Praying for my future husband

“Dear Future Husband,

I turned 16 today, and I know it may seem weird writing this to you now, but this letter is sort of my way of making a promise to you in writing…

So begins the fictional Christy Miller’s first letter to her future husband.

Reading this in Island Dreamer at eleven, I was more than a little impressed at the romantic idea of communicating with the nebulous future husband.

I began writing my own letters–and started praying for “my future husband”. The letters tapered off and were mostly forgotten–the prayers have continued.

I was in my mid-teens when our youth pastor got married. People made a big deal about how his wife had prayed for him (that is, for her future husband) for eight years before they got married.

She was considered *the* example of a woman who’d waited long, who’d waited prayerfully.

I loved it–and thought I could maybe handle eight years of praying.

It’s been 16 years since that first letter. Sixteen years since the first prayer.

I have waited, sometimes patiently, often very impatiently.

I have fretted and stewed, and sometimes I have experienced the sweet peace that comes with trusting God.

I am not a paragon of patient waiting. It has been a difficult sixteen years. My heart has not always been pure, my eyes not always focused on Christ. Even my prayers have not always been right. Making marriage an idol, I have bargained with God for a husband. I have given God deadlines, ultimatums. I have sinfully demanded a spouse.

More often than I like to admit, my prayers have been demands for a husband. But God resisted my bargaining, my demands, my desperate attempts to be content enough to earn myself a husband. In His grace, God worked in my heart to overthrow my idol of marriage and to enthrone Christ as my supreme treasure.

As I’ve grown in my walk with Christ, my prayers for my future husband have changed.

I began praying that he would seek God, that God would direct his paths, that God would lead the two of us together at just the right time.

I started praying for myself, that the God who knows my future husband intimately would make me into just the right woman to be his helpmate.

In the last week, my prayers have changed again.

Now I pray for my future husband by name.

I pray for my beloved Daniel.

I’ve prayed sixteen years for my future husband, but now, in five short months (unbearably long), I will drop the “future” and he will be simply “my husband”.

Will you join me in praying, for my future husband and for myself? Now that his name is known, will you pray for Daniel and I as we begin our life together?