By, Courtney Holloway Montgomery
“To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven…”
Ecclesiastes 3: 1
Over Christmas break, my dad thought it would be a great idea if my sisters and I went through all the storage bins cluttering his shed. When you have five children, things tend to pile up and when they live all over the country (Arizona, Hawaii, Florida, etc.) they don’t always have the space to take all their childhood mementos with them. In any case, my sister and I started sorting through piles of printed pics (who does that anymore?), old Clinique gift bags, books, handwritten letters from high school friends and Hello Kitty diaries full of anguish.
We had a good laugh reading second grade missives about getting on each others nerves and playground battles with fifth grade bullies. It was funny to read long letters about unrequited love and being misunderstood by guys that we were just “talking to” at the time. Oh, the ‘90’s were a great time to be alive!
Now that my sister and I are happily married to great guys, it is easy to look back and laugh about relationships that didn’t work out. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say and we now have the benefit of knowing the rest of the story. If there is one thing that I could tell my younger self, it would be not to waste time worrying about whether I would get a date to an Artist Series in college or whether that guy in the church singles group had potential. Thankfully, my parents never made a big deal about us getting married right out of college.
For Christian girls, marriage is often portrayed as the highest goal. Those who don’t get married are relegated to the singles group and often peppered with questions by well meaning people at church about why/how they are still single. For most marriage may be part of God’s plan for their lives. However, that is not always the case (see the life of the Apostle Paul). Judging by my own journal entries, I often worried about never meeting anyone or whether certain life decisions (moving to Hawaii after college or later to Washington, DC) would help or hurt my chances in the boyfriend department.
Looking back, I can see how God ordered my steps throughout every stage of my life. Despite the high school angst and the fact that I was almost 30 when I got married, it all worked out and I had some really great opportunities to meet people and travel along the way.
My husband and I actually went to college together and graduated in the same class (2005). We had mutual acquaintances but never dated back then. Even though he was from Illinois and I was from South Carolina and he moved to Kansas City and I moved to Hawaii after graduation, we ended up getting married in 2014. #providence
Though I wouldn’t have planned it that way thankfully God knew best. We wouldn’t trade our experiences apart. We did date long distance forever (it seemed that way at the time) but even that (though it was hard) was part of the plan.
Of course, now all the questions are about when we are going to start a family. If we did have a child then all the questions would be about whether we would give him/her a sibling and so it goes. People are nothing if not predictable.
I have always taken comfort in the fact that whatever God has for me is for me. Wasting time worrying about whether or not things are happening on my timetable is just that-a waste of time. God’s plans are the best plans even when we can’t see how it will all work out.
“Single life may be only a stage of a life’s journey, but even a stage is a gift. God may replace it with another gift, but the receiver accepts His gifts with thanksgiving. This gift for this day. The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived—not always looked forward to as though the “real” living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.” - Elisabeth Elliot
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