When Seasons Change

I don't always do well with change. Growing up, I liked when things stayed the same. I wasn't excited by the new but comforted by the familiar. As an adult, I have become more balanced, but I can still struggle with what change brings. I like knowing what's expected of me, I like feeling capable in what I'm doing, I need solid patterns to thrive even if they need to be broken at times, and transitions leave a lot uncertain and a lot to rediscover.

I recently got married, and it has truly been the kindness of God in my life. He has testified to Himself so beautifully. And though I feared just how much in my life was changing at once, He made the transition more natural than I ever could have imagined.

He has worked against my normal pitfalls. He has helped me to give myself grace when the questions pop up of my devotional time, my work, my whatever. Because some of what I was doing in my singleness no longer works for my married life. And some will work again, but in this season of transition, it makes sense that some things don't fit as I'm adjusting to so much. 

The anxiety that can so easily plague me has been met by God's persistent voice, speaking away guilt and encouraging me to trust in Him for my good and healthy patterns as their recontextualized in a new season.  

But then there are different changes that I wasn't expecting. Changes to my ministry. 

Before I got married, I was single. I was single single. I'd been on a couple dates in 28 years, had no more than a month of romantic potential, and had years apart between each one.

My singleness was a trial and a place of great blessing. Because in the trial God reaped fruit as He always is faithful to do. 

In my early to mid-twenties God taught me to believe Him for my marriage. To be able to release my desire to His hands with confidence that He would fulfill it because He gave it to me, and my desire was safer in His hands. From that lesson God grew me to treasure my singleness. To see at as a blessing for a season that would one day end. And in the last few years I really fell in love with  my singleness, seeing it as the blessing it was, while still holding that in tandem with the hardship of waiting for the marriage I longed for.

During those years I learned that longing for marriage and feeling the pangs of waiting for it were not in opposition to deeply valuing my singleness, but they were actually all working together towards a holistic vision for marriage, not as fulfillment but as blessing. My marriage is a blessing, my singleness was a blessing in preparation for receiving that blessing, but my singleness was also a blessing in itself. It was God's best for me in that season, and I got to live out of that truth for years.

And now God's best for me is marriage, and that's beautiful too. I had no qualms about leaving behind my singleness, though I treasured it, for this new treasure God was giving me.

But though I love my marriage, recently I've felt a cost.

In spring of 2024 I had this overwhelming sense of anticipation that God was bringing my marriage to me--that my singleness would end "soon," whatever that meant--and in that season singleness became my ministry like it never had before. 

I fell in love with the waiting season and all its trials because I saw the fruit it brought my soul. I wanted others to know that too whether they were waiting for a spouse, a house, or anything else. Because waiting is God's good for our hearts. It develops maturity and vision and trust in God. It had developed character in me, it had clarified my idea of marriage, it had awakened me to more of who God was, and I wanted everyone to know the joy, and not just the very present hardship of it. I wanted all my single friends, whose hearts ached like mine, to see the beauty God was doing in our singleness and to believe Him for our marriages. 

It was my delight to share, to get to speak life into people's waiting seasons, getting to awaken people to the beauty of singleness. 

And then I got married, and I delighted in God's goodness through a new season, one which I am still uncovering. 

I didn't think about what I had left behind until a friend texted me about the tension of walking in singleness when all of her friends were either married or didn't have the same vision for singleness/dating that she did. I wanted to be able to speak into that--I had the same vision!--but then it hit me, I'm that married friend. I can't walk with her in singleness the same way.

I can't speak into singleness in the same way I could when I was single. Not that I don't still have valuable things to say, but I now speak from the outside. I speak as someone who has received God's gift of marriage, and though that can still be a good testimony to the single heart, though that can add credence to the trust I invited people to place in God, that voice is now limited. Because there are times we need the people who know what it's like. The people who are in it with us. 

And then I thought about all my sweet out of touch married friends. Those who wanted so desperately to help me in my singleness, but who didn't have any realistic idea what it was like to try to meet someone and who had forgotten the pain of not knowing if their longing and desire would ever be met. They gave me a lot of good advice, but they also missed the mark a lot; they tried to talk to me as a peer, but the reality was that we weren't in the same place. That the conversation looks different when one is single and one is married. 

This testimony I had been so blessed to share was one that would be reframed. The testimony hadn't changed (except in the fulfillment of God's blessing), but I gave it from a different place.

When I first realized that, it felt like a loss. Like this thing I had treasured so much was something I no longer had access to. In that moment I adored my marriage, and yet I also began to feel a cost of it. Something I no longer had that my singleness had afforded me. 

God held me in that place of processing, but He didn't leave met there. Instead, He showed me that the cost was no cost at all. That He had called me to a new season, and my present ministry was not my past ministry. And that is His good for me.

My singleness ministry mattered, and it was sweet to speak from within, but now my ministry is changing. Now I get to learn more about marriage, something my heart delights in, not only for myself in my marriage but for the beauty of God's design and the picture of His love. In my singleness I grew to greater depths of understanding of singleness, and now I get to keep growing in something new. In my singleness I pursued God's vision for marriage, but now I get to uncover that vision from within, and I am only a novice in my knowledge. 

As that new knowledge develops, maybe God will use it to speak into marriages in a way I couldn't before. Maybe God will use it to give me a new way of speaking into singleness too. I don't know what He has planned, but I know it is good. And like my singleness was a blessing through the learning, I know my marriage will be too. And as He has given it to me, I know He will use it. 

I haven't lost my ministry, but He's shifted it, and I can't wait to see where He leads in this new season of waiting on Him.