Maybe I can lead him to Christ and maybe God will help me. Boy, was I wrong.

Let me preface by saying that I am a newly born again Christian. My family was very rough and strict with their religious beliefs, sheltering us from the world and shoving religion down our throats.

I did go through a period when I felt Jesus’s love, when I was in elementary school and middle school. But as I got older, I felt like a shell of a person, like a robot that my parents programmed. I did not know who I was as a person because my parents kept breathing down my neck with religion and utterances that fuelled my guilt.

During high school, I started to rebel. I would purposely do things out of spite against my parents, and against God.

I lost my faith, and I went through roughly seven years ignoring the Holy Spirit and my convictions. I wanted to party, gossip, engage in lustful situations. I wanted to be drunk off liquor and drugs.

Around the age of 20, I started indulging in hookup culture and stopped going to church. I would use liquor and drugs to quiet my conscience. I would get wrongful validation from my friends who engaged in the same lifestyle as me.

When I started to jump into committed relationships, I only received brokenness, trust issues, an addiction to lust, bitterness, anxiety, obsession and depression.

The more I continued to get into these toxic relationships, the more I would start to feel the Holy Spirit convict me.

Despite me ignoring God’s Word for years, He never left my side. And for that, I am forever grateful.

Missionary dating

I never knew what missionary dating was, or how painful and bad of an idea it is, until I met my last partner.

He didn’t believe in anything and he didn’t know of God. His own parents were atheists, and had never introduced their kids to faith.

At a time in my life when was I starting to hear God’s voice again, I started to listen… and I knew that being with this guy wasn’t such a good idea.

But I couldn’t understand it. How could someone who I saw as having a good heart, good morals, be faithless and not at least be in a pursuit of Jesus?

Those things aside, I was lovestruck. He was my first “healthy” relationship I had ever been in. There was no toxicity to cloud the bigger, deeper life questions that never had the chance to come up in my previous relationships. 

I wanted so bad for God to change him. I knew that He could, but I also knew that my boyfriend had to seek Him. He had to allow himself to be changed, had to want it for himself.

This was the hardest test of my faith so far. Right when I was letting God back into my life, I was also in the first healthy relationship after years of toxic relationships.

I knew I had to choose. I had to choose what was more important to me.

Of course, I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I would pray to God asking Him to change my boyfriend’s heart so we could stay together.

There were nights when I found myself incessantly crying until four in the morning, watching videos on God and thinking about our relationship.

I was emotionally, mentally and spiritually drained.

On multiple occasions, I broke down and cried to my partner, begging him (or God) to please reassure me as I was in desperate need of guidance.

Little did I know, how much this broke down my partner too. When I would cry to him, he didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, leading to a feeling of disconnect for both us.

We went on a weekend getaway trip, and I broke down crying for a few hours one night because deep down, even in my drunken state, I knew this was not the right relationship for me if I wanted to have God in my life again.

I would cry because I felt sadness for him, that he didn’t know the goodness of having God in his life. It became an emotionally and mentally turbulent battle within our minds, one that we both battled alone.

He went to church with me. He tried believing, he tried praying. I would ask if it was genuine, but he would tell me that all he felt was pressure from me.

I felt like I had one foot in the world, indulging in faithless pleasures, with the other foot trying to guide me towards Christ again.

It wasn’t until one night after crying to the Lord, that I heard Him say, “Have patience and faith in Me, my child”.

I was ecstatic. Was God finally going to change my boyfriend’s heart?

Only a couple days later, I realised it was the opposite. On the same day that I had met his parents, we had discussed how we would handle matters of sexuality if we had kids.

Of course, his views were radically different than mine. That led to me realising that this was only the beginning of how our life views would clash.

I realised that as much as I wanted for, cried for, hoped for, prayed for Jesus to be in this relationship – He wasn’t.

… as much as I wanted for, cried for, hoped for, prayed for Jesus to be in this relationship – He wasn’t.

Right then, I cried and prayed to God to help me leave if this man wasn’t the one for me. 

Before I could even think, before I could even process it, I looked at my partner and said: “I don’t think you’re the man for me.”

Truly, I would not have been able to leave him without God’s help; God helped me with a supernatural push to say words I thought I would never say.

This was when I realised what He meant by “Have patience and faith in me, my child”. God would help me walk away from something that is not in His will for me!

Is Jesus at the centre?

Upon reflecting on this relationship, I realised my partner was not the bad guy here. We both inadvertently broke each other down, as much as we thought we loved one another.

But love is a choice, and so is having a relationship with Jesus. I believe love is not true and real if God is not at the centre of it all.

The problem was that I could not, without God’s help, bring myself to leave this man. This was, after all, the first healthy, relationship I had been in.

My Christian friend would warn me to not be unequally yoked, and I never knew what that meant or did the research until it was too late.

Being unequally yoked means unnecessary sadness, disappointment and pressure to both parties. 

I am still healing. I am still crying… I am still picking up the broken fragments of myself. But this time, I do it with Jesus by my side.

I will no longer lean on my own understanding as all the times I thought I had control, was just an illusion.

I will no longer try to rush or force things, for I know that God has a greater plan for me. 

Indeed, I hold on to Romans 8:28: “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”

We just have to trust in Him and His timing, and God will come through for you and me.