When God Feels Silent About Your Desire for Marriage

If you have a strong desire to be married, yet God feels silent, here's how I would encourage you: you are allowed to pursue a godly marriage. You are allowed to make that goal a priority in your life, as you would prioritize any other goal. You're allowed to do what you can to meet guys, make yourself attractive, and prepare to be a good wife. If God isn't leading you to stay still, I believe you have the freedom to look for marriage.

The Bible says that "Marriage is honorable in all." Heb. 13:4

It calls finding a wife a good thing, and therefore we can deduce that being found and becoming someone's wife is also a good thing.

The Bible seems to assume that most people will get married and have families, as it dedicates many passages to instructing husbands and wives.

It's God's created order from the beginning that we should leave our father and mother, cleave to our spouse, and have children. While God has redeemed singleness and made it a good gift with a beautiful purpose, still most people desire that human companionship that is found in biblical marriage, and there's nothing wrong with that.

As a single woman longing for marriage, yet content in the Lord and surrendered to His will, I realized that I had the freedom to pursue marriage as if it were any other goal that I wanted to achieve in life. For example, I wanted to be a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. The money it would cost felt daunting, the time commitment to take the schooling felt scary, and I wanted some kind of sign or confirmation from God that this was the right choice for me to make. No such sign came. But I also didn't receive any closed doors. So eventually I realized that I had the money, I had the time (those years were going to pass anyway, whether I was earning this certification or not), there was nothing biblically wrong with pursuing it, and actually, I felt it was going to improve my ability to serve the Lord. So, even without any writing on the wall or confirmational verse or prophetic word, I paid the money and signed the contract and became an NTP.

One day it dawned on me that pursuing marriage would work the same way. It was my ultimate goal in life, it was a good desire, there was nothing biblical against pursuing it, and I didn't have any direction from the Lord that seemed to say I shouldn't. So I made a dating plan.

What is a dating plan? Well, each year I would take a personal retreat with Jesus where I would get away, rest, pray and plan for the coming year. I would write down some goals for each important area of my life: family relationships, work, ministry, health, etc. But one year I added a category: dating. If I could be intentional with every other area of my life, why wouldn't I be intentional with the one I most wanted to see change in?

The details of this dating plan are too much to get into here, but I've included an exact copy of mine in a free download that will teach you how to craft your own.

Whether you've never been on a first date before or you have a new first date every week, creating a dating plan will help you gain clarity about how you want to show up in this area of your life and how to do it intentionally, effectively, and for the glory of God.

You are allowed to seek the gift of marriage. I hope this Dating Plan will help bring you clarity about how to do that!