Low on the Go!

Wow, here i am blogging away like no tomorrow! but i loved this post and it spoke truth to me today ^_^ So i'm going to post it anyways. YAY Carolyn McCulley. i love her blog. she's such a wise woman.

Waiting to be Interrupted

Okay, so back to the college-and-your-future discussion. I spent about a half-hour today looking for a quote that had been buzzing around my head for the last few days. It was about how it's the man's job to interrupt a woman's plans. I was sure it was something Elisabeth Elliot had said. But after flipping through all the copies of her books that I own, I realized it was Douglas Wilson who said it. What he wrote in Her Hand in Marriage was:

But boys must be trained to take risks, which means being

confident in the midst of the unknown. As they do this on

an immature level, fathers should work with them, and teach them,

without destroying this masculine impetus.

Courtship reveals how necessary this masculinity is. Many modern

young men approach a girl, and they are quite serious as far as their

intentions go, but they are afraid of interfering with her life. "You

know, she is going to graduate soon, but she wants to go to school

at Notre Dame, and I don't really want to go to Notre Dame, and

showing interest in her would really disrupt all her plans."

But the whole point of courtship is to disrupt a young lady's plans.

A godly young woman is not going to stand around waiting for marriage.

Rather, she will be preparing herself for marriage. This means she

will be heading in some particular direction, and not just marking time.

A young man should not be afraid of disrupting, because marriage is

by its very nature a disruption of her previous way of life.

This is a releasing perspective, isn't it? There is a tension Christian women can experience in trying to live for God right here, right now, while also trying to prepare for a possible future as a wife and mother. Because we creatures don't like the unknown, we often want to box God in and try to determine from the outset what our futures hold. Fortunately, for the sake of our characters, the Lord doesn't allow this. Instead, He asks for our trust as He unfolds the details He's lovingly arranged.

So, we are not to just stand around. We are to be making plans for the future--and praying for godly men who know how to risk interrupting us. As Elisabeth Elliot used to say, if you don't know what to do, then just do the next thing in front of you. As you are faithful with that next step, you can be assured that God will keep directing you to one next thing after another. And maybe one day those steps will put you right in the path of the man who is to be your husband. In the meantime, here's further counsel from her book, Quest for Love, about what waiting should look like:

Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and

vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when,

where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits--not

for but on the customer--alert, watchful, attentive, with no other

agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted.

Amen, amen!

(bold= my emphasis)