Blessings of Singleness#4: The Pain of Rejection

July 17, 2010 By 15 Comments

When I was a little girl, I never associated being alone with being rejected.  I loved my time alone because it involved hours of acting out my fantastical imagination with princesses and palaces without interruption.

I’m not so different now than I was then.   I still love finding time away from the world. I love coffee shops and talking to God out loud and I love the freedom that being alone affords.  However, if I’m not careful, my heart will distort and twist reality so that I believe being alone equals being rejected.  On too many days my joy of aloneness is sabotaged by the painful realization that I am alone because I am no one’s favorite.

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Filed Under: Fighting discontentment, Fighting insecurity, God as father, God as friend, Hard days, Relationships, Series: Singleness Suffering, Singleness

Blessings of Singleness #3: Losing Control

July 14, 2010 By 12 Comments

In my naïve younger days (about 3  months ago)  I managed to convince myself that my desire for control had a fairly loose grip on my heart.  Now that I’m 3 months older I can see a little more clearly.  The tragic truth is that so much of my life is designed to maximize my sense of control.

Praise the Lord for the kindness of singleness, which costs me control in a huge area of my life.

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Filed Under: Fighting anxiety, Fighting discontentment, God as Savior, God's bigness, Hard days, Series: Singleness Suffering, Singleness

Blessings of Singleness#2: The Pain of Freedom

July 10, 2010 By 7 Comments

Okay – this may be a hard sell – but there is a unique pain in singleness in what the world affectionately calls ‘freedom’.

As a single woman, I have the ‘freedom’ to make my own decisions about where to go and what to do and there aren’t a lot of people implicated or effected by those choices.   I think this is sometimes something that others are tempted to envy about singleness: the freedom to just leave a place without any obligation; the freedom to make dreams for yourself and act them out without anyone asking you to be considered in your planning.

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Filed Under: Fighting discontentment, God as father, God as Savior, God's bigness, Hard days, Series: Singleness Suffering, Singleness

Blessings of Singleness#1: Loneliness

July 7, 2010 By 17 Comments

Loneliness isn’t unique to singleness.  I can’t imagine the very painful loneliness of living with an emotionally absent husband or going to sleep alone after losing a spouse.

Loneliness is the strangest sensation.  It is physical and emotional and I don’t quite no what to do with it.  And I know it won’t kill me but when I’m experiencing it, it seems strangely unbearable.  I feel that if I can’t fix it – if I can’t make it go away – I’ll die.

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Filed Under: Fighting discontentment, God as friend, God as Savior, God's promises, Hard days, Series: Singleness Suffering, Singleness

Some talk on singleness

July 6, 2010 By 8 Comments

It’s a tricky thing: talking about singleness. You’ve got to make sure you write about it on the right day.  If it’s a rough day you can yield to the temptation to believe that singleness is all pain and misery.  If it’s a perfect day, you can forget that there are true trials ahead and behind and that God is gracious in the midst of them, not just when the sun is out.

I get nervous talking about singleness because I feel like I’m supposed to not even notice that I’m single because I’m so content in Jesus, right?

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Filed Under: Fighting discontentment, Hard days, Series: Singleness Suffering, Singleness
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