Anyway, over the past few years, as I really started to develop my walk, God has literally placed me in the hands of some amazing believers. My nail tech Corinn, for one, is someone I truly consider a sister in Christ. She knows some of my deepest, darkest secrets (lmbo), and she is THEE best nail tech I’ve ever encountered. Over the past 3 years, as she’s worked on my hands, God has also used her to work on my spirit and heart. She’s truly been a major blessing to me both creatively and spiritually.

After a TERRIBLE Groupon experience with a very un-gentle “wax-lady” (I won’t even call her an esthetician), I decided to go back to a wonderful Black-owned spa called Dawning Tranquility. And it is EVERYthing it sounds like. I had my first wax with Dawn In February of 2015. I’ll never forget because I was going THROUGH some things that day, and almost canceled the appointment. However, I went and somehow ended up explaining to her some of what I was going through. She blessed me with cupcakes from Sweet Lobby, across the street from her spa. That was when I KNEW I’d be a patron for life. Just kidding [well half-kidding at least, I love a good cupcake]. Dawn was able to take what can be a very painful,  uncomfortable process and help me breathe through it. [Don’t miss that MESSAGE].

After that first visit in 2015, I fell off the waxing wagon. I just figured there were ways around the pain. Indeed there were, but none of them seemed to get the job done quite right. Go figure. More recently, I decided to once again subject myself to the torment of regular waxes. Thankfully with Dawn, it is not so torturous at all (there is a God!!). She was just as soothing and efficient as I remembered, but this time I started pouring out my faith teas. Long story short, she helped me to acknowledge a few things about myself:

1.) I tend to brace myself for pain, literally but TRULY figuratively. When you know something is likely going to hurt, what do you do? You tense up, right? So as she would get ready to pull away a strip, I would freeze and get tense, not realizing that by doing that, I was actually holding in and maximizing the pain. Once I started to relax and trust the process, it became far more bearable and it was over before I even realized.

2.) My prayer, meditation, and devotional time are not in vain, and it is most certainly not just for me. Recently I’ve been kind of struggling in my prayer life. I’ve been feeling like my prayers are hitting the ceiling and dropping back into my lap. In my most recent visit to Dawn, I once again just started pouring out my heart and soul to her. In that appointment, I said something to her to make her say to me, “God sent you here to tell me that today.” I had been reading through Proverbs and was like “Yes, yes, what awesome repetitive wisdom!” (Forgive me, Lord). But I just wasn’t feeling like it was applicable to my exact point of need at that moment. And I was right because it wasn’t just for me. In retrospect, it brought to my remembrance 2 Corinthians 1:4 (MSG):

“He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.”

Now even though it wasn’t a situation where either of us was in “hard times”, God allowed me to read His wisdom and subsequently pass it on. He wants us in His word so that when the opportunity arises, we can share it where applicable.

3.) And that brings me to my third and final point. My relationship with God is not just about me. It’s not really about me at all, actually.  It’s so easy to get caught up in what He can do for me, praying for myself, and my needs and wants. But my relationship with Him is about what He can do through me for the glorification of His Kingdom. How did I get all this from a Brazilian Wax? Only God knows

The reality is, no matter how much we love each other, my husband and I are going to have enough disagreements without the contention of opposing spiritual beliefs. That’s just an aside to the fact that marriage is a covenant created by God for a purpose greater than loving someone, making babies, and having “legal” sex. There was a point in time where I had a more limited view of the purpose of marriage. I – like many others – had the image of falling in love with someone, getting married to them, and having kids. I thought I was REALLY thinking in detail when I started imagining the aspects of living together, house chores, having sex, ummm…making dinner? I don’t know…but those are all menial factors in the grand scheme of things. It was the development of my spirit and relationship with God, and a yearning to really understand what marriage entails, that pointed me to marriage’s truest purpose – kingdom destiny. As I continued to get notifications from the Facebook thread, I noticed that some people’s reasoning was that as long there was love and mutual respect for the other’s religious beliefs, it would all work out just fine. And that led me to saying:

In essence, I was saying why not just put the whole foundation of the institution on the back burner, if not in the trash altogether? Now, me saying this was pretty much my vaguely facetious logic of  how a marriage between people with different religious beliefs could work. I’m not saying that every marriage between people of different religious backgrounds is doomed to fail. I’m not saying that marrying someone with the same religious beliefs equals automatic, guaranteed success. What I am saying is, it’s a lot easier to be on the same page with someone when you’re both reading from the same book. So for ME, marrying someone that is not a Christian is not an option. I used to think that the phrase “you complete me” was a complete farce. Two individuals should come into a union as healed, whole, and complete persons, not seeking the other for completion. However, I realized that for those God has called into marriage, their destinies are tied to their spouse. Yes, we all have our unique, individual purposes, but if God has joined us in union with another person, it is because there is something He has called us to that can only be achieved through that bond of togetherness. In an interview with Erica Campbell on Get Up Mornings!, JJ Hairston spoke of some of the hurdles he faced in his marriage to his beautiful wife, Trina Hairston. He said that in the midst of them being separated, God told him: ‘the things you want, you’ll never get without her.’ “We were separated, we were on our way to divorce and eventually, I really believe I had a conversation with God about what I should do with my life and Trina was in the middle of it. Everything revolved around my relationship with my wife, and I believe God told me that if you want favor, she is your favor (Proverbs 18:22),” JJ said in another interview.

Warryn and Erica Campbell have also been very transparent about their sixteen-year marital journey. One of the stories that really sticks out to me is Erica’s account of her wedding day; her uncle kept calling her and Warryn’s marriage a ministry and Erica was like ‘Why does he keep saying that?’ She said that it wasn’t until later on in their marriage that she realized it was very much-so a ministry: “But I understand it now. If I would have looked at our marriage as a ministry, I could have avoided probably the first 4 years of dumb thinking and bringing in negative thoughts…if I had looked at it like ‘I stood before God, I made a commitment before God.'”

Marriage is meant to glorify the Creator; it’s the closest example of Christ’s love for His bride, the church. In Timothy and Kathy Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage, they write: “Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the gospel. Each spouse then should give him- or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory…Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. It has that power because it was instituted by God.” At the end of the day, I say all this to say I want a marriage with a spiritual foundation because I know that it’s not just about me and my fleeting feelings. I know, that like with every other major decision in my life, Christ has to be the center of. There isn’t anything that I have been successful at thus far, that was done in my own strength. I want to be on one accord with my husband spiritually, first and foremost, and I cannot do that by disregarding my relationship with Christ or his hypothetical lack thereof. So as for me and my, OUR house, we shall serve the Lord (Joshua 24:15).