“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens”: Ecclesiastes 3:1
As a young Christian woman, your aspiration in life may typically be four-fold: get a good education, secure a good job, get married, raise a family.
All these require preparation: school, study, good career choices and opportunities, and good relationships. But you must also reckon with God’s purpose and timing.
In this piece I will limit myself to two of these aspirations: marriage and raising a family.
Many of you are at the age where you suddenly feel the pressure of your family and friends to get married, and those who are married suddenly feel the pressure to produce offspring.
You will hear it said often, that Christians believe in marriage and procreation (family). Your mother may not-so-subtly hint that she would like to see her son-in-law, or to hold her grandchild in her arms soon. Your aunties and uncles will ask you at any and every opportunity when they can hope to attend the big event. Even your younger siblings and cousins may start hinting what roles they would like in your wedding.
If you are married, you may be blindsided by seemingly innocuous questions like: “is there anything you are waiting for before you start a family”, or “Is everything alright with you, no medical problems?”.
That is a whole lot of pressure.
Unfortunately, many young ladies, to prove themselves, find themselves in ungodly relationships, unequally yoked partnerships, and an unreasoning, desperate search, chasing after fertility. Where there is perceived delay, desperation sets in and a desperate person has no use for God’s timing, especially where the horizon appears to be bleak.
The solution, people too often think, is therefore to help oneself in order to meet the “need” with no regard for God’s plan or timing. This has been the case since time immemorial, and you may be advised by others that it is now your turn to fall in line, or choose a different path.
Dear lady, marriage is a beautiful thing. It meets a need God Himself recognised and provided for: that two people from different backgrounds will leave their families to produce a whole new family unit. But as beautiful as it is, a wrong marriage is a life sentence of grief and sorrow.
I know that the pressure to get married or to immediately produce a child does not come from outside solely, for your own desires may dictate that it is time for such. After all, at this time in your life, many of your friends and colleagues are getting married and having children. Indeed, your social calendar may be full of engagement parties and weddings.
Dearest lady, while it is not wrong for you, in your desire to have a life partner, to pursue a relationship that may result in marriage, please do not throw yourself mindlessly into a search for a husband, and in that mindless endeavour, compromise your Christian moral values, or rush into marriage, simply because everyone tells you that it is time for you to get married. Many people have rushed into unsuitable marriages simply because they were concerned about the ticking of the biological clock. Such attitudes have led to the collapse of many ill-advised marriages, and many unhappy subsisting ones.
I hope that you do not for once think that I am talking platitudes. If you believe what scripture says: that there is nothing new under the sun, (Ecclesiastes) then you must understand that I was once your age, and I understand the pressure.
You are at a cross-roads but do not do anything out of desperation. Trust God to match you up with a husband who is truly your friend; a godly man with whom you can pray about the many issues life will throw at you.
Dear lady, in His timing, he will bless you with the child you seek. Do everything you need to do, including accessing every medical intervention necessary, but trust God to answer your prayer.
In His timing, He will not fail you.
