210: blessing of extended singleness

Six hours in a car with six kind coworkers. Stop for brownie brittle and cheese cubes that turned into an early lunch. Early dinner on the bay, big bowful of clam chowder. We took group pics and then started meandering along the harbor. I found myself alone, feeling alone. Trying to embrace the aloneness, the quiet, the moment I have lived over many a time through the years.

Lord, what is the blessing of singleness today? What about today is a blessing particular to my singleness?

When we were driving down here, one of my fellow teachers told us about when her kids were young and they all got chicken pox one after the other. After 20 days stuck at home, she told her husband, the kids are in bed, the house is clean, I have to go grocery shopping. Her husband gladly volunteered to go for her. No, she said, I need to see something other than these four walls.

Such a different season of life, I replied from the back seat.

I watched the scenery pass and thought HOW different from mine. Was this then today's blessing I was going to notice? That I get to be part of the patchwork quilt of God's story--that my prolonged singleness looks different than her getting married at 19 years old? And that I am glad I have a unique place in God's storytelling (as long as I am doing this singleness thing well, which I don't think I've gotten there yet).

But...I wasn't feeling that blessing today. I've been feeling isolation, not gratefulness. I looked out at the ships in the harbor, the water, the gulls, the people walking out of restaurants--and I fought for contentment and meaning and okayness in my aloneness.

I think the blessing God has given me today is actually this extended singleness.

Time. I have needed this length of time for things to only begin to fall off.

You spend years thinking the answer to your problems is for your life to move on. Seriously.

So as the 20s passed, I don't know, I guess God started bringing to my reality that this life-change wasn't happening. And with that thought, He is still stripping away my expectations of what I need.

My wants haven't changed. But God is using my extended singleness to strip away what I've thought I needed and take me back to some basics that I should already have mastered but obviously haven't. Basics like "all I need is Jesus" and "the chief end of man is to glorify God." Who knows what all He is teaching me through this long season? Still teaching.

As I took pics of the boats in the harbor I reminded myself too that it's a temporary season, and I need to take advantage of it--enjoy the quiet and freedom--while I still have it.

So, today, I am grateful for the blessing of extended singleness. Because it is stripping away and giving me the time and circumstances that God is using to get truths through my apparently determined-to-depend-on-marriage-as-the-solution brain.

God has allowed me to still be single at 32 years old. And it is good.

What is the blessing of your looooong singleness?

~*~

I am participating in "Write 31 Days," where a bunch of bloggers write...for 31 days. My theme is "This My Single Life," with a focus on the blessings of this season. Hopefully it's obvious to anyone who knows me or has read my blog that I want to be married and have kids. But at 32 years old, I am quite single, and I think it's God-glorifying to highlight the good things God has given me with singleness. Click here to access the links for my 31 days of writing! And if you want to read everyone else's blog posts, go to http://write31days.com/ and click "Linking Up" for the categories!