Peanut Gallery: Please read the full story of this courageous woman – both the happy ending and the false start that preceded it.

Both are reblogged below for your convenience.
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Today IS My Wedding Day! (June 3, 2013) – reblogged from The Gospel Coalition

God’s timing could not be more perfect. His grace saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life. Although I was living with the man I thought I would marry and our wedding was basically planned, I began to see that God promised much more for a relationship than I was setting myself up for in marrying a non-believer. At the point I called off our wedding, I had no idea if I would ever actually get married, but I was truly content being loved by the Lord.

Then, on the very day that I was supposed to marry someone else, the next chapter of my life began to unfold. While I was out of town visiting my best friend and trying to take my mind off things, I ran into a guy I had met at a church function a couple of months earlier. Through our initial communication, I was able to get a few important questions answered: he had a heart for God, he was around my age, and he was single.

The courting took off from there, and as our connection began to deepen through many lengthy conversations, I realized that he truly understood the Lord’s call to be a spiritual leader. Months went by as we continued to visit, meet one another’s families, and get to know each other on a deeper level. From our obsession with neatness to our feisty personalities (two areas where we constantly seek God’s grace), we were as compatible as any two people could be. Eventually he told me he loved me, and we knew we had to figure out a way to interweave our lives.

Then came a major roadblock. Although we had agreed to be celibate before marriage, my colored past of sexual sin had to be confronted. When he finally got up the courage to ask about it, I laid it all out there. Before I had a relationship with Jesus, I believed one of the world’s unfortunate lies: that I had to have sex with a guy if I was ever going to find someone to marry me. What I hadn’t planned for was the soul-tearing damage of layered sexual experiences that yielded a slew of disappointments. Over time, I became a severely damaged and broken soul.

Reading Sex and the Soul of a Woman by Paula Rinehart gave me hope to believe that God would follow through on his promises. “The freedom that comes from [the awareness of Jesus’ love] makes real love at the right time with the right man such a beautiful possibility,” she writes. “When the soil of your heart is primed to receive love, the courting dance is a clean and beautiful thing.”

And for me, it truly was. Through the healing redemption of the cross, I was set free and forgiven for my transgressions. Now this man who was trying to love me had to do the same. And since he had made the personal commitment to wait until marriage, it was an even tougher pill to swallow. But it was a perfect stage for God to reveal his grace. And he did.

Greater Meaning

When I think back to how our relationship began, I can see how the Lord was guarding my heart. His hand was at work—not only in the miraculous way he healed my heart, but also in how he brought true love into my life. Through this experience, I truly realized the depth of his love and began to trust in his ultimate plan for my life rather than my own. And through this suffering I was able to see things in new and different ways, learning to rely on him all the more.

During the time I was single, I got more involved in my church by joining the women’s ministry team, volunteering at Sunday service, and hosting a book club at my house, which afforded many opportunities to share my story. The more I shared, the more opportunities there were to help others struggling emotionally and relationally. In short, my story opened the door to meaningful conversations with people who had lost hope: single women who couldn’t seem to find love, people who were married to unbelievers, and those who were struggling to make their relationships work. At that point, it became clear that my suffering had much greater meaning. Through these interactions, others saw the possibility of another road—that healing and restoration were available to them through the grace of God and obedience to Christ.

Clothed with Joy

Today, by the grace of God, we join together as man and wife. Although I couldn’t see it at the time, and I wasn’t sure if I ever would, I never doubted that the Lord had a greater purpose and was at work through it all. We still have no idea what’s coming next (literally, we’re not even sure where we’re going to live), but we trust that God has a plan for us. And as we pick up our crosses and follow him, it will surely be revealed.

You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever!
Psalm 30:11-12

M. Connor can be reached via email at mconnor0526@gmail.com. Her previous article, Today Was Supposed to Be My Wedding Day, was published on May 26, 2012.
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Today Was Supposed to Be My Wedding Day

May 26, 2012. It was supposed to be a momentous occasion—the day I would walk down the aisle in my mother’s lace wedding gown, peonies in hand, best friend at my side, family and friends looking on with joy. It was supposed to be the day I started a new chapter, the day my dreams would be fulfilled. Little did I know, God had other plans.

We met in the winter of 2010—me and God, that is. He always had his eye on me, but I barely even knew who he was. Once I began spending time with him, our relationship blossomed into something special. He cared for me and loved me like no other. He filled a huge void in my heart.

That’s how I came to know God. It’s also how I came to know the man I thought I would marry.

The relationship started out like many others, following cultural expectations rather than God’s design. Dating, sex, spending the night, meeting the parents, integrating the pets (him, a dog; me, two cats). After 10 months, on a snowy Sunday evening in front of the place we first met, he asked me to marry him. It was romantic indeed. Even strangers passing by yelled congratulations from their car windows.

I was excited to be engaged—to finally be moving toward marriage—but something never felt quite right. I sensed a resistance in my heart, like I wasn’t totally sure about something. But he was a good guy—the right age, handsome, fun, easy-going, from a decent family. What more could a girl want?

So I moved forward. Even though I had just bought my own home, I gave it up and moved in with him on a spring day in early March. Everyone has to make sacrifices for love, I reasoned. That’s where we’re going to end up anyway. Why not start now? At first, it was exciting and felt like the right thing to do. But a different story soon emerged.

After just a few months of living together, God shook things up. I accepted an awesome job opportunity in another state, so we left behind the house we just finished renovating and drove across the country (pets in tow) to set up our life far from home, family, friends, and church.

Shortly after we settled, a friend from work recommended we try out a small new Presbyterian church in the area. I was a tad leery, as I had recently been baptized in a non-denominational church, but I agreed to check it out. I immediately loved it and felt like this could be my church home. On my second visit, I filled out a visitor card, which asked a few questions about how I wanted to get involved. Did I want to join a life group? Be part of a ministry team? Have coffee with the pastor? Coffee sounded good. I checked the box.

Later that week, the pastor emailed me, asking when I wanted to get together. What a great opportunity to get to know him and learn more about the church, I thought. Maybe he would even be willing to officiate our wedding in a few months. High hopes turned to frustration when I mentioned the possibility to my fiancé. “Coffee? With a pastor?” he asked. “Heck, no. That’s just too weird.”

After weeks of my coercing, praying, hoping, and begging, he finally obliged. But we continued to fight about it—all the way to the front door of the pastor’s house. Regardless, I enjoyed myself and looked forward to hanging out with the pastor and his wife again soon. I could see them being our friends—a couple who would help guide our marriage and bring us closer to God.

Before we could marry, the church asked us to complete a series of counseling sessions, so we set up time to meet with our new pastor. He recommended we start reading the book When Sinners Say I Do by Dave Harvey. I ordered it online, along with Tim and Kathy Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage. And in my determination to be the very best Christian wife I could be, I also ordered a copy of Carolyn Mahaney’s Feminine Appeal. I thought these books would help us get ready for one of the biggest steps we would ever take.

Help they did, but in a way I didn’t expect. As I started reading Harvey’s book, the first chapter stopped me dead in my tracks. He explained that faith is the most important part of a marriage. Faith? Really? Even though I was now a Christian, I had never considered this point before. Harvey explains that faith is like the first button on a shirt—if you get that wrong, nothing else will line up right.

I began considering how this idea played out in the episode at the pastor’s house, not to mention the weekly task of begging my fiancé to go to church, trying to convince him to join a Bible study, and asking him to remember to pray before dinner. Is it supposed to be this difficult?

No, it’s not, I learned from Harvey, Keller, and my pastor. I began to realize that just as my thinking had been flawed about sex as a prerequisite for love, I also had the wrong idea about the most important traits in a marriage. As I kept reading and talking to other Christians, no one said it was a good idea for me to marry someone with a different worldview. In other words, I had come to love Jesus and make my decisions based on him; my fiancé had not. That discrepancy became poison in our relationship—barely noticeable at first but eventually corrupting nearly every aspect of our lives. As I grew closer to God, I grew further from wanting to marry someone who did not have a relationship with him.

Keller’s teaching on Ephesians 5 helped clarify what I was discovering. Ephesians 5:25-27 says:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

Thankfully, the Holy Spirit spoke to me on a weekday in early January when my friend opened the Bible to this passage and showed me the truth. I came to understand that God intends for marriage to mimic Jesus’ selfless love for his people. I was awestruck. My husband is supposed to lead me closer to God? I immediately broke down crying. I kept digging, trying to understand how I got so far off base. “He’s a good man,” I argued. “Yes, but is he a Christian? Does he know Jesus?” people asked me in response. “But if I leave him, won’t I be going against what God says, by not loving the unbeliever?” Surprisingly, no. I was not yet married. I had not made a covenant with him before God. I was not bound to him. As much as it would hurt to say goodbye, I knew this was not the relationship God intended for me. He promises much more, and I wasn’t going to find it in a marriage with an unbeliever.

As this devastating realization sunk in, we began the process of disentangling our lives. And within a few weeks, my ex-fiancé headed back to his home with his belongings, including the dog I had come to love and all of my hopes and dreams for a lifetime of happiness together. We both knew he had to find God on his own terms, in his own way.

Who could have guessed that simply checking a box on a church form would eventually end in heartbreak, financial loss, and unwanted singleness? Difficult and sad as it was, God was there every step of the way. He was there in the simple way it ended, despite our lives being intertwined in nearly every way. He was there in the support and love our family and friends provided. He was there to give me a sense of peace that transcended all understanding. Left to myself, previous breakups had knocked me down to my lowest points in life. But this time, with more riding on the relationship than ever before, I was truly okay. I suppose obedience to God made the difference. As much as it hurts, God is always there to pick up the pieces.

Marriage and family are still the two things I want most in life, but I know that they’re in God’s control—not mine. Before I knew God, I tried to control my relational life by making poor decisions and sacrifices that brought little reward. Now, I find fulfillment in God. He is my rock, the one who deserves my love and attention. While it is a daily struggle to trust him with the things I care about so deeply, he has proven that he’s looking out for me. I leave my future in his hands.

Editors’ note: Read the follow-up article from M. Connor, “Today IS My Wedding Day!”