Bride and Groom Kissing at Wedding Ceremony

My Marriage Story

I wanted to share my testimony with people who are still looking to God to get married.

Years ago, while I was in graduate school, I met the man that I really really really wanted to marry.  He was somebody that was everything that I could ever imagine I wanted.   We had the same cultural background; he was a strong Christian (supposedly) and came from a strong Christian family.  I ended up getting into a relationship with him for about 7 years, but it was a really horrible, terrible, bad relationship.

I would say that we brought out the worst in each other but from the way he talked about past relationships I could tell that he’d always been the type of person he was with me even when he was in relationships with other people.  About 7 years into the relationship he got married to somebody else behind my back. It took a few months for me to find out what happened and when I did I was completely devastated.  I was hurt, I was disappointed, and I felt hopeless because I was already at an age where people were starting to get concerned as to why I wasn’t yet married.

I entered into a severe depression for a few years that was only exacerbated by family members, friends and coworkers constantly commenting on me not being married, making jokes that were so hurtful about me being single and just plainly stressing me out and making me think that God wasn’t working in my life.  I felt very unloved by God and struggled with this emotion for years.

Fortunately for me during this time God brought a couple into my life who were able to share with me a number of things that they had gone through and the church that they were going to.  They shared that this church helped them to have faith in God and use the Christian life to activate the blessings that God promises in the bible. The church they were going to was Christ Embassy and though I didn’t switch churches I started studying their daily devotional which is called Rhapsody of Realities.  It is through studying that devotion and the prayer of a number of people from my church and a few other strong Christians around me that I began to feel much stronger and eventually started dating again.  I began acting out my faith and buying things for my wedding.  I did this for two reasons.  One because it encouraged me.  The other because something kept telling me that when I did get married it would all happen very quickly.

I dated a couple of people and things didn’t work out.   One of the people again was somebody who ended up getting married behind my back. This time when I found out about it I came to understand he had been engaged before he even started pursuing me.   Fortunately for me I was a lot stronger and didn’t take the end of that relationship very badly; as a matter of fact I had ended the relationship before I had even found out that he had got married while he was involved with me.

I began working heavily on myself to understand why I kept finding myself in these relationships.  Through prayer God revealed some things to me clearly and I began praying over them.

About a year after that I met somebody that I absolutely adored was head-over-heels for.  Again, he was everything that I had thought I wanted but he had been married before and had a child and though he was divorced I could sense that he was still struggling with the fall of his marriage.

He seemed really excited initially for us to start talking, but a couple of months into us hanging out and talking to each other he seemed to slightly lose interest.   Around the time I had met him I had a couple of friends who had introduced me to a couple of other guys.   I wasn’t really that intrested in them and didn’t take either one of them seriously because they were in the US and I lived in Canada and the person that I had met that I really liked also lived in Canada so it just seemed easier to pursue a relationship with him.

Around the time the guy in Canada seemed to start losing interest was when I started talking to one of the guys in the US.   I remember being really impressed because during the very first conversation we had one of the first things he said to me was

“I’m interested in settling down and getting married that’s what my real intension is I’m really at the point of wanting to start my life and I’m looking for somebody to do that with.”

I was really caught of guard because in all of the years of my dating and all of the people I had been involved with even the ones who seemed very interested in pursuing a relationship with me nobody had ever been that clear and upfront that they are looking to get married.  I wouldn’t say that he won me over but we did start talking despite the fact that he lived in the US.  He would encourage me when I would get discouraged about us living so far apart, and I was particularly stressed out about it because the person that I had originally been involved with when I was in graduate school had also lived in the US.

Every time I would get discouraged about my relationship with him God would use him to speak to me and say things that would let me know that He was the one that was behind our relationship.   For example, there was a time that this guy and I were talking, and he was really pressing the issue about getting married and I had this really clear thought in my mind “he wants to get married so quickly because he needs his papers that’s probably what this is all about” because I knew so many people who had been duped into marriage by someone desperate to leave their home country.

He wasn’t from the US originally and had only been there a few years.  And literally as this thought came to mind, he sent me a text message with a picture of his green card. I was thinking to myself why he sent that and I asked him “what made you decide to send this to me right now, we weren’t even talking anything at all about your immigration status” and he said, “well I just felt like I wanted to send it to you.”  There are a couple of other things like that that happened that made me feel very confident and convinced that God was in the middle of the situation.

It was also probably around that time that I started remembering after the second person I had been involved with got married while I was talking to him, I had prayed a certain prayer to God that any person that is going to come into my life without the intention of marriage that God should let them stop calling me.  It was shortly after this prayer the guy in Toronto stopped calling.   So, I kept talking to the guy that was in the US and we got to know each other a little bit more and I felt more confident that God was in the midst of the situation and so we decided to get married.

From the time that we talked about marrying and the time that we actually got married was less than 6 weeks, probably a little bit over a month.  Right after we decided to get married, and we had announced our engagement to all of our friends and family the guy I liked in Toronto reached out.  He let me know the reason that he had stopped talking to me was because during that time he had found out he was still married to his wife who was in England and felt like he needed to deal with that before he could pursue a relationship with somebody else.  And that’s when I felt very convicted that this was all orchestrated by God -that God had taken him out of my life at that particular time because he wanted me to pursue a relationship with the person I had gotten engaged to.

It was after we actually got married that one day I was sitting down and going through some of my devotional books and journals and came across the list I had written to God about the man that I wanted to marry.   The list was pretty long, most of the things I had written was to encourage myself that God could do it, not that I felt at any point that if I’d met somebody who was God-fearing and who I thought had been sent by God that didn’t have every quality on the list that I wouldn’t have married them. But I wrote all the qualities down to encourage myself and remind myself that God is capable of bringing anybody.

Looking over the list I realized my husband had every quality, every single quality that I had written down on that paper.  Down to wanted our families to have a good relationship.  Our parents talk, I communicate with his diblings and he talks to my mother constantly.  I thought to myself “wow if I had known that God was going to show up in such an incredible way I definitely would have put more things down on this list, like marrying a billionaire, or marrying somebody on Forbes top 100, or someone who looked like Idris Elba or actually marrying Idris Elba” (just kidding, well kind of).  Anyways I did feel very happy and confident that God had really shown up for me and that he had been the one from the very beginning working everything out for my good.

To anybody who is still looking to God for the flesh of their flesh and the bone of their bone I just wanted to encourage you that God cares about your situation.   He is preparing that person and working things out for your good.   In the meantime, use this opportunity to be very clear about what you want and put your hope, faith and trust in God knowing that he will bring you the desires of your heart.

If he could do it for me, he can surely, do it for anybody and he will definitely show up in an amazing way for you.  In Jesus name.  Amen.

3 Comments

  1. Cal_M 11/7/2017
  2. Yana 3/13/2018
  3. Judith 1/23/2024

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