147: scary scary word

Partway into this LadyM's Distractions blog venture, I started struggling with the Lord. Most of it centered around prolonged agony singleness, but some of the background for the struggle included events my family had endured that had messed up our little unit pretty bad. So I've been struggling and questioning and getting bitter over and wrestling with this idea of God's sovereignty versus our foolish choices, outside circumstances, and fallen world.

But like I said, most of it came down to the issues of "Why am I not married?" "Why didn't I get to be married at 21 like I had expected?" "I need my own home, but I can't have it. *grumble, grumble*" "God, I really want someone to encourage me spiritually." "I want someone to hold me. That's how YOU made me." "Lord, why can't I just have someone to talk to? I'm lonely. Didn't You say it's not good for man to be alone?"

Anyway.

I am thankful I belong to a God who lets us wrestle with Him.

"Righteous are You, O LORD, when I plead with You;

Yet let me talk with You about Your judgments." (Jeremiah 12:1)

If I were to go back and counsel myself, I'm not sure I would feed myself any platitudes, true though they may be. I think I would tell myself to do exactly what I did. Wrestle it out. Better to wrestle it out in the presence of the Lord than to ignore the questions and pretend like everything was okay when it was becoming increasingly not okay.

I would say to myself, "Wrestle it out with the Lord, and then, (to quote Jen Hatmaker from the If 2015 conference) 'Give your heart permission to trust Him.'"

After I sweated it out, I was stripped to the point of making a decision--either to trust or continue to question.

I THINK, by God's grace, I have chosen to trust.

At least for today.

I have chosen something else. It's a scary, scary word. But it's something that as soon as I started transitioning over to it, I wished I had done so years ago.

I chose "acceptance."

I started accepting that I am single, and may be indefinitely, and may be forever.

I couldn't do the wait on the Lord thing anymore. I couldn't WAIT for what God had not promised me.

With acceptance has come the freedom to examine my life as if it's not on the cusp of change. That's how I've always lived my life--as if I could get married soon and will need to alter my habits to accommodate another person so . . . I'm waiting. But if I'm accepting that my present life is my life? Then I have the freedom, and the responsibility, to create new habits and paint my world the way that I want it to be, because change isn't around the corner.

That thought process is probably unique to me, but that's how this little brain works.

The funny thing is, even in the acceptance, I feel hope and freedom to pray for a husband. Acceptance didn't take that away.

 

Stay tuned for an upcoming post about the faith I have to keep coming back to amid this acceptance.