Dear Future Hubby...

Hello!

I've been thinking a lot lately about my future husband. And by lately, I mean like for the past ten years he has been on my mind. Truthfully, I should say that he has been on my mind since I was a little girl. See, I've always been infatuated with the idea of marriage and finding a life-long companion and I think I have my mom and grandma to thank for this. They both have been praying for my future husband since literally the day I was born and growing up, they made this very well known. I remember being as young as ten years old and sitting with my grandma in her kitchen when she told me that she was praying for my future hubby. I can tell you with full confidence that ten year old Sydney thought this was the strangest thing in the world. I took one quick look at the boys in my fifth grade class and told my grandma that she could wait a few years before praying for my husband again. However, once I reached high school, I began to feel comfort in knowing that the Lord had someone special in store for me. And that he had been prayed over and spoken for in my family since the day I was born. 

So, like I said before, I have always been obsessed with the fairytale-esk love story. Specifically, I have been dreaming of my wedding day since...forever. In sixth grade, I was really big into watching Say Yes to the Dress. This obsession inspired me to start collecting all of my spare change and put it in mason jars. These mason jars were then known as my "wedding dress funds" and to this day I still add all of my spare change to these jars. I can't make this up, people...I was ready to get married at a whopping eleven years old. And this excitement has hardly slowed down since then. 

In high school (I'm sure this doesn't come as a shock to any of you) I was a classic teenage girl in every sense of the term. I loved any and every bit of attention a guy was willing to give me and all it took for me to have a crush on someone was for them to show the slightest bit of interest in me. My crushes in high school never led to a relationship which, looking back, was the Lord guarding my heart for sure. However, once college hit, one of these crushes led to my first real relationship. I had a crush on a guy I met at bible study who ended up having a crush on me. We ate some food together and drank some coffee (over separate occasions) and ended up dating for a few months. We unfortunately went our separate ways but, thanks to this sweet man, I learned something about myself that would take two years of wrestling with the Lord to fully understand.

See, when my first boyfriend and I broke up, I would tell myself (and sometimes the people around me) that I was terrible at being in relationships. I would say that I was great at friendships but once things got romantic, I got weird. Which I think is still partially true but not to the extent it used to be. Two years ago, I was unaware of how to truly love and care for myself, let alone other people. I hardly knew what my love languages were and how I could see the outer-workings of them in my life. Now obviously, the love language test is not the deciding factor in determining if someone is ready for a relationship. But this is what I chose to demonstrate how I knew nothing about myself. Truly. I knew my name, my age, that I loved Jesus with everything I was, and I wanted to be a middle school teacher. That's all. Everything else was a sort of "play by ear" scenario--especially romantic relationships. 

So when my first relationship ended, I think I knew deep in my heart that the Lord was ready to do some heavy-duty work in my life but I was weirdly content with it. I was excited. I remember praying so hard over what I felt like the Lord was going to do and I was overcome with a peace. A peace in my singleness that transcended literally anything I had ever felt before. A peace that brought me to the point where I wasn't even interested in a relationship because I was so content. It was totally unlike me...which is a good thing. That was just the beginning of the perspective-shifting work the Lord was doing.

  

So here I can bring it back full-circle. I've been thinking a lot about my future husband lately. I've been praying for him...hard. Well, I've been praying for him like my whole life and I didn't stop praying for him even in the two years where a relationship didn't appeal to me at all. But looking back, I was so content in my singleness because that was the answer to the prayers for my future husband. I would pray "am I ready for a relationship?" and if not, "when will I be ready?" was the next question. And the answer was peace. And I am overwhelmingly grateful for that answer. But now there has been a change in my heart-space, I guess you could call it. I can feel the Lord telling me that He is finally ready to show His glory to me through a relationship. So hearing the Lord say this, I've amor-ed up and become a hardcore prayer warrior for my hubby. I've also become a prayer warrior for myself...because I learned through those two years that the intentionality and spouse-like characteristics were a necessary reciprocation. I couldn't hold my future husband to a high standard without holding myself to that standard as well. So I pray for him. And I pray for me. I pray that when our paths cross, he has the attributes of a Godly man and that I have the attributes of a Godly woman. I pray that whenever I meet him, he is the man my family has prayed for my whole life and that I am the woman he and his family have been praying for. 

I don't think I've met this man yet. In fact I'm 90% sure I haven't met him yet. And even though the Lord has finally prepared my heart for a relationship, it could be another two years before I actually meet my future hubby. But in the meantime, I am patient in the Lord's work. I am patient in his work in my life, in my hubby's life, and in our life together (whether our lives overlap right now or not). 

So if you're reading this, future husband. I am so excited for what the Lord is going to do with us and through us. I am excited to navigate this beautiful love story that our creator has been writing for us for so long. I've been praying for you--along with my family--for as long as I can remember and we definitely won't stop now. I'm patiently waiting upon the Lord for you...like Christ waits for the bride. I truly can't wait. 

All my love,

Syd