Why I Surrendered My Marriage to God

[Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Angela Tyler. I’m so happy Angela reached out to me to share to her story on Devotional Diva! Marriage isn’t always perfect, but God always is. Thank you for sharing with us, Angela!]

Like many other girls growing up, I often imagined what my life would be like as an adult. I pictured myself married with two children, football practices and family game night. Things were planned out, and I knew exactly the kind of husband I wanted. I was a go getter with a can do attitude about my future. I had the right stuff to make sure everything worked out accordingly. Oh, how naïve I was.

Things aren’t always going to go as you planned.

My husband and I started as very good friends when we first moved in together. We never fought and we had a lot of fun. I would often hear compliments from friends and family that he was such a nice guy, and we were great together. And I couldn’t have agreed more – I adored my husband, and I knew he adored me.

The birth of our daughter was a time of delight. Her arrival was the spark for my salvation and at that point I began to see my life in an entirely new way. We were elated as we took her home and talked about how our lives were going to be different. Respectable. Happy.

A hard lesson.

Our daughter was our salvation, and our sudden awakening that real life had begun. We were responsible for another sweet, tiny human being. And the heaviness of that awareness began to make both of us begin to self-doubt our worthiness of such a task.

We felt that she deserved the very best, and the pressure of proving that was overwhelming. Things got harder quickly as we aimed to give her a better life. The stress of that began to chip away at us, and at times we ended up bitter with each other simply because we were stressed.

I think back now, to the time when I had it all figured out as a teenager. My preconceived notions of what life should be like in the future had set me up for defeat. I wasn’t exactly where I had planned to be, I wasn’t the type of mother I thought I’d be and I definitely was not the type of wife my husband deserved.

I was trying to control every aspect of my life exactly the way I wanted it to go. I wanted my kids to behave so I wouldn’t be a yelling mom. I wanted my husband to be act a certain way so that I could act in a gracious and loving way. I wanted other things to change so I wouldn’t have to.

The moment everything changed.

The day it happened was a few months ago at church. My husband and I had just come through a pretty rotten week. Some hard things were going on and we weren’t getting along at all. I was in a pretty dark place and feeling incredibly unsatisfied with my life. Pastor offered an altar call for the surrender of a burden in your life. My heart was pulled from my seat and I walked down to the altar. I asked God to fix everything. Just take away the hurting and bitterness because I loved my husband and didn’t want our marriage to turn into something undesirable. A warm hand was laid on my shoulder and in an answer to my prayer, said these words softly in my ear: “your husband is not your enemy.”

That was the day I surrendered my marriage to God. I was not in control, he was. The relief in that moment was like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. My problems were not solved that day – God didn’t take away any of my husband’s “faults”, he didn’t make my kids perfect angels, and he didn’t suddenly make us debt free. He released my soul from the burden of carrying it all.

When I relinquished the responsibility of taking that responsibility all by myself I was free to place my priorities elsewhere. I became a better mother, I became more motivated to please my husband, and I began to really live my life.

Still, there are moments of discouragement. A person of faith is never exempt from suffering. But the wonderful truth is that our God is bigger than our problems. We have problems that we try to fix on our own but we don’t have the ability to do that without the help of God. He works things out for our good in his own time. And in my experience, the result is a hundred times better than I could have imagined.

Hi! My name is Angela Tyler. I’m a wife and mother of two beautiful kids. Reading scripture and other literature has been a core part of understanding the profound love of our Father, and helped me to live a happier life. My heart’s desire is to contribute to some of the amazing literature available to wives and mothers everywhere.