I Didn't Think I Deserved a Love Story Like This

For most of my twenties and early thirties, I built my worth out of things I could control...

My job title. How hard I could work. How wild I could be on a night out. I drank the way most Brits do, hard, often, proudly. I chased achievement and chemistry and told myself that was just how love worked.

When I got sober at 33 and later gave my life to Christ, I looked back at those years and felt something I didn't expect. Not just regret. A disbelief that God would still want to bless a woman with a story like mine.

I thought grace was for people who hadn't messed up as much as I had. I thought I would need to prove myself first, heal enough first, become spiritually impressive enough first, before God would trust me with something as good as a godly marriage.

I was wrong about almost all of it. And I think a lot of single Christian women are carrying the same quiet belief without realizing it.

The word grace in the New Testament comes from the Greek word charis. It means undeserved favor. A gift freely given, not a wage you worked for. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast."

Read that again slowly. Not by works. Not a reward for how healed you are. Not a prize for how consistent your quiet time has been this month. A gift, freely given, because of who God is, not because of what you've earned.

Most of us have rewritten that verse in our own minds to fit our waiting season. We tell ourselves marriage is what comes after we've done enough inner work, prayed enough, forgiven enough, become "wife material" enough…

That is not grace. It’s a performance review with God's name attached to it.

I want to name something directly, because I believe it is one of the most common unspoken beliefs among single Christian women.

Somewhere along the way, many of us started believing that God is withholding marriage as a form of correction. That if we were more patient, more healed, more spiritually mature, the husband would have arrived by now.

That belief is actually shame wearing spiritual language. Your singleness is not a report card. And a future marriage, when it comes, will not be a reward you finally qualified for.

It will be a gift, the same way your salvation was a gift, freely given by a God whose love was never based on your performance in the first place.

Under Old Testament law, the poor and foreigners were allowed to glean leftover grain from the edges of a field. Ruth had that legal right. But Boaz did something no law required….

He told his workers to deliberately pull extra grain and leave it for her. He invited her to eat and drink alongside his own workers. He offered her protection she had no claim to.

When Ruth realized what he'd done, she asked him directly, "Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me, a foreigner?" (Ruth 2:10). Boaz pointed to her faithfulness to Naomi, but what he gave her that day still went far beyond anything her actions had technically earned under the law. That gap, between what she was owed and what she actually received, is where grace lives.

Ruth eventually became Boaz's wife. Her character mattered. But the extravagant kindness that changed her life started before she'd proven anything to him. It started the moment he chose to give more than was required.

1. Stop trying to earn what has already been freely offered. You do not need one more month of healing before God will consider blessing you. Grace was already given, in full, before you did anything to deserve it.

2. Receive grace for your past the way God already has. Whatever you are carrying from before you knew better, God is not holding it against you the way you are holding it against yourself. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

3. Let grace change how you treat yourself in the waiting. If God's love for you does not depend on your performance, your own daily self-talk shouldn't either. Stop grading yourself. You were never meant to be your own judge.

4. Extend the same grace to the people who hurt you. The grace that met you undeserving is the same grace available to whoever hurt you along the way. You don't have to carry bitterness forward. You can release it the way it was released to you.

I did not deserve the love story I have now. I was not spiritually impressive when I met my husband. I was a new believer, still unlearning years of a completely different life, still figuring out who I was outside of achievement and chemistry. Grace met me exactly there, undeserving, and gave me something I could never have earned my way into.

With love and faith,

Zena

SheWaitsWell.com