+ years has given me the freedom to turn to God as often and as long and as loudly as needed, which has helped me to at last grow closer emotionally to my heavenly Father. I have a special spot on my sofa in my bedroom that is my “Daddy’s lap” cozy spot where I feel free to cry on his shoulder and talk out loud to him as long as I need to. It took over 3 years after my husband died to dig out and bring up and out my deep pain that I had endured in my dysfunctional and emotionally abusive marriage to him, then over 3 more years to reach the point I’m at now, having felt ready to be open to a new relationship but so far not finding a man from whom I feel genuine care and consideration. My emotions have been gut-wrenchingly thawed out and often overwhelming, and the whole range from happy tears of giddy hope to sad tears of disappointed hopelessness. I’m growing in my quickness to recognize when I’m feeling something and in my ability to figure out what the feeling is. I have a long way to go yet, but I will never go back to be the feeling stuffer that I was for so long. So, I must be confident that a man wants me to be emotionally honest and expressive with him before I can feel safe to entrust my heart to him.

By “body” I of course mean physical attraction and affection before marriage and desire for sexual union that is yielded to only within marriage. God says that in marriage, a man and a woman become “one flesh.” I have also needed to thaw out sexually. My marriage was not intimate physically, and though I was thankful to easily get pregnant when we wanted to have babies, I never felt that my husband wanted to make love to me. I won’t share TMI but will only say that 33 years of not feeling attractive enough physically to him to arouse any desire for physical intimacy was so deeply wounding to my womanhood and my sexuality that I didn’t even know how much I needed to heal from that. I’m so thankful to my Father in heaven for giving me experiences in the past year of two men being strongly attracted to me physically. Those men being expressively attracted to me was a great gift which I discovered I needed so much. I learned that there are men out there who could see me as a feminine, attractive woman and that I could yet hope to experience deeply satisfying sexual intimacy for the rest of my life with the right man. The hard part of these lessons was that neither man had the capacity for or interest in getting to know the rest of me – my mind, spirit, and heart. The ending of my hopes for complete intimacy that would develop in the right order, with physical intimacy being reserved for a marriage built on healthy and balanced deepening intimacy of mind, spirit, and heart, was very painful and yet I’m thankful to have gone through the whole experience from thrilling beginning to painful end with each of them because of what I learned about myself and how I grew more ready to look forward to physical intimacy someday that will truly be making love. I feel sad and bad for both of those men because the temptation I came through helped me understand and appreciate more than ever before the wisdom of God’s will that sex be reserved for marriage. I know from experience now how a focus on physical attraction and desire crowds out the other parts of each person. So, I know for sure that I cannot entrust my body to a man until I’m sure that he cares about and wants to know my mind and spirit and heart first. And when that is true, marriage and the freedom to express our love in every way will be the natural desire for both of us.

I didn’t realize how squelched my heart and body were. I should really say that I knew objectively that those parts of me were squelched, but I didn’t know how crippled that had made me. I endured the years of my marriage by clinging to and pursuing my quest to learn about personal interests and grow spiritually – feeding the needs of my mind and spirit while my heart and body/sexuality shriveled. I know now that I was focusing on and clinging to the parts of me that weren’t as vulnerable to being hurt, trying to maintain some sense of myself.

I’m so thankful for my relationship with God, as stunted and as slow-growing as it often was. Even as I pondered and wrote to try to understand and articulate my biblical convictions, which arose out of my need to continue moving forward after leaving a church that had crossed the line into unbiblical, cultish practices, I knew that I had yet to experience fully the lifestyle and church paradigm that I came to see so clearly and wrote about. I could see what God promised, and I named the collection of booklets I wrote “The Precious Promises Series” from 2 Peter 1:3-5a: “By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires. In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises.”

Through the past almost 20 years since writing the first booklet named “New Birth! Known by God,” I have held on to hope that someday God would grant me the opportunity to experience in reality the vision of the marriage lifestyle, fellowship with other believers, and outreach to the world that became so clear to me by the time the series was written. I gave up hope of experiencing it with my husband, and when he died, I felt rescued by God (which took the three plus years to admit freely to myself and to others). I have continued to hope, now adding to my prayers asking that God would provide my Aquila with whom to share and live out my vision. I see and appreciate, looking back on these years since my husband died, the ways God has worked so many things together for my good as he promised he would in Romans 8:28: “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” I believe that the biggest lesson I’ve had to learn is to become integrated as a whole person. I feel ready to move forward with renewed hope that God will, in his own wisdom and timing, provide my Aquila to share the rest of my life with, to experience the wisdom and perspective of Ecclesiastes 9:9: “Live happily with the woman you love through all the meaningless days of life that God has given you under the sun. The wife God gives you is your reward for all your earthly toil.” I hope to be cherished by a man who could see me as his reward from God. I would love to live happily with such a man!

And so, I continually seek God’s wisdom and strength to keep the balance between looking for Aquila while simply being Priscilla. If I never find my Aquila, I want to feel content, at peace, whole, loved by my heavenly Father and my dearest brothers and sisters in the family of God, happy as a mother and grandmother, and to trust that that is enough. But I do want to be honest with myself, my friends and my family, that I am asking my Father for the opportunity to experience yet in this life a marriage that I know is possible and that can be such a great gift for me, for a man I could love, and for others who would see that they could have a marriage as God intended for it to be experienced also.

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