Episode #39- Fit To Be Bride

Transcript:

Welcome to Soulish Femme! Soulish Femme is a channel solely dedicated for you where I help remember that life is not going to wait around for you. Therefore, live a life with intentionality and curate the life you’ve always dreamed of. Truly be free from the shackles of the systems limitation. You must decide once and for all to live unapologetically and live a life that makes you feel alive and rejuvenated every single day. Perhaps I am a hopeless or romantic person, but I truly believe we are meant to enjoy the wonders and the magnificent beauty the world has to offer. If you are ready to embark on your healing journey from traumatic experiences, feel free to check the link below to enroll in this course through Udemy. I will see you there. Thank you.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to another podcast. My name is Glennavelle Manarang. I already know that. So, let’s get to our topic directly and today’s title is fit to be a bride. This is specifically for single ladies out there who want to be a wife someday. It says that in Matthew 25:16, there’s a story between the wise virgins and the foolish ones. You can probably read that to yourself when you have a chance. I’m not going to read it into detail because it’s actually so long.

Enjoy being single

But number one point I want to make if you want to be a bride someday is enjoy being single. Live your life. Don’t rush getting married due to pressure. Of course, we have a timeline as a woman that we have to get married at certain age because if you want to have kids our time clock is ticking and that is why we’re trying so hard to get married earlier. However, if you want to be fit to be a bride, you must be able to be okay being single and probably be comfortable with living on your own for several years to really get to know who you are. I was lucky enough or blessed enough that I was able to live on my own for about maybe seven years. I had my simple apartment. I made my own money. That was a time when God was teaching me about finances, being responsible, how to cook a meal, how to organize my time, how to keep myself tidy. Because do not underestimate the little preparation because that will become handy over time when you have children and you become a spouse. You cannot ask something when you’re not capable of having the responsibility. Much is given, much is required.

So if you want to become a bride, you must be able to understand what being a wifehood entails and what does it consist to becoming a wife. You think that you will not going to have problem when you become married. It actually doubles the amount of problem because before you’re only dealing with yourself. Now you have to deal with another person and it’s a different kind of problems that you’re going to face into. And what comes with that is challenges, especially with men. You think that just because you found the right one that you’re not going to have problems anymore or you’re not going to have any more difficulties with your relationship, that you’re not you’re going to be happy. But actually, happiness does not depend upon your own husband. You will realize that men are going to just do the things that they like to do. Men are wired differently than women.

Women think that just because we got married that the man in our lives is going to complete us. That they are the core of our happiness. You will realize that if you’re not even comfortable with being alone because most of the time maybe your husband is a businessman and he travels a lot or he works a lot and what are you going to do? Lurk in self-pettiness and cry me a river because he’s not paying attention to you because men are selfish. I am not trying to disrespect men but that’s just how they’re wired. And of course it says that Ecclesiastes 11:9, “Rejoice, oh young man or woman in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart.” So that’s why enjoy your life now while you’re single. I was privileged enough that I was able to enjoy my life. I partied on the weekends. I had, you know, my girlfriends over.

We would go out and party and drink and just be cute. And I actually lived the kind of life privilege. Of course, I was still not fully aware of what was I doing. I was naive. I was just living my life la vida loca. However, those were the moments that I truly enjoyed being alone because I got to know who I was. I got to enjoy being single. Looking back, if I didn’t enjoy all those things, I probably would still be a wild person right now trying to become a mom and a wife and then all of a sudden want to be a single and party. But because I’ve lived those life and I had experience living the kind of life a partied girl, a partygoer, that’s why I don’t really crave for that much anymore because I was able to live that when I was single years.

That’s what it says that you have to weight you have to walk in the ways of your heart and just live and enjoy being young because once you become an adult and you become a wife material and you become a mom, it’s a different ballgame. And to fit to be a bride is you need to ask God’s guidance who you should marry. Proverbs 3:56 it says, “To trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not in your own understanding.” Acknowledge him and he shall direct your path. It is important that you just don’t go by what your family says or sadly enough there are still people out there who are fixed marriages. And I had one of those people. I was sometimes tried to be met up with this man. My family talked me into it sometimes that this is the man for you. Not in a way that is obvious. It was subtle.

They were trying to fix me up with this another man. I didn’t want to get into detail, but I said to myself, if I’m going to marry someone, it’s because it’s my own choice. It is based on my selection, not based on what my family thinks that I should marry because of their standard. That’s why I said you have to really ask God for it. And the onlookers, of course, my life and the choice of marriage, the man that I married, it was actually not the first choice of my family. You could say it was a forbidden kind of relationship because of the strap that was happening. Other than that, because I prayed about it, I asked counsel from the pastor and I’ve been asking God to give me intervention. That’s why it says trust in the Lord, not in men. Blessed is the man who trusts in God and curse is the man who trusts in a man. Man doesn’t know the ending. They don’t know the long-term result.

Ask God’s direction

So if you are going to confine in someone if you should marry this man or not just because your family said so, you must confine in the one who truly knows the best, which is God himself. The one who really knows the beginning and the ending. The one who knows your heart and the desires of your heart and also this man that you’re marrying into. Because marriage is not something that you can just hope for the best. It is a commitment. It’s one thing that you have to consider before you decide to marry someone. Are you committed to live with that person till death do your part? Are you devoted or are you just one of those people that if it gets hard? Of course, it’s easier to pack your bag and leave. And that is what we think about. You know, if it doesn’t work, maybe I’m just going to get divorced.

You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking to myself. Well, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen if this marriage doesn’t work? But actually, God had corrected me. You shouldn’t think that way because marriage is a covenant. It is not something that you should just, you know, decide one day to get married because it’s a trend. Everybody’s doing it. My sisters are married. My friends are married. So why not me? Even though deep down in your heart, God says no. And remember, marriage is a covenant. It’s a promise, till death do your part. In Luke 14:28:30, it talks so much about you have to have a undefiled bed. You have to be able to count the cost when you can marry someone because when you count the cost is Jesus said when someone builds something you got to count the cost because it will cost you a lot of things when you get married.

When you get married is actually going to cost your time, your energy, yourself. It’s no longer about you anymore. It’s actually about your husband and you. It’s about partnership. Marriage is about contract business. When you think about it, it’s two people have two different kinds of mindset, two different kinds of upbringing. You’re actually merging with that person. It’s like two companies or two individuals will try so hard to make a life together. And when the company have two differences and they don’t always agree to one another, that’s why the merging sometimes is hard. Complications arises, miscommunication, disagreement and conflict. And that’s why marriages will fall apart. And of course, I want to point out that if you want to be a bride someday, you know your value. That your value is not in a man. That your value as a woman is first of all connected with the creator.

Work on yourself

You must know your value not based on the man that you married. Two people come together as one. You must come in as a whole person, not fragmented. You must be able to know your worth first of all before you said I do. If you’re not comfortable of being alone, as I said, you’re not going to be even comfortable being married because you don’t even know your worth and value. That’s exactly what Jesus pointed out to the woman in the Samaritan well when she married five times different men in her life because she was thinking to herself that the men in her life that she married to that her value was contingent upon this people. When Jesus said, “You have been marrying six times and the man that you’re married now actually five times. The man that you have now with is not your husband.

So, Jesus pointed out of course this profound realization that hey look here woman you think that your value and your worth as a woman is dependent upon your husband. You don’t realize that there is no man in this world can make you complete and whole apart from God himself. Jesus said, “I will give you the fountain of living water.” It is a spiritual matter. It is not only physical. Man is flawed. Your husband is flawed. Your partner is going to disappoint you. He’s not going to be always meeting every needs you have. He’s probably sometimes going to piss you off. And you just want sometimes to kick him under the curb. But because he’s a man, he’s just like you. He has weaknesses. You have weaknesses. And if you don’t know your value from the creator in God, you’re always going to chase for his approval, chase for his attention sometimes. And that is where the problem with many women.

We think that my life is going to revolve around my husband because now I’m married and I’m going to completely forget about my own. That is one of the classic mistakes of women. You know, we get into marriage, we control them, we make them as our project or a fixer upper. We think to ourselves, well, I can make him this way and I can make him that way. When in fact, when you have received the package, that’s exactly who they are. Okay? They will not change unless God is going to change them. You can try, but you’re just going to be frustrated and you’re just going to be out of emotional turmoil out of yourself. you’re going to be feeling like why is this not working? You know what happens to Adam and Eve, right? Eve was the usurper. She’s the controller. She’s the manipulative one. She decided to say, you know what? I’m going to rearrange the whole thing here. I don’t think I’m so uh into this garden or living in the Eden part. I’m tired of this whole version of living in the same spot.

Don’t try to change your husband

So I’m just going to tell my husband to just get me another place which that’s why they have eaten the forbidden fruit and that is why we have now problems after problems. The battle of the sexes has always been happening from the beginning of time because Adam is a passive aggressive man. He is who he is. He is just the way he is. When you married him you think that you can change a man because majority of women thinks well I can change my husband the moment I I marry him. Even though you saw the flawed about him before you married him, you didn’t think that you can really just accept him for who he is. That is a realization that it took me a long time to realize when God told me you cannot change a man. A man is a man the way that you have met him and he has always been that way.

If he has not been trained the right way when he was a child, guess what? He’s always going to be that way until the day he dies until of course he becomes the second Adam which is Jesus Christ himself. The first Adam is really a coward. He doesn’t want to do anything. He blames the woman especially when he makes a mistake. This the first Adam have no accountability. He’s a coward. He points the finger. And that is why majority of men they encounter they don’t take accountability. They blame you for their wrong actions. And that’s why we call men narcissists because they’re actually most of them are. They don’t take accountability because it goes back to Adam and Eve. What happened to Eve and Adam when God said to Adam, “Where is what are you doing? Where are you? You’re hiding.”

So, Adam, instead of saying, “Hey, God, it’s my problem here. It’s my fault that I was a coward. I didn’t defend the woman. I’ve seen the woman talking to the beast or the serpent. I had just watched the whole thing, the whole show, and I just never butt in and says, “Hey, woman, stay away from the beast or the serpent.” But God actually asked the man, “What did you do?” And he said, “Well, it’s the woman’s fault. It’s not really my fault that this woman is incompetent and she was blind enough to follow the serpent.” And I just followed along, you know, I don’t want to argue. I’m just passive aggressive. I don’t want to defend. And that is the problem. If a man becomes the second Adam, which is the Lord Jesus Christ, he is now awakened to his consciousness. He’s now responsible. He protects. He defends. That’s his nature.

He provides because God said until the day you die, you’re going to sweat under your brow to provide and to till the land until the day you die. That’s why men are prone to work and to provide for the family. I’m not saying that all men do this. Some men do. And this is why when you want to be a bride, you got to know your responsibility that you are not your husband’s moral code of conduct. You are not your husband’s moral code of conduct. you are not his god. Do not play a god. And it takes a lot of humility to realize that you are not your god. You’re not you are not your husband’s god. You don’t try to be your husband’s mentor because he has his own mind. Apparently men are slow in the process of learning compared to women. Women matured fast. Men do not. And this is why you can get so frustrated when you try to change someone that don’t want to be changed. You got to just pray about it and ask God to change the man’s heart.

No secrets

And that’s exactly what God told me before. This is not your problem. Your husband’s problem is between me and him, not between you and you. You can just That’s why in the Bible when Peter said to women, you got to be able to learn to be quiet, which is very hard to do as a woman. and gentleness and hidden part of yourself. And another thing of course is discuss to your partner about your past before saying I do. If you want to be fit to be a bride, if you found the mister right someday, let it all out. You have to be able to be honest of your past. Do not really get into your marriage and hide something and live in secret because eventually it’s going to haunt you in the end. It’s going to be a big problem. If you have issues from the past, if you have been past that have been hidden, you have you got to be able to be honest with your partner. And I think the foundation of marriage is honesty and trust is earned. You cannot have trust when someone has been lying to you. People think, well, you have to trust me and you just have to give me my your full trust.

But in fact, how can I trust someone when you’re not fully honest with someone and you have been hiding a a brief moment of your past and you have forgotten that very specific information and you did not expose it or you did not tell me about it? You were not transparent. How can I trust you? That’s why trust is earned. You cannot trust someone. If you get into a marriage and later on you said to your husband, “Hey, by the way, this actually happened to me in the past.” Or it’s too late now, then why didn’t you not tell me that before getting married? Why did you hide that from me? Especially when it comes to your past trauma or anything that you’re hiding from your husband because eventually if I was not honest with my husband he would not understand why one minute I was off and one minute I was on I was going through this emotional turmoil I was I was impatient I have outbursts of anger. I made him aware that there are bad things that happened to me in my life when I was younger in my teenage years.

Are you willing to take them? Are you willing to said I do? Even if you know exactly my past, you got to be transparent to your spouse because he doesn’t want to be surprised of why you’re acting erotic sometimes or why do you have uncontrollable emotions because of your past? You have been wounded. You have been sexually abused and you had abortion and you told him that this is exactly what you’re marrying into. Are you willing to sleep on it and make the bed and sleep on it? Are you willing to take me as your wife? You cannot. He cannot accuse you of saying why didn’t you not tell me you lied to me. You He cannot tell you that. He cannot ask you because you were afront with him. You gave him the transparency and saying you want to marry me. Are you sure you’re willing to uh really marry someone like me, then he has nothing to accuse you of by hiding something because he already knows exactly who you were.

And that’s something that he has to be willing to accept. And it takes a lot of courage to to face that out and to to spread it out or to share that to your spouse to your husband to be and if you want to be fit to be a bride and that’s exactly you need to work on yourself because without working on your trauma it’s going to be a problem. I’m not saying that when I went to my marriage I was perfect but because I’ve done the work a little bit of work when I was single I was able to go to a therapist talk about my past and go to the pastors did a lot of women women’s retreat I did a lot of healing journey on my own before I got married I was not completely whole but at least a version of me was still trying to get fixed and that is why I said you cannot be a bride unless you need to face your own self unless you’re willing to be uh reliable enough.

Build yourself up

And what the Bible actually says in Proverbs 14 that says the woman the wise woman builds her house but the foolish pulls it down with her hands. If you’re a wise woman, what is the build her house here? When you think about building her house, she’s this Bible, the verse of this Bible in Proverbs, the woman that is wise build her house is her temple. When you talk about the house, it’s your temple. It’s your body. It’s your vessel. The wise woman, she builds it first of all before she commits to someone long term. She has to build herself up first of all. She has to be able to be whole. Marrying into someone because if you’re going to marry into someone you’re not whole, you are going to just feel like a woman trying to earn love from your husband, earn attention from your husband, you’re not comfortable being alone. You think that marriage you’re going to be doing things together all the time.

He’s going to be, you know, at your beck and call or he’s going to always try to make you happy and entertain you because that’s just further from the truth. As I said, men usually go back to their own thing. They are most likely are going to play videos if that’s exactly what they were used of doing and play sports if that’s exactly what they were used of doing. Their life is not going to revolve around you. Women however we are conditioned that our life revolved around our husband and our children. That’s not our nature because our nature is to nurture people. And this is why when we’re not comfortable being alone because a woman builds her house, she builds her temple that she has to be able to understand that I’m a woman. I cannot neglect my house. A foolish woman, she pulls it down.

So when you talk about the temple of your body as a woman, you need to build it up by confident by eating the right food, going back to the gym or working out and looking after yourself. As I said, I don’t know why majority of women it happened to me before after I got married and after I had my child, I thought I taught I told myself if I could speak, I just need to be complacent. I don’t need to work out anymore. I can lose the weight. I don’t have to lose the weight. I can just gain all the weight because what’s the point? I’m already married and have kids. I have let go of myself. There was a point that I decided to just completely let go of myself that I gained so much weight and I just eat whatever crappy it is. And over time, I did not feel good about myself. I didn’t feel good. I could not even look at myself in the mirror. I feel not confident enough. I feel like what is going on? It’s because I have let go of myself.

As the Bible says, the wise woman builds her body. she built her house. A foolish one, she pulls it down by neglecting herself. Just because you’re married or just because now you’re a mother doesn’t mean that you’re going to pull down your own house or you’re going to forget about the person who you were before you got married. Because we have bought this lie that just because now you’re a wife and you are now a mother that we have to be at everybody’s service like a hotline 24 hours, 7 days a week saying, “How may I help you?” And we are running ragged. We are so tired of taking care of everyone around us except ourselves. And no wonder why we are depleted of energy. We have no more time for ourselves, no more time for people. We cranky. And I will find myself when I am snappy, cranky. I am not pleasant to be around with because I don’t have enough sleep. I don’t have enough food to eat. I’m hungry. I don’t have enough rest. And I can feel that tension in my body.

And this is why a woman that is why she builds her body. She builds her house. She takes care of herself. It is actually biblical that you must take care of your vessel. The one vessel that God created you. The one that he gives you, the body, the temple. Our body is the temple that God’s reside. If we don’t have the body, God cannot use us. Because where’s the spirit lives? It’s actually our temple that God resides. God is within us. And for you as a wise woman to fit to be a bride, you must be able to take care of your body, your soul, and your spirit. That’s why I always talk on my channel, what does it mean to prosper in body, being healthy, eating the right food, and taking care of yourself by sleeping a lot and resting. Do not be guilty of saying, “Well, you got to be doing this and doing this and getting pulled from every direction.”

Because if you are not really unplugging from the world’s noise, you are going to just run yourself like a crazy person and you are just all over the place. And for the longest time, as I said, the reason why I was all over the place because I was constantly available for people. I could not say no because I was a people pleaser. And I had a chronic uh way of trying to please everybody around me when I was a lot younger. Everybody would want to do something with me and I would just say yes. Can you do this? I would say yes. And I would just learn to just keep saying yes because I was afraid that what if I say no? They’re not going to like me or people think that I’m just so stuck up. But over time when you’re always available for people and you have no time for yourself, this is why you are always running on an empty tank and you are so restless. You have no peace.

And Lamentation 3:26-28 says, “It is good that one should hope and wait patiently. Let him or her sit alone and keep silent.” So sometimes for you to be a woman, it’s good to be quiet and not have anything to do and just block out one day in a week that you are not available for anybody. You know, just sometimes I would turn off my phone on Sundays for the whole day. So I can not be distracted by cell phone, text message and browsing in the internet. I can just all lot that time for myself by reading a book or watching a movie or coloring a coloring book or maybe resting and absolutely doing nothing. Those are my times that I can decompress and get back to myself because it is biblical and it is actually wise that you just sometimes do nothing. It is something that our society has forgotten to be bored. Why is boredom now is a disease? For some reason, people don’t like to be bored anymore.

They don’t want to sit alone and think about their thoughts or just sit sit quietly and be comfortable with their thoughts. It’s somehow because our society is now conditioning us to constantly entertain ourselves, distractions upon distractions, competing with our attention. And that’s why we have attention deficit in our society. We can no longer focus in one task. We’re all over the place. And I have noticed that about myself. If I’m constantly on my phone, I’m overly stimulated. I cannot focus. I cannot concentrate because my brain is scattered. And my focus is all over the place. That’s why it’s important as a woman, you must function in your femininity by relaxing, by decompressing, by learning to be sitting comfortably with silence and not talk too much. Because I know as a woman, we have two mouths.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. We love to talk. We’re chatter butter. We just love to always constantly share our opinions and exactly give people our story. We call our friends, our mom, our sisters. And you wonder why you have nothing else to do at the end of the day. I used to talk too much on the phone with everybody. I would tell them about my story, what I ate that day, my problems, my sister would know, my mom, my friends. And then you wonder why at the end of day you have nothing done. You’re like, “Wait a minute. It’s only 12 o’clock in the afternoon. What did I do?” Nothing. You’re just talking on the phone and there’s there goes your time. So you have to be mindful as a woman. And you have to be able to understand that to fit to be a bride is just knowing who you are and counting the cost.

And if you’re willing to count the cost is because you are now a legible wife, a material. It is not something that is trendy or it’s a a norm for society. Some people are gifted with singleness. Some people are not given the fact to be married. God said not everybody has to be married. Some people are really just God given them to be single. And we see that in other people and they’re happy just the way that they are. And some for for many of us we have to develop this being a wife by trying to understand who we are first because marriage is another problem. Now you are going to deal with another person. It’s a lot easier to deal with yourself. It’s a lot easier to just you know make decisions on your own. Now that you’re married you have to consider what your husband thinks. You have to consider if he agrees with you or not. You have to consider whether your decisions are okay with him or not.

When you’re single, it’s less stress actually because you only have to deal with yourself. But now that you’re married, there’s another person that you have to consider and you’re going to argue sometimes and disagree with many things. You’re not always going to see eye to eye because that’s just men are wired differently. Men are from V uh from Mars and women are from Venus as they say. And another point that I want to make is that you need to have the character a virtue a virtuous woman who can think have a character excellence of thinking the result is to teach and experience time excellence the character comes into being a consequence of habit. So the little habits that you do matters.