My fiancée and I have been meeting once a week with the pastor of a local church for pre-marital counseling. Well, it's supposed to be once a week - same time every week. It's been 4 weeks since we last met with him together. We were scheduled to meet with him this afternoon at 3:00, but around 1:45 he called my cell phone and left a message letting me know that an emergency had come up and he would not be able to meet with us today. Last week the same thing happened - he had an urgent situation to attend to and couldn't meet with us. The week before that Hannah (my fiancée) became ill that day and so I went to meet with the pastor alone. The week before that he was extremely busy all week and just couldn't fit us in at our usual time. The week before that one is the last time we both met with him - and that meeting was cut short when an emergency came up and he had to leave.
It's very discouraging. Hannah and I want to get married as soon as possible, but we decided to wait until the pastor feels we are ready to be married. We decided that shortly after our first meeting with him, which was 6 weeks ago, I think. We certainly weren't expecting to have so many of our scheduled meetings disrupted!
The primary focus of the counseling so far has been to help us improve our respective spiritual relationships with God. This is something that we both needed - and still need. I had been a severely backslidden Christian for about 8 years. I'm slowly rebuilding my spiritual relationship - it's a never-ending process that takes time and effort and God's help. More about this in a future post. Maybe.
When we found out about the cancelation today, Hannah remarked that it sure seems like the devil doesn't want us to get married! That thought had occurred to us last week as well. Maybe we're giving the devil too much credit, but it sure seems odd for our meetings to not work out so many weeks in a row. The past couple of weeks in church on Sunday we've been learning about how the devil can interfere in the lives of Christians, so we're wondering if that's what's happening with our pre-marital counseling.
While praying last night and this morning I asked God to please allow everything to work out today for our counseling meeting. Given how the last few weeks have gone I was worried that today would be yet another disappointment. Lo and behold, it was anyway.
So now I'm wondering - was today's cancelation caused by the devil interfering, or did God answer my prayers with a "no" because He knew we shouldn't go to counseling today for some reason unknown to us?
