Category: Gospel-Centered Singleness

My Rainy Day Woes

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Photo credit: Love Your Life Photography

When I cry, it’s usually for one of two reasons:

  1. I’ve lost complete control of a situation.
  2. I’ve encountered grace.

On Sunday morning, I cried harder for the first reason than I’ve cried in almost my entire adult life. Nasty, ugly, snotty bawling that probably scared passing drivers.

After months of planning, weeks of coordinating, days of errands, and hours and hours of DIY projects and spreadsheets, I (Charity J Edwards, blithe wedding coordinator) found myself driving in the pouring rain to the bride’s house to tell her that we had to move the ceremony location. After all, no one wants to go to a wedding in a mud puddle instead of a grassy knoll.

I’d lost all control over the wedding I was supposed to be in charge of. And I was big-time disappointed in God for taking away all my control.

Having been told by several people to expect a rainy-day wedding – and not being able to process the idea of losing all my work – I had staunchly ignored the forecasts and prayed for sunshine, dramatic clouds, and a rainbow.

Hey, my God is big. I know He does big things and answers big requests. I had absolute faith in the fact that He would give us sunshine that day – after all, I’m His daughter, and He loves me.

I had gone to sleep on Saturday night, kind of grinning to myself as I listened to the rain outside my door; I was hoping against hope that God would pleasantly “surprise” me with sunshine the next morning, and I knew he would come through.

I woke up to rain. Read More

My Wedding Coordinating

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I’m right in the middle of coordinating the wedding of some friends this weekend. Gonna be honest, I’m already looking forward to the part where we pack up all the stuff and go home.

I love wedding coordinating, though. I love the fashion and flowers and food and fun and fabulousness of weddings. I love being so busy I can’t see straight, having to come up with a plan in case it rains, trying to fit in the rest of life when I’d rather it just pause for a while until I get through this.

It’s my happy place.

Unfortunately, my happy place took over my life this week, Read More

My Useful Waiting

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I just finished reading a book called “Who’s Picking Me Up From The Airport?” by Cindy Johnson. I was scared when I first picked it up that it would be pretty much the book I want to write, but I’m happy to say that the author is fun, snarky, smart, godly, and super relatable – and it’s not my future book. I recommend it.

In one of the chapters, the author mentions a friend who often compares waiting for a man to waiting for the return of Christ. “Intriguing,” I thought, and immediately starting writing this post in my head.

I’d never thought of the parallels of waiting for a husband and waiting for Christ, so I figured that the best place to start was the Bible.

Before I get started with what I found, let me just establish that Christ’s return is important. On our own, we have no way of getting to God, because we do bad things; but on His own, God sent His son (Jesus Christ) to live a life doing no bad things. Jesus was killed because some people said He had done bad things (even though He hadn’t), and then to prove it, He rose from the dead – after which time, He rose up into heaven to live with God forever. Because of this, he paid for our bad things, thus becoming our Savior, since He saved us from an afterlife separated from God forever (I Tim 1:15).

While He was on earth, Jesus promised that He would come back for us someday (John 14:19). In fact, even before Jesus came the first time, people have been prophesying (telling the future, because God told them first) about the second time He’ll come. And even after He left to go to heaven, God continued to tell men about Christ’s “second coming” and they wrote it down so we can read it now (I Peter 1:10-12). The Bible says that when Jesus Christ comes back, He will come to rule over His enemies and over the earth. He’ll be our King (I Tim 6:13-16).

This is important because without the Second Coming, Read More

My Birthday Prayer

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Today is my birthday. I turned 32 at 6:57 am (PST). I’m still single.

My prayer this week has been, “God, remind me of the value of waiting. Remind me in this limbo that You are still good.”

I’ve blogged a lot about how I get to know Jesus more in the waiting and in singleness, but this week I’ve been normalizing singleness. (Translation: I could have way worse problems.)

I would never, ever poo-poo the hardships of the single life. Valentine’s Day is coming up again, with its mixed feelings. Loneliness is real and sometimes inevitable. Dating is weird.

Sometimes, yes, singleness is actual suffering. But in blogging about it (in other words, processing it ALL THE TIME), I think I sometimes lose track of the bigger picture.

My church has been reading the book of Acts together, and those first-century Christians had some serious problems. Sometimes, the political leaders would say, “okay, you’re right,” and then beat them up anyway! (Acts 5:37-40) No matter how hard they did the right thing and spoke only good things about God, they were imprisoned, kicked out, beaten up, and even killed.

And it wasn’t just the first-century Christians who had that problem. Throughout history, Christians have been tortured and ostracized and separated from their families. In some periods of history, different church factions would burn EACH OTHER at the stake. Good grief.

I hear contemporary stories all the time about men arrested for holding church in their homes, or women killed by their families for professing Jesus over Allah.

Even if I didn’t want to talk about the persecuted church, there are plenty of other problems I could talk about: abortion, Syrian refugees, human trafficking… Read More

My Useless Worry

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I used to worry.

I would worry about real stuff. One time, my roommate was getting married and moving out, and I worried myself almost sick about where I was going to move and who I was going to live with.

I would worry about fake stuff. When I was a kid, “To Be Continued” episodes would keep me up nights, worrying about the characters.

I would even make up stuff to worry about. My favorite “go-to” reason for worrying was the thought of my parents’ both dying at the same time, leaving me to fight the legal system so I could get custody of my underage siblings. And if I did get custody, then how would I support them? And would I be able to homeschool them? That hypothetical scenario could keep me going on worry for HOURS.

I worried, basically, whenever I wasn’t in control of a situation in which there was a questionable end. I worried because worry was my way of trying to maintain some sort of control. I even said to myself once, “If I don’t have worry, then what do I have?”

I think I’ve shared the story of my worry turning-point before on this blog. I worried and worried and worried Read More

My Story’s Middle

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I sighed deeply as I inched along in traffic on Tuesday evening. I had been praying for my future man and telling God how much I was looking forward to marriage someday.

Sometimes when I pray about my future and my relationship status, I get super excited about what God is doing and energized because of the great time I’m having getting to talk with my Savior.

But Tuesday, I just sighed. “When, God?”

I groaned. “How much longer do I have to wait for You to reveal Your plan?”

I felt just…tired.

I didn’t get a billboard or a lightning bolt or even a still, small voice. I tried to listen for an answer and got nothing. I told Him, “I trust You. I trust Your timing.” I didn’t feel like I was trusting very much, but just praying those words helped a little. Read More

My Communal Reasonings

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No unmarried person should be an island. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems (especially in the church) that island-hood is expected and/or encouraged for singles. I’ve definitely been to churches in which I was the only single woman over the age of 18 – or the only single woman not living with her parents.

Fortunately, I’ve had some excellent people (married and unmarried) in my life who have joined me on my Island of Singleness, wallowed in the Swamp of Sorrow with me, and then pulled me into their boats and taken me to the Continent of Personhood where everyone is treated like a person – not like a marital status.

Because I’ve lived in the extremes of No-Community and Really-Really-Great-Community, I thought I’d say a few things here on the value of community and why it’s important to find ways off the Island of Singleness.

Community builds skills:

  • Conflict resolution skills – sometimes life is messy (literally and figuratively). Living in community brings more mess, but it also teaches me how to deal with mess and thus makes me a nicer person. This is especially true when I do life with people who are different than I am.
  • Auntie skills – whether I have biological nieces and nephews someday or not, it’s good for me to be “Auntie Charity” to my friends’ kids. It reminds me of what it was like to start understanding the world, keeps me relating to people of all ages, and teaches me how to talk about Jesus in smaller words.
  • Keeping-things-in-perspective skills – It’s easy to think I’m alone in the world, or that singleness is the ultimate suffering in the universe. But hanging out with people of all ages and demographics reminds me that there are bigger problems than mine, that other people are (or were) single into their 30’s, and that it’s nice to not have to wake up with kids five times a night.

Read More

My Grateful Attitude

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When I was little, my mom wouldn’t let me complain about things. She would redirect my complaining energy into thankful energy.

“Mom, my sister won’t clean her side of the room.” – “Thank Jesus that you have a sister. And stuff. And a room. A lot of little girls aren’t that blessed.”

“Do I have to eat squash agaaaaaaain?” – “Thank God you have food, honey. And a mom to cook it for you. If you don’t like it, you can make dinner tomorrow.”

“My feet hurt from walking around all day at Disneyland!” – “Aren’t you so glad you got to come to Disneyland? Remember all those rides you go to go on? We need to say thank you to Jesus for letting us come and to your grandparents for paying for our tickets.”

Whenever I didn’t know what to pray for during family prayer times, my parents would say, “Just tell God what you’re thankful for.”

It worked. Read More

My Ultimate Hope

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I sat across from my friend at IHOP, listening as she unloaded her family struggles and boy problems and work issues. I nodded and drank my coffee and made appropriate “mm hmm” noises.

“What do you think?” she asked. “What should I do?”

I put my coffee down. “It sounds to me like you’re spending all of your time focusing on your problems instead of on Jesus.”

“But Charity, I try to do that. I focus on my problems, which leads me to thinking about Jesus, which makes me think I shouldn’t try to do anything else. When I focus on Jesus, I don’t care about my job or my family or my work or ANYthing!” she said as she waved her hands dramatically.

I smiled as I realized it Read More

My Courtship (Non)Experience

.Reading time 10 minutes.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations, and I think a certain expectation deserves to be fleshed out more.

Last week, I said that I expected to “meet someone, maybe hang out a couple of times. Then he’d talk to my parents, and we would decide to ‘court’ (but rebelliously call it ‘dating’) because we’d already know that we were headed toward marriage.”

In the words of the great Inigo Montoya: Let me ‘splain. No, ‘tis too much. Let me sum up.

I grew up in the “courtship culture” that has generated national buzz with the recent weddings of two Duggar daughters. This belief system is basically thus: man meets woman, man gets to know woman in a community setting (like a church or family outings), man asks woman’s father for permission to pursue her, man and woman never go on unchaperoned dates, man asks woman’s father for permission to marry her, man and woman get married and have many babies.

I have a lot to say about it, but since there are many, many, MANY blogs and books and otherwise published opinions and commentary on this subject, it took me a while to figure out if I have anything to add to the conversation. Well, I do. Read More