Episode Three: Is Waiting on the Lord for your Boaz Keeping You Single?

We're told to trust God's timing.

We're told to wait on the Lord.

But what does that actually mean?

Because for many single Christian women, waiting on the Lord has quietly become indistinguishable from waiting for something to happen and possibly remaining single till you are 60.

This episode explores a different possibility: that waiting on the Lord can involve wisdom, investment and precision without becoming striving.

Waiting on the Lord can lead to marrying well. And it may not mean what you think.

Transcript

[00:00:00] What they say in the songs is partly true. They say all you need is love. What I have come to believe is that love is all there is. Right now, I can hear my three toddlers laughing and cackling as they play with each other. I just got a ping on my phone from my husband telling me he's on his way home.

He'll call soon so that we can talk while he drives. Before he calls, I'm hoping to run to my closet and quickly wrap a present for my sister-in-law who I'm meeting for lunch tomorrow. Also on my mind are the emails my mother-in-law and my mom are sending back and forth about my daughter's birthday party and who is bringing which of her favorite treats.

My life is quite full, and it does seem as though love is all there is. In fact, when I listen to the [00:01:00] songs I used to play on repeat when I was single, I almost don't remember that girl. The nights crying in the shower, the mornings lying in bed wondering, "Is this all it's going to be?" It feels like it happened to someone else.

The Lord redeemed the years the locusts had stolen. He turned my mourning into dancing, and mourning is a strong word when you consider what my single life actually looked like. I had acceptance letters from Stanford, Caltech, and MIT for advanced engineering degrees. I traveled across the country simply to spend a weekend with friends.

I traveled internationally all the time with my mom and my sister. I was active in church, serving musically alongside my dad while he taught scripture. There were triathlons, dance competitions, [00:02:00] research engagements. My life was very, very good. But I was mourning. And when your life is that good, it can be easy to forget that you are paying what I call the single tax.

The single tax is the unspoken cost of extended singleness, particularly for Christian women. For instance, I did not understand how fragile the ability to conceive actually is. I did not understand that fertility exists within a relatively brief window, one that travels alongside the very same years in which women are often building their education and careers, and it can quietly get edged out.

Mine nearly did. Thank the Lord [00:03:00] I had my twins at forty, but when we wanted to have one more, my gynecologist simply said, "Don't wait." There are other costs to extended singleness. The opportunity to build a life with another person, to build a family, to build wealth, to make decisions with someone whose strength compounds your own.

There's a beautiful line in a popular musical where one character asks the other to imagine what they could do together. That is part of the single tax too. I know my own ambition and success reached new heights after I was married. So did my husband, so did our finances. And I think part of the reason is contained in a very old biblical truth.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. [00:04:00] Once that place in me that had been heartsick became heart fulfilled, I blossomed. And there is another cost of extended singleness that we don't talk about very often. Hope. There is a cost to asking the heart to hope indefinitely. We tell ourselves we can delay. We can wait another year.

We can focus on just one more thing first. But the willingness to keep hoping is not inexhaustible. The window in our hearts in which we are able to pursue marriage with openness and expectation does not necessarily remain unchanged forever. And Christian women are often told, "Wait on the Lord." [00:05:00] Yes, waiting on the Lord is biblical, but waiting on the Lord is not passive.

And sometimes when we say we're trusting in the Lord's timing, we're actually relying on our own Waiting on the Lord is not randomly throwing spaghetti against a wall and hoping something sticks. You have waited on the Lord in other important areas of your life. You did not do it by guessing. You invested time where time was required.

You invested money where investment was required. You sought counsel for discernment. You acquired wisdom when wisdom mattered. Finding the love of your life is no different. The reality is that Christian dating now exists at the intersection of Biblical wisdom, attraction, [00:06:00] and rapidly evolving technology.

Technology has changed the landscape in which men and women meet, recognize each other, and commit to each other. Now more than ever, wisdom is required, not more effort. And isn't it intuitive that waiting on the Lord would involve wisdom? That it would involve gentleness and quietness in a precise way?

What my clients have experienced is that sometimes it really is as simple as one apt word spoken at the right time for the right man to stop in his tracks and recognize them. In particular, one of my clients left a Facebook comment. It was natural. It was easy. A godly man saw it. He looked her up. He pursued her, and later, I received an email from her telling me, "I got married [00:07:00] yesterday."

Sometimes I forget how extraordinary my own courtship was. My husband told me he loved me before we had even met in person. All he had seen were photographs, but they were photographs that told a compelling story, that communicated something true, that allowed him to recognize something before I had walked into the room.

Precision is required, not more effort, not endless dates, not countless months struggling on dating apps, not heartbreak after heartbreak that can sometimes take years to recover from. Waiting on the Lord can be far more beautiful than that. We are often taught to pray and wait. Few women are taught how to pray, wait, and marry well.

But waiting on the Lord does not [00:08:00] require you to become passive. It does not require you to strive either. It can look like wisdom. It looks like gentleness It can look like one photograph, one apt word, and trusting the Lord to grow one carefully planted seed