Earlier last year 2011 of course, I was apart of an amazing Biblical discipleship program called DownLine Ministries. I believed that this was the season of my life that the Lord decided to show me Himself in ways that I never thought I would be able to handle. The program was a freeing time of my life, in that, I had an enormous amount of time to just enjoy the Lord, become more broken than I have ever been before, and embrace biblical community in ways that at times I really didn't want to. DownLine placed me in a discipleship group, with three amazing women of God, and we discussed many trials, tribulations, and discoveries about ourselves and how we can translate those areas into the more santicified image of Jesus Christ. I truly enjoyed our hangouts so much because number one: we were all women and number two: we all desired to draw closer to the Lord, BUT the one theme that I was the most timid about always seemed to creep back up when I surely did not ever want it to: MARRIAGE.... no one ever said that we had to agree on the topic of marriage. And guess what? I was the main one in the group and the only one in the group who was not the advocate for marriage and not because I had anything against marriage, but my groundwork for the definition of marriage had been so distorted over the course of my life, that I just truly believed that I did not want any part of it!!!
Growing up my father was absent from the home and my mother was never married, a single mother, raising 8 children, but she always seemed to cohabitate with other men along the years. I always desired to see my mother married....but that never happened. I even wondered how my father would lead the home, be the hero of things to fix around the house, and tell me how he would harm a guy who ever tried to come at me the wrong way, if he ever married my mom. So, since I never saw my parents married, I never ever actually dreamed of getting married myself.... As a little girl, I didn't plan my wedding since the age of 7, beg my mom for the Barbie and Ken and dream house, or cut out my dream wedding dress from tons of magazines. Marriage was a mere illusion that seemed like it would never become a reality. So whenever my discipleship group would get giggly over the topic of 'who would be getting married soon' or 'what kind of wedding she would have' or this is 'the man of God I desire to marry', I would cringe inside and find the black hole in my mind and live there.
Spring starts to approach of 2011 and the Lord has enthusiastically softened my heart from the progress that I have made in my discipleship group on the topic of marriage. My roommate also kept telling me how much she believed that I would one day get married too. I completed all of the exercises to narrow down a list of characteristics for a Godly man, I placed a stake in the mind that I would not let my past determine my future, and I opened up my heart to the reality that I could actually be apart of the beautiful mystery of marriage.
Then my long time best friend Martel Johnson, whom I met on campus May 4, 2007, came back into my life towards the end of my discipleship program. We had made a mutual decision to consecrate ourselves to the Lord in 2008 because when we met we adorned each other so much as friends that we decided to explore the possibilities of entering into a relationship. However, we were both brand new Christians in the faith and we were extremely spiritually immature that we allowed our flesh to overrule God's will and tragically we fell into sexual sin. Devastated by our actions, we had to immediately separate and we could not come back together until we knew our boundaries and convictions in the Lord. Well, as I consecrated myself, prayed for Martel and I, and drew so much more closer to the Lord than I ever knew, the Lord decided that uniting with Martel again finally in 2011 was stamped by His approval. Martel asked to pursue me at the end of May, he gave me time to pray over the decision, and EUREKA, we entered into a Godly relationship in May 2011 and now I am his newly engaged fiance=) Wow look at God!!! He reconciled two sinners saved by grace, by His mercy to challenge us to grasp how His will is always better to follow than our foolish and fleshly desires. So people this is my story and I am sticking to it. When we launch our wedding website, you can see how he proposed to me.
