Author: Charity J. Edwards

My Unfair Assumptions

.Reading time 6 minutes.

In the spring of 2009, Melissa was married, my best friend Evie was engaged, and my other friend Noel was about to be engaged any minute. I could have papered my walls with wedding invitations.

It seemed so easy for everyone else. I even asked some of them, “How do you get a boyfriend?” The answer was always something like, “Well, you find a guy you like, you Define The Relationship (DTR), you date, you DTR again, you get engaged, and then you enlist Charity to help with the wedding.”

That answer was infinitely frustrating. At 26, I was SO TIRED of watching everyone else meet their men or women, fall in love, and get to plan their weddings – like it was no big deal to just *poof* find the love of your life and *poof* get married.

I joyfully performed bridesmaidy duties twice that summer, musing over my lack of love life thus far. Read More

Just For Fun – Roommate > Husband

.Reading time 3 minutes.

I’ve bragged on this site a couple of time about my current roommate, so I want to give you an idea of how wonderful she is – and how, because of her sheer awesomeness, she makes me a little more content to be single.*

No but seriously, what man would ever do any of these things: Read More

My Best Solution

.Reading time 8 minutes.

Melissa and I packed up our apartment – taping boxes, sorting through junk, navigating piles that made our living room look like “Bed, Bath & Beyond” sneezed in it. Wedding decorations here, Goodwill there, Melissa’s stuff, Charity’s stuff…

Melissa was getting married and moving out in the same day; I (in probably the stupidest decision I’ve ever made) was also moving out the same weekend as the wedding.

Basically, I had three (very first-world) problems: Read More

My Wandering Eyes

.Reading time 7 minutes.

I had my visa, passport, plane ticket, and 140 lbs of luggage in hand – headed, beyond my wildest dreams, back to Australia for a year to work. I was turning 23, and I clearly hadn’t been looking for a man in the right places in college (2:1 girl:guy ratio, after all), so it made sense to buckle down and get a man before I came back to the USA.

Nothing in my worldview had prepared me for the idea that I might be single without marriage prospects at the end of college. And what better place to find a man than Australia? The Sydney Opera House is still the single most romantic place I’ve ever been, and I’d like to go there on a date sometime – which could prove expensive if my man weren’t in Australia already.

So I looked. I made the year unnecessarily stressful with almost constant thoughts of “Is this the one? How about that one? No? Ooh, he’s cute, can it PLEASE be him?” (Granted, my options were limited once I ruled out all the men who were my students or housemates.)

After a year of working in Oz (slang for Australia – I feel so cool right now), I moved back in with my parents in Oregon. The exotic men of Australia were replaced by non-Christians at work and suuuuuuper homeschooly men at church, so obviously I didn’t marry any of them.

Clearly, I needed to try online dating. At my sisters’ suggestions (“Come on, you’re turning 25 on Valentine’s Day weekend!”), I created an eHarmony.com* profile during a “free communication weekend” and went man-shopping.

A couple of years later, I fussed around with ChristianMingle.com. After I moved to San Diego, I checked out the free okcupid.com. I found out from a friend that there’s such a thing as reformedsingles.com; I didn’t know whether to join to be serious or to make fun of it.

My coworker in San Diego once convinced me to go so far as to pay for one month on ChristianMingle. She and I tried sooooooo hard to find me a man on there.

None of the sites kept my interest for long, though, because

a)      It was too much like shopping online for shoes (search for men by keyword? Really?), only with a higher-stakes return policy.

b)      It was too much effort for the little bit of return I got from it.

So at some point, I deactivated all of my online dating profiles, crumpled up my working mental list of potential husbands, threw up my hands, and said, “God, You’re in charge.”

(I’m not knocking online dating; I know many people for whom it has worked out great. I’m just saying that, for me, it was one more way of trying to do God’s job for Him.)

I’d like to report here that, having identified behavior that is not respectful to God’s plan, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that the “marriageable until proven otherwise” way of looking at things is probably not healthy. I’d like to say that I’ve started to trust God – like, really trust Him, not just say I do while still checking out every man in a suit.

But I’m not good with this. I still have a running list of bachelors with “Eligible to Date Charity” status. I do crumple it up every once in a while, but only so I can start from scratch.

I didn’t know at first how to make this blog post Jesus-y. I really had no idea how the story of God/Jesus applied to this post, and I almost decided to scrap it. But then a friend reminded me of two things:

Jesus was not exactly the man I would take home to my parents. He was unattractive, unemployed, homeless, and connected by choice to scumbags and unlovely people.

How funny is that? If Jesus had a profile on plentyoffish.com, he wouldn’t meet any of my search criteria (except maybe “loves to travel”). Yet, He is the One I absolutely need. He fulfills my greatest spiritual need (salvation from my sin – Luke 19:10), my greatest emotional need (comfort – I Cor. 1:3-4), and my greatest physical need (life – Col 1:16-17).

Regardless, Jesus is taking me home to His Father.

If Jesus had a profile on match.com, I wouldn’t meet any of His search criteria. I’m not 100% perfect (Rom 3:23) or completely loving (I Cor 13). Yet, despite my ugly sin and my tendencies to judge people by keywords, Jesus voluntarily takes my sin from me (Rom 4:25), clothes me in His righteous royal robes (I Cor 1:30), and gives me a home with Him for eternity (John 14:2).

I don’t know if those two thoughts will keep me from searching for my man, but I hope to keep them in the forefront of my mind the next time (and the next and the next…) that I want to ask God, “What about this one?”

The answer is, of course, “It doesn’t matter; Jesus is better than the future Mr. Charity” – whether that lucky man is in Australia, online, or in the next pew.

(On an unrelated topic, does anyone feel like jaunting on over to the Sydney Opera House with me?**)

 

* It didn’t take long for me to give up on eHarmony. I spent an hour telling the much-hyped personality test stuff about myself, and the site spit all that same information back to me in grammatically incorrect sentences. Is anyone with me on this?

** Now taking applications for a travel buddy – preference given to Jesus-loving bachelors.

My Deserved Reward

.Reading time 8 minutes.

The airplane’s wheels touched down in Portland, Oregon, and my heart jumped up and down in anticipation of seeing my family again. The plane took foreeeeeeverrrrrrrr to disgorge its passengers, until I could skip down the corridors of PDX, straining to see my family past the “No Re-entry” sign.

I’d been in Australia for a semester with 32 other American students, and I missed them already; but there’s nothing like the carpet at PDX to make you feel good about being back. Not only that, but I’d made it through college and would be graduating in a few days.

Despite everyone’s good intentions upon my departure to Australia a few months before, I did not actually find an Australian man to date. In fact, this conversation grew really old really fast: Read More

Just For Fun – “Great” Advice

.Reading time 6 minutes.

I’ve been single for a long time – 31 years, in fact. In that time, many people have offered much well-meant advice on how to irrevocably alter my relationship status.

I hear some of this advice (like the advice about going to the bar) so much that I have standard responses to it. Other advice I just laughed off – and then later thought of the perfect snarky response.

So, for your perusal, I present: Great Advice. I dare someone to try some of these and let me know how it works for you. Read More

My Pursuit of Happiness

.Reading time 8 minutes.

“I don’t need a man, in order to be happy,” I remember telling my mom one day when I was 21 or so.

At the time, my life was super fulfilling, and my outlook on my circumstances was rosy. I’d gotten a taste of globetrotting with a semester at Oxford; I had a job I loved; I’d found outlets for my passionate creativity, in class and in editing and writing for the school newspaper.

Plus, I mean, I was a senior in college, and this finger didn’t have a ring by that spring, or the one before that, or the one before that… So I had decided to stop waiting for the (pink diamond) ring and just live life.

The plan was great on the outside. Read More

My Wedding Woes

.Reading time 9 minutes.

I inserted the final bobby pin into Sarah’s hair and began fastening the white rose bud as the finishing touch to my first bridal hairstyle. I smiled big, oohed over how beautiful she was (I really had done a lovely job with her black hair), and kept up the smiling and oohing for the rest of the evening.

I was 19 years old; the bride, 18.

As a pastor’s kid, I’d been to literally dozens of weddings by that time, but Sarah’s still stands out to me for three firsts:

  • First bridal hair I’d styled
  • First time I was friends with the bride AND the groom
  • First wedding where I was older than the bride

Read More

My Bookish Questions

.Reading time 9 minutes.

I didn’t read EVERY book on the “Christian Dating” shelf at the local Christian bookstore where I worked in high school; but I knew enough about every book to be the resident “Christian Dating Shelf” expert during my shifts.

As I approached my later teens, my parents wanted to do the parent-y thing and prepare me for boyfriend, romance, marriage, etc. Knowing I was an avid (seriously, there are not enough letters in the word “avid” to describe the avidness with which I was avid) reader, they directed me to books.

I, like all good teen Christian girls in the late 90’s, started with “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” by Joshua Harris; bought an advance copy of the sequel “Boy Meets Girl”; delved into real-life love stories like “When God Writes Your Love Story” by Eric and Leslie Ludy. From mass-published to self-published, the books couldn’t fly through my hands fast enough, and I supplemented my literary life with more Christian romance novels than I care to admit now.

I got super frustrated with “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” because Read More

My Thwarted Plans

.Reading time 11 minutes.

In the fall of 1999, I flipped through my SAT practice book, feeling a little overwhelmed by the geometry section. Feeling a little overwhelmed about this whole college thing, actually. My dad had bought me a fatty directory of colleges (bigger than a phone book – no joke), and I had been going through it for days, trying to pick out colleges I should maybe think about applying to.

“Ugh!” I called out in the general direction of God, as I began an internal monologue I hoped He overheard. If I could just find a man and get married, I could start making babies and not have to worry about this geometry problem. I wish my dad would hurry up and find me a boyfriend; I only have less than two years before I turn 18 and have to go to college.

I languished as neither God nor my dad found me a boyfriend in the next two years, and my family and I packed up and moved from Southern California to NW Oregon so I could go to George Fox University in Newberg.

I hate “no” for an answer – even from God. Read More