My Gladiator Arena

.Reading time 6 minutes.

For the last couple of weeks, I feel like singleness has been kicking my butt. Like singleness and I have been facing off in a gladiator-style arena, and I’ve been losing.

Maybe it had to do with hormones, or maybe it had to do with the fact that things didn’t work out with the man I met online. Whatever the reason, I’ve been tempted to sin, I’ve given into temptation, I’ve been bitter against the demands on my time (because I’m single, I apparently have plenty of free time for everything everyone else wants me to do).

With every temptation, every failure, singleness has delivered another blow to my broken, weary self.

In church this past weekend, my pastor’s Easter sermon was on Romans 8:31-39. These verses are all about how God is on my side RIGHT NOW.

In the past, I’ve just kind of thought about these verses, “Yeah, okay, so Jesus is going to win in the end.” I’d picture myself at the end of my life, bloody and bruised spiritually and emotionally, heaving my last breaths as singleness swooped in for the death blow – then Jesus would show up out of nowhere, deliver a final kick to singleness, take me to heaven, and say something about putting up a good fight or something. Read More

My Dramatic Tendencies

.Reading time 7 minutes.

I’m a pretty dramatic person (in case it hasn’t been blaringly obvious from previous posts). My default setting is definitely not a healthy sense of perspective. Noooooo, my thoughts always default to THE most dramatic outcome EVER to face ANYone in ALL of history.

Someone cancels plans on me: This ALWAYS happens to me. The ONLY person I can rely on is [insert person who hasn’t stood me up lately].

Someone at work does their job wrong: That’s what I get for delegating. I’m the ONLY one I can trust to get things done.

One of my roommates annoys me: I NEVER get my way around here. I have ONLY my harsh words and impatient tone to rely on.

An event I’m planning runs into a hiccup: Things will ONLY go right if I am bossy and push people around.

I start thinking about the future: I’ve been single FOREVER, and I’m NEVER going to get married.  The ONLY person I have is my roommate (the one who’s not engaged right now).

Sometimes, it goes the opposite way. Read More

My Hope in Tribulation

.Reading time 12 minutes.

This week, singleness has sucked.

It’s been full of temptation, failure to resist temptation, and sadness. It’s been hard to find anything to be thankful for. I went back and read some of my old posts and thought, Did I write those? They are WAY too optimistic about Jesus.

It’s been one of those weeks where I’m just done with being single. I’m DONE. Yet, throwing in the towel of singleness just adds to the dirty laundry; it doesn’t actually make the towel go away.

Most of me loves having an engaged roommate with a wedding to plan; most of me loves seeing pictures of friends’ kids, most of me loves hearing about honeymoons and midwife appointments and adoption updates. But the part of me that doesn’t has made it hard to find joy in those things this week.

I read Romans 5 last Friday, and I’ve been processing it and re-reading it for several days. Here’s the blurb I keep coming back to: Read More

My Little Sister

.Reading time 11 minutes.

I have a little sister who always lives my dreams. Sometimes it feels like God gave her to 9-year-old me just so we could grow up and she could show me my dream-come-true life.

She started traveling internationally at 15 years old. She lived in Chicago for a while during college. She got a boyfriend at 18, a fiancé and a walk-in closet at 19, and a husband at 20. Now at 22, she’s having the first grandkid for my parents and the first nephew/niece for the rest of us. This past Monday, she texted me that she’s probably going to decorate her nursery with a book theme. Like seriously?! Are NONE of my dreams sacred?

I’m overreacting of course; I really am happy for her. She’s one of the most genuinely, effortlessly compassionate people I’ve ever met, and she is living the story that God wrote for her before either of us was born.

I get into a funk every once in a while, though, because – I might as well say it – it kind of sucks sometimes to not only not see my dreams come true, Read More

My Unfulfilled Desires

.Reading time 12 minutes.

I want to be a wife and mom.

Besides Jesus and maybe a “Beauty and the Beast”-esque library, I want wife-hood and mom-hood more than anything else in this world. More than a better paycheck, more than losing 20 pounds, more than a trip around the world, more than my own house, I want a husband and children.

Not just “Oh yeah, it’s kind of a toss-up between a house and a family for me.” No. If my desire for comfortable high heels is a 1, and breakfast in the morning is a 3, and a walk-in closet filled with dresses that magically look great on me all the time is a 4, and a pink hovercar is a 7, and the most I think I could ever possibly want something in the world is a 10, then husband/kids is probably like a 12.

I’m not always honest with myself about this fact. I hide the extent of my desire (“Nooooo, Husband/Kids is totally only a 7.5. Ptch. I want soooooo many other things from life first.”) from my friends, family, readers, and even myself most days because – well, because of a few reasons, I guess: Read More

My Rainy Day Woes

.Reading time 18 minutes.

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

.Reading time 1 minute.

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

.Reading time 23 minutes.

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

.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

My Useless Worry

.Reading time 11 minutes.

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