Submit my heart to God by Camy Tang

I’ve been discipling a young woman at church who used to be in my youth group, so I’ve seen her grow up, to an extent. She’s very busy with graduate school right now, but there’s a young man she’s met with whom she’s gotten closer.

It’s always hard for me to give advice or encouragement to young women when it comes to their love lives. Everyone’s experience with romantic relationships is different depending on each person’s personality, family background, and life experience.

The guy she’s interested in seems nice. He’s a bit immature in some areas, and yet in other areas, he’s emotionally stable and sensitive to others’ feelings. No one is perfect, but I’ve come to see that there are spouses who are perfect for your own temperament and personality. Captain Caffeine matches me in ways I didn’t even realize I needed compatibility. He is kind, we laugh a lot together, and he is always striving to do his best for the Lord.

One thing that came out in my conversation with this girl is that God was really good to me. When I was younger, I was so desperately lonely that I could have fallen in love with any loser who came my way and gave me attention. But God introduced me to Captain Caffeine, who has a really good heart and who treats me well.

I don’t know if this is why God blessed me so much, but one thing happened just before I met my future spouse. I had reached an emotional low point in my life. My loneliness had become incredibly painful to me and it seemed no one understood why it bothered me so much. While I understood that God loved me more than any human being would, I still wanted that kind of human connection and wanted to feel that I mattered to someone else.

The one area I really struggle with is submission to God and His will, especially when I don’t understand it. This period of loneliness was no exception. God kept encouraging me to simply submit to Him and His will for me. Even though I didn’t understand, even if His will meant my doing something I didn’t want to do—namely, never falling in love, never getting married.

Was I willing to trust God to that extent, to trust in His plans for me and His knowledge of what would make me happy, to trust in the path that would enable me to accomplish what I was made to do?

It was a long and painful struggle, but I made the decision, Yes. I was willing to submit to God and trust Him, even if that meant never finding that special someone. I gave up on my own ideas of what would make me happy and chose to trust in God’s plans, even though I didn’t understand what they could possibly be.

A few months later, I met Captain Caffeine, and the rest is history.

I really do think that for me, that moment of decision to trust in God is what enabled my heart to be ready when Captain Caffeine walked into it. If I’d met him a few months earlier, maybe our relationship would never have gone anywhere because I wasn’t spiritually and emotionally ready for it.

Anyway, I explained all this to the girl I was disciplining, and I don’t know if that applied to her or not, but I hope it encouraged her that God really does know what is best for our lives, if we’re willing to trust Him.

I encourage you to trust in Him, too. You may not be having loneliness issues like I did, but maybe you’re at a crossroads and you feel God telling you to simply submit and trust. I encourage you to wrestle with it and make the decision to trust Him. One thing I’ve come to see in my own life is that God really does know what’s best for us, in ways we couldn’t possibly understand.