I have lived enough life now to know that some lessons only come with time.
Forty-two years.
Married twenty-four.
A mother for twenty-three.
I have lived in three different states.
Sat in the pew of three different churches in my adult life.
Loved people in various seasons and watched some of those seasons bloom while others quietly withered.
I have known health struggles, deep disappointments, answered prayers, long defeats, and beautiful victories.
And somewhere along the way, I began to realize something.
If I could sit down across from the younger versions of myself, there is so much I would say.
Not because I think I have arrived. I haven’t.
Not because I imagine I have all the answers now. I don’t.
But because life has a way of teaching us things the hard way.
Sometimes we only understand a truth once it has bruised us, humbled us, and then healed us.
Sometimes the wisdom comes after the tears.
Sometimes the clearest lessons are the ones we fought the longest.
That is what this series is for.
“Letters to My Younger Self” is an attempt to walk back down memory lane and sit beside the girl I once was in different seasons of life.
To speak honestly about the mistakes I made.
The things I misunderstood.
The places I hurt.
The idols I held.
The prayers I thought God had ignored.
The mercies I only recognized years later.
And maybe, by writing to her, I can also speak to some younger woman walking a similar road right now.
Maybe she is fourteen and unsure.
Maybe she is twenty-two and disillusioned.
Maybe she is:
-newly married
-newly heartbroken
-newly afraid
-newly full of hope
Wherever she is, perhaps these letters will be a lantern.
This first letter is to sixteen-year-old me.
It is about the importance of unanswered prayers.
Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Me,
I can still see you so clearly.
You are bright-eyed and full of life.
Your laugh comes easily.
Your heart feels everything deeply.
You still have those unruly blonde curls that never quite do what you want them to do, and those blue eyes that always seem to be searching for something just beyond the horizon.
There is a song living in your chest most of the time.
Music is one of the great loves of your young life—as it will remain for years to come.
You sing in high school competitive choir, and you sing at church, and sometimes you sing because it feels like the only way your heart knows how to breathe.
You are happy, mostly.
Bubbly.
Zealous.
The kind of girl who genuinely wants her life to mean something.
At fifteen, you poured your heart out at an altar and gave your life wholly to the Lord.
You had trusted Him for salvation at eleven, but fifteen was different.
That was the year you knew you didn’t just want heaven one day.
You wanted Jesus now.
You had given Him your soul at 11, at 15 you gave Him your life.
You wanted to live for Him, boldly and sincerely.
You find yourself in a large public high school where most of the kids call you “Holiness.”
They mean it partly as affection and partly as teasing, but you wear it with a quiet kind of dignity.
You are trying.
Really trying.
You want your life to reflect Christ.
You wear that gold ring on your finger, a promise between you and God that you will keep yourself physically pure for your future husband and your own future self.
You do not know exactly what that future looks like, but you know you want to honor the Lord in it.
And right now, at sixteen, your heart is breaking.
You are head over heels in love with a boy a year older than you.
He is a very good friend.
He is kind.
Familiar.
Safe in the way that young girls often mistake for certainty.
And in your little mountain-girl mind, he is the only good Christian boy around.
The only one really serious about God.
The only one you can even imagine walking through life with.
But he does not love you the way you love him.
That is becoming painfully clear.
Your paths overlap, your hopes rise, and then they fall again as he begins talking to another girl.
You are devastated.
You feel embarrassed by the depth of your own feelings.
You feel rejected.
You feel as though God has overlooked the deepest prayer in your young heart.
And because you are sixteen, it feels final.
It feels like the whole future just collapsed.
So let me tell you something I wish I could whisper to you while you are wiping tears in private and trying to act like you are fine in public.
Some of God’s greatest gifts come wrapped in unanswered prayers.
—Or better yet in prayers answered “no.”
You do not see that yet.
All you can feel is the sting of not being chosen.
But one day you will look back and thank God with all your heart that He did not give you what you were begging for.
You do not want a man who must be convinced to love you.
You do not want a relationship built on your chasing, pleading, wondering, and waiting for him to notice your worth.
You do not want to spend your life asking God to bend someone’s heart toward you who was never meant to hold your heart in the first place.
The right one will not have to be begged.
He will not need to be chased.
You will not have to become someone else to hold his attention.
You will not have to downplay your convictions, smooth out your edges, or change your very self to be loved by the right man.
And here is the sweetest part…
Only one year from where you are standing right now, you are going to meet the one meant for your heart.
You do not know that yet.
You think your story is ending when it is really only turning.
You think this unanswered prayer is rejection when it is actually protection.
You think the closed door means God is withholding when He is really preserving you for something better than you have the maturity or perspective to imagine.
Fast forward a little, dear girl.
The right one shows up, and he loves you exactly as you are.
He does not need to be talked into it.
He does not have to be persuaded.
You will not have to perform.
You will not have to anxiously measure yourself against another girl.
He will see you, and he will love you, and his love will feel steady in a way this present ache never could.
And more than that, he will fit the life God has for you.
Because time will tell a story you cannot yet read.
The one you are crying over now would not have walked the path your future holds.
He would not have chosen the life you now cherish.
The life of ministry flexibility.
The life of a quiver full of children.
The life of sacrifice and simplicity and faith that has marked your home.
He would have leaned another direction entirely, toward earthly treasures and a life built differently.
And if God had answered your prayer the way you wanted Him to, you would not have the beautiful life you now live.
So hold on.
Hold on, girl with the curls and the ring and the songs in your throat.
Hold on, girl with too little confidence where your looks are concerned and too much tenderness where your heart is concerned.
Hold on, because the Lord is doing more than you can see.
These are the lessons you can apply in so many places in your future life:
God’s delay is not denial.
God’s denial is not cruelty.
God’s seemingly unanswered prayer is not His absence.
God’s “no” is actually a form of mercy.
Scripture says, “No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”
That means if He withholds it, it was not good for you, no matter how badly you wanted it.
And one day you will know that in your bones.
You do not need to spend your years trying to become desirable enough for the wrong man to finally want you.
Spend them becoming the right kind of woman.
Root yourself in Christ.
Grow. Serve. Sing. Learn. Be holy.
Be soft in heart and strong in conviction.
Trust that the God who writes love stories sees far beyond this moment.
The right love will come in God’s time.
And when it does, it will not feel like striving.
It will feel like peace.
So let this heartbreak teach you early what many women do not learn until much later.
Unanswered prayers are not always signs that heaven has gone silent.
Sometimes they are proof that heaven has been paying very close attention.
With tenderness and hindsight,
Your older self
Biblical Womanhood
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