No Junk

Romantic relationships have always been the most difficult part of my life for me to surrender to God. When I pray for my future husband, I often can feel the war waging inside of me which I can't reconcile. There's the good side: the side that wants to trust God with His plans for my life. Then there's the bad side, the “Leslie” side: the part of me that wants to make things happen in my own time, with the guy I happen to be interested in, in the way that I want things to happen.

 I spent this past weekend with seventy middle and high school students at a youth retreat. (This is relevant, I promise.) Our first night, Jeff Kinley (the guest speaker) spent some time talking about Adam and Eve and how they were the basis for our sin nature. As he was talking about this first couple, he made a joke that Adam must've named Eve “woman” because all he could say when he first saw her was “Whoa... man! Whoa-man! Wo-man!!”

All the youth laughing at this point, he went on to say, “You know, Adam and Eve were the perfect people—God don't make no junk! And it will be the same for all of you when you get married: God don't make no junk.”

For some reason, that comment stuck in my head throughout the entire weekend—and has been on my mind ever since. As I mentioned before, I struggle with trusting God in the area of guys. Not that there has really been any significant others lately... which is precisely the problem! With college graduation nearing, I've been wondering what I will do once school is through—and marriage, of course, is vying for a place at the top of my attention-list.

Yet, the more I focus on trying to find a husband the more frustrated I get. Either the guy isn't interested in me, or there aren't any available men that care even remotely about Jesus... I just can't get things to work out, you know?

There was a second thing Jeff mentioned during this weekend that touched my heart. When he became a Christian, he feared that God would look at his life say, “Alright, let's take the ten things you love most in life and throw those out the window. Now let's take the ten things you don't want to do and make you do those every day.”

His point was this: God's not like that.

If I trust God to take care of my relationship status, I don't think that the Creator and God of the Universe—who loves me enough to die for me—would stick me with a boring, unattractive, unromantic, chauvinistic, lazy man. God don't make no junk. By trusting in Him, I'm trusting that He will fulfill my heart.

“What romance, beauty, and glory we forgo when we try to script the story ourselves. God has not called us to build our lives around the pursuit of our own selfish desires, but to be poured-out sacrifices for His kingdom” (Leslie Ludy, Sacred Singleness). During the rest of my time as a single woman—whether another year or two or twenty—I want to pour out my life for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

He's the best man I know, after all.