“If you build it, he will come.”

Hey, it worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, so surely the maxim must also be true for singles, right?

“If you pray it, he/she will come.”

Well, actually, there’s a bit of disagreement among Christians who are single about whether or not we should be praying for a spouse.

Matthew 21:22 says, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” Well sure, but aren’t there a ton of people who are married that never really asked God for a spouse in the first place? Why do I have to pray mine into existence? God is sovereign, and He will make it happen if He wills it.

We found these two articles to be good examinations on both sides of the matter.

Candice Watters, from Boundless, submits that we should not only be praying for a spouse, but we should be praying boldly:

We know God designed us for relational intimacy — when Adam admitted his loneliness, God created Eve. After they were together in the garden, God said, “It is good.” Not long after that, He gave us marriage. It is not a “social construct” but a gift from God. Some are called to celibate service, and they’re specially gifted to live that out. But the rest of us are called to marriage. Asking God for a mate is asking Him for something He created and called good. For those of us who are called to marriage, it’s nothing short of asking Him to give us what He wants us to have.

Conversely, in her article for Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog, single girl Anna Broadway offers reasons why she went from fasting and praying for a spouse to no longer praying for a husband at all:

Then one Monday, shortly before the end of 2009, I got the idea to take a “do-nothing” approach to my love life for 2010. You see, if relational life is like two adjoining rooms connected by a locked door, I had spent most of my time in the “single” room gazing through the door and scheming how I could get through to the other side. I’d never made a real, good-faith effort to inhabit the place where I was and be present in it. On the one hand, ‘doing nothing’ scared me. In all my persistent doubt of God, it was easy to assume the only animating energy for change in my love life came from me.

But on the other hand, a commitment like that excited me. At a few specific times in my life, giving up trying to make something happen has been precisely the point when very good things, and not ones of my doing, happened. The last fruit of those experiences is a deep longing to see God move in my life; to see things change because and how he wants them to. We always get angry when our plans are thwarted (a move easily interpreted as divine spite and mismanagement), but boy, is it exciting to have something good come into your life that you had nothing to do with.

So we thought it would be interesting to see where all of you fall on the matter. Not for the sake of another argument on the Internet — goodness knows there are enough of those out there already — but out of genuine curiosity and hopefully some mutual encouragement within our community.

Are you praying for a spouse? Why or why not?