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August 27, 2010

Consume Me, God

The following entry was taken with permission from Scream the Truth e-zine. It was written by the editor, Julie Martin.


I used to say I'd never date... until I actually fell for a guy. When that guy fell for me and asked me to be his girlfriend I went absolutely insane... and of course, I said yes. For the first few weeks he was all I ever talked about... I was pretty much obsessed with him. Eventually liking him grew into loving him, and eventually loving him grew into heartbreak. One day he called me and ripped my heart out. It took me a while to heal from that, after-all, I'd never had my heart broken like that before. I mean, he said he loved me... right? He said I was the most amazing girl he'd ever met before... right? Then he CALLED to break up with me and didn't even give me a real reason WHY?! At the time I didn't understand. I didn't understand for a long time, but recently God has been giving me hints as to WHY such a thing happened.

I used to pray for my relationship with this guy. I constantly prayed that if I wasn't following God as deeply as I should that he would put a halt to the relationship. What I didn't realize back then was that I'd become too wrapped around what was going on around me that I was forgetting to pray everyday; in a way, I was ignoring God. I think God was ultimately the one behind halting that relationship, and to be honest, I'm really glad what happened, happened! It was something that really NEEDED to happen.

This whole experience has given me a much deeper understanding of why we need to be totally and completely lost in God before we decide to date. Guys, I mean this, we need to totally and COMPLETELY caught up in God before we even consider dating. I'm not going to lie, I do still like guys, but even if someone were to ask me out today I'd say no... because I'm not to that point with God. I'm not totally caught up in Him. Yeah, I have a strong relationship with him, but there are definitely some areas that I need MAJOR improvement in. If I still get distracted by the things going on in the world around me then how could having a boyfriend actually benefit me?

I'm most definitely not trying to call anyone out. I promise. I just believe we need to stop, take a deep breath, and take time to whole-heartedly pray about possible relationships. We need to ask God, "will this really benefit me? Will this distract me? Do I need to just focus on You for now?" I'll be honest, I never had that talk with God. I mean, I prayed about it, but I never put my heart into it; my heart was already caught up in the guy, which should have been a major red flag to begin with!

So now, I'm going to put it plainly -- I'm not dating again until college. Yeah, I have guy friends, but that's as far as anything is going to get for now. It's a tough decision for me to make, but in the end I know I'll be happy I did it. It gets tough at times seeing the majority of my friends happy and dating. I mean, I can't help but wonder to myself "Why doesn't anyone like ME? Why can't I have that?", But God grabs me and says "Julie, you don't need that... not yet. Not until you're fully mine."

Now I challenge you to take a week or two of deep prayer over this subject. Put your heart in it and learn what God has in store for YOU relationship wise. After all, everyone is different.

Then He said to them all, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it."
- Luke 9:23-24

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