Waiting on God for Marriage — Murray on the Long Wait
⏱ 13 min read
You have been praying the same prayer for a long time now. You have prayed it through three New Years and the same number of birthdays. You have prayed it after the friend’s wedding, the cousin’s wedding, the wedding of the girl from small group who once said she was committed to staying single. You have prayed it in the quiet of an evening alone in your flat, where the prayer feels too small and too repeated to be heard, and in the loud of a Sunday service where you were standing in the row of mostly-married women and the prayer was beating quietly under your ribs. The prayer is the same prayer. The years are passing. The marriage has not come. You do not know how to keep waiting on God for it.
The older Christian tradition wrote about this kind of wait without sentimentality. It did not promise the marriage would arrive on a timeline. It did not promise the marriage at all. What it taught was a posture of waiting in which the soul learned to live inside the long meanwhile — not as a corridor, not as a test, but as a particular form of nearness to God that the wait itself had become the school of. The Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow daily waiting into a 140-day companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — let the framing be re-set.
The article that follows is a slow read of two passages from Andrew Murray — the Dutch Reformed pastor whose small book Waiting on God has been carried by Christians inside long waits for over a century. Murray was not writing about marriage specifically. He was writing about the soul that has been asking God for one specific thing, year after year, and has not yet received it. The marriage wait is one of the long waits his vocabulary was made for. Read slowly.
What the older tradition actually said
The contemporary Christian conversation about waiting for marriage tends to soften the wait or to project-manage it. The softening sounds like He has someone for you. The project-managing sounds like be the kind of woman the man God has for you would want. Both, kindly meant, do quiet harm. The softening promises a future the writer cannot promise. The project-managing turns the wait into a self-improvement assignment in which the woman’s job is to become marriageable. Neither has anything to say to the woman whose wait has now stretched past the point where the softening sounds credible, and who has done all the project-managing the assignment requires and is still alone.
Murray writes inside a different framing. For Murray, the prayer that has been prayed for years is not a prayer that has failed. It is a prayer that is being slowly answered — not necessarily by the giving of the thing prayed for, but by the deepening of the soul that has been praying. The years of the same prayer are years in which the soul has been being made into something. The making is the hidden answer. The making is what the wait was for. Whether the visible answer ever arrives is a separate question — and Murray, gently, would have told you the visible answer is not the most important thing about the wait, even though the wait is real and the longing is real and the marriage, if it comes, is real.
So when you ask how to keep waiting on God for marriage, Murray’s answer is not one more year, hold on, it’s coming. Murray’s answer is the wait has been doing something in you, and the something it has been doing is the actual gift of the years. That is the framing the rest of this article will sit inside.
(If the wait has emptied prayer of its earlier easiness, a prayer journal and devotion — 30 prompts that earn their place is the daily companion. If the wait has gone through another New Year and is now stretching forward, a women’s prayer journal for the year ahead and a new-year prayer journal for women sit alongside this one. And if the prayer has become the prayer you are now embarrassed to keep praying — please, the same one, again, this year — a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray walks the practical companion.)
The first passage: enter deep into thy relation of dependence
“Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. Enter deeper still into His covenant of redemption, with His promise to restore more gloriously than ever what thou hadst lost, and by His Son and Spirit to give within you unceasingly, His actual divine Presence and Power. And thus wait upon your God continually and only. ‘My soul, wait thou only upon God.’ No words can tell, no heart conceive, the riches of the glory of this mystery of the Father and of Christ. Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy.”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line to sit with is the last one. Our God, in the infinite tenderness and omnipotence of His love, waits to be our Life and Joy. Notice the verb. Waits. The waiting in this passage is not all on your side. God is waiting too — not for the marriage to be ready, not for the right circumstances to align, but to be your Life and Joy in the actual present of the actual long wait. The mutual waiting is the foundation of Murray’s whole vocabulary. The soul that has been waiting on God for marriage has been waiting on a God who has been, at the same moment, waiting to be the Life and Joy of the soul that is doing the waiting. Both waits are real. Both are continuous. The one is the answer to the other, even before the visible answer comes.
This is the quiet inversion Murray performs. The contemporary scripts treat the wait as the woman’s wait for God to do something. Murray treats it as the meeting place of two waitings — the soul’s wait for the answer, and God’s wait to be received as the Life and Joy of the soul before the answer comes. The marriage, if it arrives, is a particular gift on a particular day. The Life and Joy of God is available now, in the present, in the long unmarked stretches between the visible mile markers, and the long wait is the slow learning of how to receive Him as that.
Enter deep into thy relation of dependence as creature on God, to receive from Him every moment what He gives. The receiving is moment by moment. Not the receiving of the marriage. The receiving of the moment — the actual moment, the small ordinary moment of Wednesday at four. The soul that has been waiting a long time has often, without noticing, stopped receiving the moment. She has been living forward into the imagined arrival. Murray is calling her — gently — back into the actual present, where the receiving is possible, where the Life and Joy of God is being offered now, in the small daily form that the long wait keeps trying to make invisible.
What does the present-moment receiving look like in the wait for marriage? It looks like the morning coffee, slowly drunk. It looks like the verse in the journal, slowly written. It looks like the evening light on the wall of the flat that is, for now, your flat alone, and the noticing that the light is beautiful, even if no one else is in the room. It looks like the small daily gratitude that does not have to be earned by the arrival of anything. It looks like the friend’s call, attended to, without the running thought but I am still alone. The receiving is the practice. The receiving is what the relation of dependence Murray names actually feels like, lived out, in the moments the wait keeps trying to make you skip past.
Mid-page: a small note
The Prayer Journal for Women was built as the daily evening place for this kind of moment-by-moment receiving — one short passage, room for one honest sentence, no demand to manufacture the contentment that has not yet arrived. The 140 days are not a programme to finish the wait. They are a daily home for the wait, the evening chair the soul returns to, where the small receiving is rehearsed until the rehearsal slowly becomes the actual climate of the day.
The somatic that goes with the long wait for marriage
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Notice where the long wait for marriage has been living in the body. Most women carrying a long marriage-wait carry it in the lower belly — the soft place under the navel, the place that has held the held-breath quality of years of waiting, the place that braces in the seconds after seeing a wedding photograph on the phone, the place that tightens at the family question about whether you are seeing anyone yet. Put one hand low on the belly, below the navel. Take one slow inhale, slow rather than deep, and let it go all the way down to the hand. On the exhale, let the breath stay slow on the way out — slower than the inhale — until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own.
The body of the long-waiting woman has not been letting the breath touch the place the longing lives. The somatic of Murray’s wait thou only upon God is the slow re-permission of the breath to go all the way down — not because the breath will solve the longing, but because the body learns it can hold the longing without locking the belly against it. The lock has been quiet. The lock has been there a long time. The lock softening is not the marriage arriving. The lock softening is the body’s slow learning that the Life and Joy of God can be received in the present body, with the longing still present, and the longing does not have to be either suppressed or solved before the receiving can begin.
Three slow breaths. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The second passage: the arms of Everlasting Love
“‘At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.’ Let each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command, and teach us to listen more earnestly than ever till the Spirit again give us to hear the voice of Jesus saying, with a love and authority that inspire both hope and obedience, ‘Child, abide in me.’ That word, listened to as coming from Himself, will be an end of all doubting — a divine promise of what shall surely be granted. And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read it twice. The line to keep is resting in the arms of Everlasting Love.
Murray is naming what abiding actually is. Nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Notice the construction. The resting is not what you achieve. The resting is what happens after the giving-up. The giving-up is daily. The giving-up is what the wait, slowly, teaches. The soul that has been praying for marriage for years has been being taught — patiently, often without her knowing — to set down the controlling motion of the management of her life. The setting-down is the giving-up. The giving-up is the door. Through the door are the arms.
The arms are the image Murray returns to. Not the corridor. Not the queue. Arms. The long wait, when it is entered Murray’s way, is not the absence of the One you are waiting on. The wait is the arms. The being held is the substance of the wait. The marriage may or may not arrive. The arms are present now, in the wait, and the wait is where the being-held is being learned. Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. The phrase is doing all the load-bearing work.
For the woman in the long wait for marriage, this is the line worth keeping near the page. Write it on the small card. Keep the card in the journal. Read the card in the evening when the wait has been heavy for the day. Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Not as a slogan. As an actual posture. As the bodily reminder that the One you have been waiting on for the marriage is not running a clock somewhere out of view; He is the One whose arms are the substance of the wait itself, and the wait is the place where the being-held is being learned.
Murray’s each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command is gentle, too. The failures are anticipated. The days you cannot pray. The mornings the bitterness has been louder than the abiding. The Sundays the sermon has knocked the air out and the abiding felt impossible by Sunday afternoon. Murray treats these days not as evidence of failure but as the friction by which the abiding is slowly schooled. Each consciousness of failure only give new urgency to the command. The command is abide in me. The failure does not disqualify the abiding. The failure is what the abiding learns through. The voice that says Child, abide in me is not waiting for you to be good enough at it. The voice is the voice the abiding is built on, and the failure of any single day is folded back into the abiding by the next morning.
What the practice will actually feel like over a year
The slow daily abiding Murray is teaching will not, in the first weeks, feel like rest. The wait will still be the wait. The marriage will still not have come. The prayer that has been prayed for years will still be the same prayer in some form. What will change, slowly, is the centre of gravity. The wait, lived inside the arms, will start to feel less like a corridor and more like a room. The room is the soul’s actual present. The room is being furnished, daily, by the moment-by-moment receiving Murray named in the first passage. The room is where the Life and Joy of God is being received in the present body, with the marriage longing still present.
A year in, the marriage may have come. It may not have. Murray would not have promised either. What he would have promised — and what the older tradition has delivered to women for several centuries now — is that the soul that has spent a year learning to abide will, by the end of the year, be living inside the arms in a way that the soul a year ago did not yet know was possible. The wait has not been waste. The wait has been the school. The school has been doing what schools do — slowly, daily, in the small ordinary moments that did not look like instruction at the time. Waiting on God for marriage, in Murray’s framing, is at heart a misnamed practice. The deeper name is waiting on God. The marriage, if it comes, comes into a soul that has spent the wait learning to abide. The abiding was the prayer all along.
(The sibling articles in this series sit at what does the Bible say about singleness — Augustine and de Sales and what does the Bible say about waiting — Murray on Waiting on God.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — wait thou only upon God, the arms of Everlasting Love, Child abide in me — into a daily companion built for the woman whose long wait for marriage is, at last, ready to be lived as the abiding the wait was the school of all along.
