So lately, every time I log into facebook my news feed is blowing up with news of engagements and marriages. Ha, especially with my team being all women, it seems we have 6 groups worth of friends who are all moving into this time of life, and at least twice a day someone announces a friend who just got engaged or just posted wedding photos. It’s such a beautiful thing, but also a bit bittersweet one too, because we’re not there to celebrate with our friends who are entering into this time. With all of the engagements and weddings coming up or already happening, the talk of it all has definitely increased amongst us ladies. Some, thanks to pinterest, have even begun to already gather ideas for their future weddings. I haven’t yet reached that point, but admittedly my thoughts about the matter have gone up in number.
Amidst all this wedding talk, I’ve started to think more and more about the marriage that comes with it and I’ve been hit with these moments of feeling the seriousness of it, the excitement that it brings and the completely life changing aspects of it. It’s definitely stirred up some stuff. And one of those things is purity.
Some straight talk: I’ve done quite a few things in my life that I don’t feel the greatest about now, and I’m realizing more and more how, through those things, I’ve hurt many others and myself. I’m hit again with the weight of my decisions, with the internal and external consequences that they’ve come with. Most times when I talk to people about this kind of thought, I’m met with a really familiar response of, “but you have been washed clean through clean and made pure by Him”, and trust me I believe that to the fullest. I have felt the change in my life because He’s done that and because He has renewed my Spirit from what it used to be. Psalm 51 is tattoo’d on my shoulder because reading it and hearing from the Lord in that was such a monumental moment in my life with all this stuff. My belief in the fact that the Lord has washed me clean of all that isn’t what I’m dealing with right now, I’ve got that.
As the wedding talk increased and thoughts of marriage grew, I found myself thinking a lot about my purity in regards to that. I’ve found myself really caught up in thoughts of remaining pure until that time, basically the whole desire of “saving yourself” until marriage. And even though that means a lot more than just in a physical sense, there is a spiritual and emotional aspect to it as well, how easy it is for us to think of it only regards to the physical. And how easy it is for us to try to “protect our purity” or “save ourselves” in our own way.
During the beginning of my walk with the Lord I was working through some serious amount of guilt over the crap that I had done. Even after I had entered into a relationship with Him and was getting to know Him, I was still struggling with old habits and things that were at the point just engrained into me. This is when I was introduced to the story of Hosea through my discipler at the time, Hilarie. At first when I read this book I was pretty offended that she had suggested it, because I gathered that she was trying to tell me I was like Gomer, the prostitute. Well, she was saying that, and so was God. …And once I got over my offendibility and truly read the story of Hosea, I too saw the parallels, but in such a hopeful and humbling way.
The Lord recently reminded me of all of that and what He had spoken to me then through Hosea and Gomer’s story. He reminded me how diligently He loves, how faithful He is, and how forgiving His nature is. He reminded me of how, through that book, He declared His unrelenting love over me and made me feel so secure in that love. Even in remembering that though I was still struggling with the connection to the here and now and my thoughts about marriage.
That’s when He reminded me of a blog I wrote a couple years ago after He spoke to me about purity then. I wrote this in April of 2010:
"I'm saving myself"
As I was walking down Mulberry today, being covered with sunlight, feeling the heated cement and at times left over wet mud and fall leaves under my feet, thoughts began their usual flood of my conscious.
One idea stuck: it is the concept of “saving ourselves”, what motivates us to do this, and what it is exactly we are saving ourselves for. Previously in my life, as in before this morning, the way I would say it was like, ”I’m saving myself for marriage” or “I don’t want to kiss another guy until its my husband”
I realized this morning that there is something inherently wrong with those statements. With in those I am being pretty presumptuous in assuming that the Lord has a husband for me. Yet, I have no way of knowing that, I may never marry, and if that’s the case then what am I saving myself for? It leaves my purity with out cause and with out justification…I’m left saving myself for no one, and that emptiness is scary.
The truth is I can not save myself for a husband I’m not sure I’ll ever have, but I can and am giving myself daily to the Lord and my purity rests in Him and Him alone. He is saving me for himself, [washing me and cleansing me to present me before the Lord as blameless] and if He so chooses, one day He will let a man lead me and take me as his wife, to love me as He loves me. The Lord is whom I am pure for, not some vague (maybe non-existent) future husband.
And in that all the lines that used to be blurred are made clear.
In this way I was shown my current problem; I was forgetting that none of this, at the end of it all, is about anything other than Him. I had written that passage, obviously, in a time when I was single and it was a bit easier to focus on that. But now as I’m in a relationship its been easier to get caught up in the physical, “earthly”, part of this stuff and to see it as the end goal; to see a certain day that I’m saving myself until or a certain person that I am saving myself for, when in the fullness of it, my purity isn’t being saved until any certain day or for any person here. It is, and always will be in, for and because of the Lord. I’m reminded too that these things are a shadow of what’s to come. That these marriages here aren’t meant to be an end goal of ours, but they are used by Him to reveal more to us about His and our’s relationship and our union with Him. They were set up to be an example to us and a means for us to be an example to this world.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the small picture of things. To just see us in it all and to think largely about how it all effects us and has to do with us. In all of my thoughts and struggles lately, I realized there was a lot of me in it. The solution provided was to think more about Him, more about others and to see the bigger, more heavenly, picture of it all.
