Prayer for a Future Spouse You Havent Met Yet

Pray for that person the way Paul prayed for the church at Colossae. He had never seen their faces, and he asked God to fill them with wisdom, to grow their character, to make them people whose lives held up under weight. Those are the right things to ask for someone you have not met. Hold the whole prayer loosely, though, because Scripture nowhere promises that a spouse is coming.

Is it strange to pray for someone I have never met?

Paul did it constantly, and he said so plainly to a congregation he knew only by report.

For I desire to have you know how greatly I struggle for you, and for those at Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh;
Colossians 2:1 (WEB)

Laodicea was a place he knew the way you know about a person who does not exist yet: by inference, by hope, by the shape of the gap. He prayed for them anyway, in detail, with effort. The word he chooses is the language of wrestling, not of wishing. What makes doing the same thing feel strange is only that you are the interested party. Paul was never going to marry the Colossians.

What should I actually ask for?

He gives the content of his prayer for strangers, and it transposes almost word for word.

For this cause, we also, since the day we heard this, don’t cease praying and making requests for you, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you may walk worthily of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
Colossians 1:9-10 (WEB)

Notice what is missing. No timeline, no circumstances, nothing about how or where the meeting happens. He asks for knowledge of God’s will, for wisdom, for a life that bears fruit. Turned toward the person you have not met, that becomes a prayer that they are being formed into someone honest, that whatever they are walking through now is not wasted on them, that somebody is loving them well enough that they will know how it is done.

Then add the unglamorous requests. That they are safe tonight. That if they are inside something destructive, they get out. That they are learning to handle money, anger and boredom, which test a marriage harder than anything romantic does.

Some of that is not hypothetical for the person praying it, either. If you are the one currently inside something that frightens you, the next step is a phone call alongside the praying rather than instead of it: in the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, staffed around the clock. If being alone is something you are getting through by numbing it, the SAMHSA national helpline is 1-800-662-4357, free and confidential. Neither call is a failure of faith, and prayer was never meant to do the work those numbers do.

Does God promise me a spouse if I pray long enough?

No. That is the hard part of this, and it is better said flatly than left as a suspicion. Marriage in Scripture is a genuine good, a gift and a covenant, but it is never issued as a guarantee to the faithful. Paul treats singleness as its own assignment rather than a delay inside somebody else’s.

Yet I wish that all men were like me. However each man has his own gift from God, one of this kind, and another of that kind.
1 Corinthians 7:7 (WEB)

The verse most often stitched onto the front of a future-spouse prayer journal is this one.

Also delight yourself in Yahweh, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 37:4 (WEB)

Read inside the psalm rather than off a mug, that is a promise about what happens to your desires when God has your attention, not a mechanism for extracting a particular person from him. Delight reshapes wanting. Christians disagree honestly here, and the disagreement is an old one: some read the line as God granting what a delighted heart asks, others as God retuning the asking itself, and there are careful readers in both camps. What neither reading will carry is a delivery date. Either way it is a better promise than the one people make it bear, and a harder one to live with.

You can pray boldly and specifically for a spouse. You cannot pray one into existence, and if you could, prayer would be a vending machine and God would be its coin slot.

How do I keep this from turning into a fantasy?

That is the real risk, and almost nobody warns about it. Pray long enough about a person with no face and you will begin supplying one: a composite built from the best qualities of people you know, edited for flaws, improved every time you revisit it. Then an actual human being walks in, three-dimensional and inconvenient, and loses a comparison to someone who was never alive.

You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures.
James 4:3 (WEB)

James is not calling desire dirty. He is saying prayer can be conscripted into serving an appetite, and that the tell is what the answer would be spent on. Two questions, asked honestly. Am I praying for a person, or for relief from being alone? Would I still want this if the marriage turned out to be mostly ordinary, which most of a good marriage is?

The correction is specificity aimed the right way. Pray about their character rather than their face, their faith rather than their income, their safety rather than their arrival date. It is very difficult to build an idol out of let them be honest.

Why pray for this at all if God already knows?

Therefore don’t be like them, for your Father knows what things you need, before you ask him.
Matthew 6:8 (WEB)

Jesus says that while teaching people how to pray, so it cannot be an argument against praying. It is an argument against one kind: the anxious, information-heavy kind that treats God as somebody who needs briefing before he will act. Asking was never meant to inform him. Asking works on the one who asks.

Spend a year praying for another person’s character and you come out with a sharper sense of what character costs. Spend a year praying for their protection and you arrive less able to be careless with them.

What do I pray for myself while I wait?

Half of this marriage is you, and yours is the half available for work right now. Paul’s word for that work is not a romantic one.

For this is the will of God: your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honor,
1 Thessalonians 4:3-4 (WEB)

Sanctification is slow and unspectacular. It looks like telling the truth when a lie would be smoother, keeping a budget, apologizing early rather than three days late, learning to be alone without needing to be numbed. None of that qualifies you for marriage. It is simply the person you will be either way, and that person is the one who shows up.

So pray in two directions at once. For them: protection, wisdom, faith, people around them honest enough to be useful. For yourself: that you would be worth marrying before anyone arrives to assess it, and that you would have a life you are not merely waiting to escape.

A prayer for the person you have not met

Father, I do not know their name. You do. Keep them tonight, wherever they are, and let whatever they are carrying make them kinder rather than harder. Heal what can be healed and give them the sense to get help for the rest. Teach me to want them without inventing them. Make me patient and useful in the meantime, and if marriage is not what you have for me, let me find that out with my hands full rather than empty. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Write the date beside it, so that one day you can see what you were asking for before you had any idea who you were asking about. And when you meet someone real, be ready to let the prayer be answered by a person you did not design. That is the only kind God has ever sent.