Dear Agatha,
I am in my late 40s. I have never been married and still waiting on God to give me the man of my dreams. I have always been a good Christian, one that kept all the doctrines and did nothing without consulting my pastors. I became born again when I was in secondary school. My parents attend Catholic Church. Though they tried to dissuade me from joining my church, they soon gave up on my ways and me. They did to have peace at home as I was as determined too to make life difficult for them.
There is nothing I do without the express permission of my pastors to the irritations of my parents who saw it as another form of idolatry. From as far as I can remember, no man came my way without me first seeking the approval of my pastor.
Strangely, none of the men was ever approved as being the right man for me. After a while, when all my friends were all almost married, my mother called me aside to plead with me to get married and stop pegging my decision on who is right or wrong on the recommendations of my pastors.
I ignored her because she has always been my major antagonist when it comes to religious matters. I had to leave home when the last of my sisters got married. Being the first daughter and child of the family, my mother told me she couldn’t live with me any longer under the same roof. And that she wanted her husband to herself since I have refused everyman who came my way.
At the time I left five years ago, the number of men asking for my hand in marriage had almost disappeared entirely. Many who saw me assumed I was married with children. The few that came my way were either out to mock me or looking for a woman to sleep with.
I became not just desperate but afraid that I might end up without a husband. As I write my youngest sister has two children already. My immediate sister’s two children are already in the university. The rest of my siblings are not only married but are parents. These days, I hate going home because they all look at me with scorn.
Agatha, since last year, not even the wayward ones have come my way to even look at the market I am selling. The worst thing now is that my menses have stopped flowing.
The most painful thing now is that all the pastors who once encouraged me are now urging me to lower my standards and marry any man before I completely lose out. At 49, what choices do I have? I went for medical examinations when I discovered my menses had stopped only to be told by the doctor after examination that I was entering menopause.
Help me Agatha, because I feel suicidal. I want children, husband like every other woman, but here I am, having given God everything I have without a man or child to call my own. I am looking older than my age because of all the frustrations.
Please help me. Why has God abandoned me to suffer this shame? I did everything He asked me to do.
Angela.
Dear Angela,
Suicide isn’t an option to any challenge in life. Remember you didn’t create yourself, hence wrong to take something that doesn’t belong to you. All you have to do now is accept the reality of your situation with a view of finding a way round it.
First you have to perish the thoughts that God has abandoned you. No! He is always there by your side. Just that you elevated your pastors to the position of your God. You may have observed all the doctrines but the fact remained that you didn’t direct your faith and attention to the right source. You disconnected from your source completely and relied on men like you to dictate what was and wasn’t.
In the first instance, you didn’t ask God about the pastors you were going to in the first place. You didn’t ask God for help in knowing which pastor was yours and has the vision from God concerning everything that has to do with you. You also didn’t bother to confirm from God Himself whether what they were telling you was from Him or not.
From experience, it is always wise to go to God in prayers yourself for confirmation of whatever one is told to ensure one is still on the right track God intended one to be. There is no way God would have wanted you to wait till now for you to have a man of your own and children. There is also no way He would deliberately expose His own to mockeries and scorns of people around. He isn’t an author of confusion. When these things happen, the problem is often with the choice we either make consciously or unconsciously.
Often time, we leave God behind in our worship and praise of Him and glorify the wrong values. While believing we are doing what He expects, we remove from His safe hands the authority of our lives and give it to others. Consequently, a lot of us are in the church without knowing we are not actually doing what God expects from us, but what others expect us to do in line with their own beliefs as well as understanding of what they think God wants.
Your features would soften once you begin to reposition your life in line with the reality of your current situation. To get it right, it is pertinent you remove all the destructive virus of bitterness from your system. If you don’t, it will obliterate your sense of sound reasoning. Whatever thing you think isn’t right with the past, allow it to remain in the past so you can discover who you really are as well as what God intends you to do from this point.
While you still wait on God for the desires of your heart, there is the urgent need for you to take a step of faith on your own. First begin from your own outlook. If you were a man, would you look at yourself twice? What are the lights in those eyes communicating to the world? Is desperation, sadness, disappointment, bitterness happiness or peace?
No man wants a bitter and resentful woman by his side. Therefore no matter what you are currently facing, learn to be happy. Those wrinkles are not from the age garage, but from the warehouse of bitterness. You must learn to radiate confidence in yourself as well as open acceptance of what your life is. So what if you are single at 49? So what if you don’t have a child of your own? Is that the end of the world? As long as there is life, there is always hope and endless God given opportunities. It is a matter of tuning into what He has to offer at that particular time. Being a God of all seasons and time, He is neither too early nor too late, but always on time. Your season now may be to adopt a child whose presence in your life would make you forget all the worries about being single, entering menopause or not having your own child.
The presence of this child will help you appreciate the untapped beauty and glory of God all around you. When a woman gets to this point in life, only the presence of a child can give her hope again. Go to any of the many motherless babies home and make enquires on how to go about it. As long as you treat the child as your own, invest love and care into his or her life, nobody would know you weren’t the biological mother of the child. The truth is that not everywoman was meant to carry a child in her womb just like not everywoman who is able to carry a child is in her womb is meant to be a mother. You can be a good mother without being able to have a child biologically.
Children have the magic to make moods and self-pity disappear, because they would always do or say something to make one laugh without intending to. Frankly, this is what you need the most now. Stress could have caused you to go into menopause and age drastically. There is nothing that says you still cannot get a man of your own, get pregnant if you are relaxed.
In addition, adopting a child and taking on the responsibility of caring for the survival of the child would stop your tilt towards suicide since you would be too busy to even remember to feel sorry for yourself.
The beauty of being 49 is that you don’t need the permission of your parents or the society to restructure your life the way it pleases God and you, as long as you have the financial ability to care for the child.
Stop depending on intermediaries to talk to your Father. Go to Him directly and buy back your happiness, dreams and glory as a woman.
Good luck.
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