I was and probably will always be something of a late bloomer.
Growing up, with anxiety and people pleasing often left me with shattered confidence and haunted by comparing myself to others. As a young woman, I often felt behind as I watched friend and after friend get married, have children, and appear to have a general trajectory of predictability for their lives (which looking back now, this assumption wasn’t true at all – God has unforeseen journeys for everyone’s life).
Extended singleness (among many other experiences) has been a key tool that God has used to pick away at the strongholds of fear and idolatry in my heart.
Learning to shift my focus away from myself and others and instead look to Jesus is easily the entire story of my life in a nutshell.
Seeing my world, my experiences, my hopes, and my disappointments through the lens of eternity change my view of how big those things are.
The desire for marriage is hard to surrender.
The longing for motherhood is hard to surrender.
Hopes, dreams, plans, accomplishments – they are so hard to surrender.
Yet… I won’t see my Savior face to face and suddenly feel inadequate because I never married or never had children.
I won’t have a less full salvation or a smaller inheritance because I wasn’t wealthy or seen as important among my peers – Jesus himself is my salvation and my inheritance.
All of the disappointments and shattered dreams, all of the good things we worked for but never saw good from in return, all of the seed hopefully cast onto the soil that never grew – they died and disappeared – not one of these hard things will make Jesus less glorious or his salvation any less amazing.
Are you feeling defeated, confused, and possible heartbroken with how your life has turned out? In eternity, Jesus isn’t going to commend us for all of the things we accomplished in life – whether we married, what job we had, the amount of money in our bank accounts, or the number of awards we obtained. But you know what he has promised to do? He will wipe away our tears.
“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” -Revelation 7:16-17
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