No, that can't be him, I thought to myself as I surveyed the upperclassmen helping the freshman girls move into our dorms. Too short. And that one—not the right hair color. And definitely not him—his clothes don't even match! But that one over there, he sure is cute!

I had just arrived at Hannibal-LaGrange College—and I was already on the hunt for Mr. Right. I wasn't just looking for a guy. I wanted to find "the guy." The man of my dreams. After all, this was college: This is where you are supposed to meet your spouse, right? Well, that's what I thought. And I wasn't alone. It seemed almost every other freshman girl I met had the same idea as I did those first few weeks. We were preoccupied with guys. As I got to know my roommate and the others in our dorm, I noticed that the most common topic of conversation centered around who we liked and who had a great sense of humor. Several of my new friends actually started dating guys immediately. Others, like me, waited and hoped that our knights in shining armor would soon appear.

As my freshman year went on, I grew frustrated and even angry, wondering why I hadn't met my perfect match yet. What is wrong with me? I kept asking myself. I know I'm not drop-dead gorgeous like my roommate, but I'm not an ugly duckling, either! I'm funny and smart, and there just has to be a guy out there for me.

When I decided to attend a Christian college, I was sure I would meet a wonderful Christian guy there who would sweep me off my feet, and we'd live happily ever after. I knew that a Christian college was a great place for a Christian girl to meet the guy of her dreams, and everything around me seemed to reinforce my expectations. I heard so many stories of young couples marrying right out of Christian college. And it seemed that with each passing week, more of my friends were starting to seriously date someone. I felt like I was the lone single girl in a world full of couples, and I did not like the feeling. In fact, I often felt like a failure, wondering why, with all of the available Christian guys around me, I couldn't find the right one. Week after week went by, and although I had an occasional date, I never felt like I had found "the one."

OK, God, are you playing some kind of joke on me? I began to ask. I thought that you wanted me to be happy, and if I'm going to be happy, I need to be in love like everyone else around me!

I thought that when I really fell in love, it would be just like in a romantic movie. My heart would start pounding, my palms would get all sweaty, and I would hear the sweet strains of violin music playing in the background. Instead, semester after semester passed, and I was still waiting to hear the violins. As we got closer to our senior year, more and more couples were getting engaged and planning big weddings for the summer after graduation. At my school, it was a tradition for newly-engaged couples to go after dark to the historic bell in the middle of the campus and flip it upside down to announce their good news. Then, the next day when everyone would see the bell upside down, the speculation would begin about which girl was the lucky one to have a new ring on her finger. It seemed that bell was never right-side-up the entire time I was at college. For me, the bell only served as a reminder of what was missing in my life.

I became so obsessed with not having my own special someone that I actually convinced myself that God must want me to remain single my whole life since I hadn't fallen in love yet (even though I was only in my early 20s). My friends tried to tell me to be patient, that it just wasn't God's time yet. But in my stubbornness, I wouldn't listen. During my junior year, I decided to just force myself to be happy with staying single for the rest of my life. I developed a "martyr complex," thinking that singleness and loneliness would be the burdens I had to bear in order to serve God. I started shutting out friends, female and male, and I spent a lot of time alone.

I prayed that God would help me to be content with never getting married, and to be honest, I also cried a lot. Since I was so sure it must be God's will for me not to marry, I didn't consider asking him what plan he really did have for me. I wasted so much effort feeling sorry for myself that I missed a lot of what God was trying to teach me during this time. All I could see ahead of me was a life of loneliness. I even had a recurring nightmare that I turned into this old, bitter woman who lived in a big house with a hundred cats.

The turning point came in the summer after my junior year. I went to Mexico on a 10-week mission trip and worked in a mountain village in southern Mexico with two female missionaries. Neither of these women had ever married. The older one was in her 70s, while the younger was about 50 years old. They had both been in Mexico doing Bible translation for more years than I had been alive. As I worked with them and observed them all that summer, I began to see that being single didn't have to mean being bitter or lonely. They were perfectly content; not having husbands and children didn't make their lives any less meaningful. I opened up to them about all of my fears, and they helped me to see that no matter what God had in my future, it was all a part of his perfect plan for my life. They encouraged me to go home and stop worrying about whether or not there would be a husband in my future and start concentrating on becoming more like Jesus.

So, I took their advice. I went back to college that fall with a new attitude and a new outlook. I gave up the notion that God wanted me to remain single for the rest of my life. And instead of wondering whether every available man that I passed would become my future husband, I just enjoyed my last year at college. I let go of the idea that I had to meet a man in college or I was doomed. I reconnected with my friends—guys and girls. I focused on my studies. I poured myself into studying my Bible. I did all of this to become a woman God would be pleased with.

As the weeks passed and more of my friends set wedding dates for the following summer, I found that I could be genuinely happy. I stopped wondering what they had that I didn't. I could even look at their bridal magazines without feeling envious. My closest friends wondered what had happened to me; they thought maybe I had fallen in love while in Mexico. I had to explain that even though nothing had changed in my circumstances, my mind and heart had both undergone major transformations.

I discovered real freedom once I stopped obsessing over not having a boyfriend. My heart was much more open to what God wanted to teach me during college. Through Bible study, God gave me a passage of Scripture that helped me when I was tempted to feel sorry for myself. Isaiah 61:2-3 promises that Jesus will come "to comfort all who mourn… to give them beauty for ashes… the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified" (NKJV).

I discovered that God had comforted me in my sorrow. I also realized that in order for beauty to come out of ashes, something first had to be burned. I had to sacrifice what I wanted. I had to let go of my expectation of what would happen during college and let God do what he wanted in those years. God showed me that I could offer all of my dreams, my hopes and desires to him as a sacrifice, and he would take it and create my life into something more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Campus Life's Ignite Your Faith magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Campus Life's Ignite Your Faith.