Category: Valentine’s Day

My Wedding Day

.Reading time 9 minutes.

It may not surprise you to learn that I was a bit of a control freak about my wedding. I’d been planning it since I was 3, after all. It may also not surprise you to learn that not everything went the way I planned for it to on my wedding day. #pandemic, am I right?

In every wedding, there are things that don’t go quite according to plan. When that happens, you adjust, you move on, and you hope the bride isn’t traumatized. At my wedding, there were definitely those things. For instance, I had planned for us to take pics with special “Bride” and “Groom” masks, but we accidentally left the masks in the car and took pics with them on our honeymoon instead. Things like that. No big deal.

PC: Jovanna Penney – I’m pretty sure we never got a smiling pic where everyone was looking at the camera. And three of my attendants attended on a tablet.

But there were two big things that didn’t go as planned, things that kind of rocked my world when I realized what God was doing.

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My Recent Adulting

.Reading time 8 minutes.

I turned 34 this week. Gosh, I love being in my 30’s. I threw myself a pizza party, baked and decorated myself a cake, bought “Happy Birthday” plates and pink stripey napkins, and invited adult friends over who gave me flowers as gifts. I love it all.

Most days, I even love being single in my 30’s. I have friends my age whose kids are in middle school now, and I wonder when they ever had time to figure out themselves. I have friends with 6 kids, friends with a divorce or two, and friends with incredible how-I-met-your-mother stories. When I look at their lives, I don’t know how they do it, and I’m just so glad that God has given me the life I have.

(I even found out this week that some of the little girls at church think Nicole and I are SO COOL for being independent women and roommates in our own cute little apartment. We are pretty cool, aren’t we?)

What I don’t love so much is the level of adulting required some days. When I was a kid, I thought being an adult was 90% fun and 10% work. And some days, it really is. But these past couple of months have required some serious adulting. At a couple of points, I even had to fight back the lie that I could have dealt with my problems better if I’d had a husband to help me out. Read More

My Valentine’s Musings

.Reading time 8 minutes.

I’ve blogged before about how much I love Valentine’s Day, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned how much I love my birthday. I love other people’s birthdays, too, but I LOVE my birthday. I celebrate all month.

Early in February, I threw a little birthday party for myself. I invited all my friends in San Diego to come to lunch on Super Bowl Sunday – after church, but before the game. I had 20-25 people RSVP, and I reserved tables at a local restaurant.

I know to hold RSVP’s loosely – especially in San Diego, and especially since most of the people on the guest list were from my old church (which is notoriously bad with RSVPs). But even I was surprised when only 10 people besides me showed up. Literally half of the people who said they were coming wound up not coming, and some of them didn’t even text to say sorry. They simply didn’t show. Read More

My Birthday Prayer

.Reading time 6 minutes.

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