OBSESSED!!!! And rightly so! And about time!!!!! And *proud* of it!!!!!

OK, I’ll admit it.  I have just raced through writing my blog post on my other blog so that I could finally get to “the object of my desire” which today, is this post itself!  I have been itching to write this post all week – when I have not been smiling off into the distance, that is!  I had actually been planning to write a post under this title last week  (but as usual I completely forgot when it came to the time to actually write the post).  However, it has only been in the course of this week that I have finally released myself to truly luxuriate in prayer regarding Mr HW and my marital dreams.  Finally!!!  Can you imagine?!  After so many years of watching other people’s relationships, thinking, asking myself questions, devouring as much material as I can find on relationships, and blogging. (In fact, this blog is now a full three years old, (and a year old under its own domain name).  I might publish the archives so people can look back through the full history!)
And now at last, I am in that happy place of praying. Happy sigh!  The prospect of being happily married holds so much joy that even praying about it brings so much joy as you excitedly look forward to this thing.
But yes, now to the actual “obsessed” thing.

I was thinking away on these issues as always:  marriage….husband…how to know and evaluate someone’s character… and then a worrying thought darted across my mind.

“Oh no, Lord, I honestly think…I might be….a little obsessed!”  The thought initially came with some fear –

“Oh no, that would be dreadful!”
Immediately the machinery of my mind automatically started moving to reassure myself that

“No, I am not obsessed…it’s fine!”
But then I thought:

“No, actually!  If, and by God’s grace when I do get married, my marriage will not merely be “an important part of my life”.  No, in fact my marriage will be my life!  So obsessing about my marriage is in fact obsessing about my life.  And of course it is good and right for me to think deeply and carefully about my life itself!  And it is not as if I am indifferent to the question of getting married – this is something that I deeply want! So am I obsessed?  Well yes of course I am, and yes of course I should be!”

And acknowledging that brought a deep sense of joy to me.

The prayer thing
This is my issue with the prayer thing.  I’ve been trying to work out different issues about marriage for so long. And up until recently it has all felt so confusing, and I’ve felt as if I have been tussling endlessly with this issue of how to approach a relationship for the greatest probability of an amazing marriage. And because I have not understood it, I’ve just not had the necessary clarity or vision in my mind to pray, to know what to ask for and how I would like it to happen.  So because all these marital issues/prayers have just represented big confusion, it has simply been easier to shove them to the side, and focus in prayer on other things which I have found a lot easier and clearer to deal with. This is written as someone who is so busy, and who has so many pressing demands on her time.  When these other issues have been very pressing, and clearer and easier to deal with then they have won, even though marriage is something that has been so important to me for so long.

I was challenging myself on this issue recently and thinking:
“Surely, all I had to do was pray that God would send an excellent husband….and then pray for the kind of marriage that I wanted!  How hard could that possibly have been?!  So simple!!!”

In a way, yes.  However my difficulty has been in how to structure the relationship from the outset, how to enter into it, how not to enter into it, how to know that we are friends or that we are compatible – or not, how to separate “feelings I might feel for him” from  “objective and cool-headed observation of his character”….these are the kind of things that have represented a big knotty mess, and it has just been easier to push the whole thing to the side.  Even if God had brought “The Man”, I would not have felt confident about how to approach the relationship.
However, now I feel that I do understand better, with the friendship thing:  what is friendship, the difference between friendly and friendship, the two year thing…etc etc.  So now I feel as if I have a clearer idea of what to expect, and what to hope for, and I have a clearer vision of how to pray.

The time thing
Largely because of the two year thing, it appears that all of this is predictably going to take some serious time. Because of this, I have been half-wishing that I let myself become obsessed with this ten years ago, as other women did so that it might at least have been sorted out by now, rather than a few years yet from now! However, there was a very good reason why I did not throw myself into that ten years ago.  I’ve been brought up to cultivate dreams of excelling in my own right. For some women, getting married and motherhood totally define all that they aspire to in life.  These are not bad things, of course. However, for me, I dream of these things alongside other dreams for my life. I am the kind of person who delights in audacious, radical, and highly impractical ideas. I’ve always known that to do these things, I would need to focus on them before marriage. So that is what I have been doing.

I’m not going to let myself become obsessed by the time thing. I’m going to cling to my guns tighter than ever – 2 years of pre-relationship “getting to know one another”, period!!! However, the time and age issue together definitely are added reason to let give myself completely to this issue now, now that I finally do get it!

So yeah, let’s talk about those prayers!  My issue thus far of course is that I’ve been busy. It is not that I have stopped being busy, of course. But no matter how busy I continue to be I have come to the place of forcing myself to carve out good time for this.   I’ve finally let myself have the time to really spell everything out, to try to cover everything I can think of.  My goodness, one day during the week I concentrated so hard in prayer on dreams for my marriage that my head actually hurt afterwards (Admittedly I was also nursing a cold at that time. However it was definitely the prayer that caused that  headache!) And it has been so good to pray these prayers.  It has been so good to dream these dreams in the presence of God, and bring them before God, present them to Him for His empowerment, and think with excited anticipation about these things finally happening. It has been so good that I have been tempted to increase my prayer time, to give myself further time to meditate on these happy thoughts.  And you know, I do have many prayerless years to make up for, after all!
So yes, I’m obsessed.  (NB, I acknowledge that this title might seem a little strange to some people, as they might think that I’ve been obsessed for ages!!!  However the big point is that I have finally given myself permission to pray about it deeply, to make this a prayer priority in my life, even above other important and urgent things!)
So again, yes, I’m obsessed!  And you know what, it is long overdue!  And you know what else?!  I’m proud of it!!! 😉  Now if you’d kindly excuse me I’m going off to smile some thoughts into the future! 😉

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PHOTO CREDITS
Rose picture from Pixabay
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