Wandering through life…a journey before me. Where do I turn? With whom do I walk? Only You my Saviour, my God and my rock know. Lead me Oh Lord.

I’m introducing a new series entitled ‘Towards tomorrow’. The idea is to encourage us to commit our future into God’s hands by focussing on different facets of our lives. By so doing, we are pretty much investing into our future.

To be honest, I have tried to do things the best way I know how but I have found that only the Lord’s way is right. Towing the path He sets before us helps us evade unnecessary stress, anxiety, worry and trouble. As one wise man once told me, prayers are seeds. By praying today, you sow into your future and you will surely reap it.

I’ll be posting prayers I find on different topics as often as I can. Today, it is on our future partners. Please, feel free to pray it too. In fact, I’d encourage it.

Before we go into the prayers, I want to share with you all a personal story. People on twitter have already been given an overview of this tale. However, I wish to use this platform to give a more detailed version of my experience. This is not it happened to one ‘Ifeoma’ or one ‘Mary’. It happened to me, Temi. Read and learn.

I moved to Nigeria sometime in March this year. I felt it was time to start another phase of my life-post student phase. My mom, a very prayerful woman, prayed and prayed for me that day I stepped into Naij. One particular prayer point she kept mentioning was that God should lead me to my partner and soon too. I said amen…with my whole heart, lol.

Anyway, everyday I go out, there’s this feeling that ‘today might be the day’ if you know what I mean, hehehe.  On a more serious note, I always pray that God should open my spiritual eyes so I don’t miss out on His best for me. I always pray that as I keep myself engaged in his business and delight myself in Him, He will sort me out. If you have been following MCLA for a while now, you would know that as much as I value spirituality and a close relationship with God, I would really like for my future partner to be tall . Read my musing on this here.

So one fateful day, I met this young gentleman somewhere near my Local Government (Eti Osa 1). I gave him my number after debating it for a while. I thought, oh well, if he turns out to be a nuisance, I’ll just never pick. It’s not that serious. So, like I said, I gave him my number and we got talking. Lagos is a very busy place and I am an introvert so in the period of two months, we saw each other face to face for a total of 45 minutes or so. The rest was just chatting on the phone. He looked good-on paper. Speaks well though he had a bit of the dreaded hybrid accent. The hybrid accent, as I term it, is spoken by people who can’t make up their minds whether they want to do it the Yankee, Jand, Jamaican, Kenyan or Nigerian way. So they just serve up their speech in a mixture of all variations. We heard this a lot during the Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria pageant. Too funny. I digress.

This dude used to talk about his church and his pastor at his RCCG in Surulere. He even used to give me summaries of the message (well this happened once). Although, he looked good on paper, somewhere in my mind, I was not comfortable and the fact that we never really used to see made it easy for me to think straight. He had one thing going for him big time though- he was tall, my kind of tall.

To cut the very long story short, one fateful evening, we were speaking over the phone and I was on the internet so I decided to look him up on Facebook. I asked for his ID and I found some disturbing things. I kinda was expecting to see that he is in a relationship or something of that nature but that would have been mild in comparison to my findings which go thus:

1. He has a different name on Facebook from what he gave me. He quickly tried to allay my suspicion by telling me the name he gave me was his middle name. I was still confused. If anything, the name on your FB should be your middle name while you give me your real name not the other way round. It was therefore very worrying that he had given me a name he does not really go by.

2 and most shocking. It turned out bros is actually a practising muslim! Yes, you read me right. On his FB, he liked about 15-20 pages praising Islam and the deities thereof. Don’t get me wrong, a number of my nearest and dearest are muslim but I have decided to marry a Christian so had I known this dude was muslim, I would have known how to categorise our relationship from the get-go. His 6 3 frame would not have meant anything. Not only is he a muslim, he appeared to be a very strong one as even my muslim friends don’t have their FB profiles sprinkled with so much religious bits and pieces.

Now, what shall we say to these things?

I had heard about this type of behaviour: man pretending to be a Christian, lady marries him, a day after wedding, he brings out his mat to pray. But to be honest, I found it a bit ridiculous. It was almost unbelievable. This has proved to me that it is not as outrageous as I thought. There are so many men/women out there who would alter their personal profiles to suit yours when they meet you. It takes only God to unveil these things before it is too late. If you are not the type to commit it all into your Father’s hands and simply ask for His stamp of approval after falling in love, it might end up in a disaster.

You know if we had been talking and seeing more, I could have fallen and next thing, I would join the league of ladies who are ‘praying for the partners to change’. This revelation exposed my limitations to me and made me appreciate once again that only God can help and lead us aright. Hence, the need to ask for His grace and His mercy and His leading…

No, the moral of the story is not that it is wrong for me to want a tall person, lol. The moral is that I have no wisdom of my own and only God can reveal ‘the One’ to me. Therefore, I should cling to him…alone.

This is a prayer I believe sums looking unto God for the His choice of a spouse for us all up. Let us pray it as often as we can.

***

Lord God, your Word declares that if I delight myself in you—if I enjoy and seek your pleasure above mine—you’ll give me the desires of my heart (Psalm 37:4). Desiring a husband is neither evil nor selfish because marriage is honorable (Hebrews 13:4).

At the beginning of creation, you proclaimed, “It is not good that man should be alone” and then you created Eve to be a suitable partner for Adam (Genesis 2:18). In the name of Jesus, I ask that you would protect the husband—a suitable partner—you have chosen for me.

Because the covenant of marriage is sacred (Mark 10:9), I ask for a man of God. Please give me a husband whose love for me is only outmatched by his love for you; a man who will cherish me and build me up (Proverbs 31:28); a man who will honor me (I Peter 3:7) and our marriage vows; a man who will be a good father and provider; a man whom I will be attracted to physically, emotionally, and spiritually; a man who will love me as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25).

Keep me from attaching myself to another man out of desperation. I will not settle for a relationship that’s second best, convenient, or one that feeds my insecurities. Guard my purity and give me the patience to wait. And when I meet him, confirm to me that he is the one.

Release from me the baggage of past relationships, and prepare me for the man You have chosen to be my husband. Free me from any hindrances to a healthy and godly marriage: insecurities, habitual sins, selfishness, and emotional hurts.

Dispel my unrealistic expectations that set me up for disappointment. I place my trust in you rather than my partner.

In this period of waiting, I will look to you alone to be my companion and best friend. You are the one who redeems my life from the pit, who crowns me with love and compassion, who satisfies my desires with good things (Psalm 103:4-5).

I will not be anxious, but as I present my requests to you, flood me with the peace that surpasses all understanding so my heart and my mind are guarded in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6,7). In this request, I commit myself to trust you and do good, to dwell in the land and feed on your faithfulness. I commit my way to you and trust that you will bring it to pass (Psalm 37:35). Amen.

NB: I’m not one to use prayer books, that was until I found this one two days ago: Prayers to move your mountains by Michael Klassen and Thomas Freling. The prayers there are basically like reading your Bible-they are all taken out of God’s Word. I recommend it!

*I’m thanking God for healing in advance*

On a note so cheery note, may the soul of Christie Essien Igbokwe rest in peace. She passed away this morning after a brief illness.

Have a nice weekend people!

Temiville.xoxo