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(Caution: For men only. The transactional & business metaphors
are meant for humor and not to illustrate reality. Forgive me if they sound offensive to you.)
If you’re at the stage in life where you often find yourself saying, “I’m not ready”, welcome to the group most of us men belong to.
If you’re a single
professional, deciding to pursue and eventually marry a woman is like launching
a new enterprise. You can never create a perfect business plan that guarantees
success – one that enlightens you about the opportunity at hand, the hurdles
along the way and the forecasted capitalization required.
Quite often,
after months or even years of developing the product (yourself), you learn the
hard way that the customer (the woman) does not need or want most features that
you work so hard on.
Planning to
figure out most of the unknowns first, before actually executing the idea will
surely leave you old and wanting still.
The ones
that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure – NOT relationship to relationship but life’s challenges - all the while maturing
both in terms of character and skill as they continually learn from juxtaposing
their experiences with God’s word.
There comes
a point when the years of planning, research, bible-reading, praying and hoping
must be followed up with IMPLEMENTATION.
Here are
some suggestions on how you can go about it:
Step 1) Serve God
You’re going to be amazed by how many gorgeous women who love God serve in the
church. And you'll have the privilege of serving with them.
Step 2) Pursue God
If you’d like to marry the beautiful woman you met in church and became friends with, understand
that she finds a man who pursues God above everything else most attractive.
You
might insist on doing other essential steps like: ocular inspection, market
survey and gathering customer's feedback to see if the product development is
at its right course but doing
steps 1 and 2 should suffice, for now.
And if you
keep doing steps 1 and 2 over and over and over again, something's going to develop in
your heart that you never thought was there. It’s that deep longing inside of
you that’s beginning to be satisfied. And then, you’ll realize how much God
loves you and how much you desire to have deep intimacy with Him, knowing that
it’s really Him who completes you and He’s the one you truly love.
Step 3) Ask God for His daughter’s
hand in marriage.
Forgive me for the oversimplification but reaching Step 3 will be up to
your faith and courage – heavy doses of it, and most importantly, God’s
providence.
Don’t wait until
you’re ready. You’ll never be. Rely on God and take courage. God’s favor –
there’s such a thing and it will be with you as you commit and surrender
everything to Him.
