My Story’s Middle

.Reading time 10 minutes.

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

.Reading time 9 minutes.

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

.Reading time 9 minutes.

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

.Reading time 17 minutes.

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

My Unexpected Expectations

.Reading time 8 minutes.

Not all years in Blithe Bachelorette-ville have themes, but 2014 has had a big one. It’s been a year of letting go of expectations.

  • This summer, moving from one apartment to another was a HUGE exercise in letting go of expectations. While I didn’t expect everything to go seamlessly, I did expect to be actually in town the weekend we were moving (which didn’t happen), and I didn’t expect to have to tell my roommate “I’m sorry” for being selfish several times (which did happen).
  • At work, I expected to be much farther along by this point; but I still find myself working on some of the same projects I was working on 12 months ago.
  • Even with this blog, I expected certain people to guest blog for me, or expected them to be able to blog on a certain day, only to have them say “no” or want a more flexible schedule.

And, of course, I’ve had to let go of a whole list of expectations about finding my future man. In the last year or longer, I’ve let go of: Read More

My Identity Crisis

.Reading time 8 minutes.

For years I told everyone who would listen, “I don’t want to marry a pastor.”

To anyone who asked why, I’d explain, “I don’t want to be known as ‘the pastor’s wife’ instead of by my name.”

I’d make a terrible Borg or Cyberman.

For years, I was defined by my relationships to people; I was one of the Edwards family, the pastor’s kid, the principal’s kid, Karissa’s sister, Krystal’s sister, etc.

In college, it finally occurred to me that I could just be “Charity Edwards.” I reveled in and flourished under that realization. I had heaps of fun finding out who I was without having to point at someone else as a reference point.

Once after I graduated college, my family and I met an old lady whom her grandson introduced to everyone as “Grandma.” He actually corrected people who tried to call her by her name. I remember thinking how awful it would be to be old and have no one left to call you by name – to only have a title that is determined by your relationship to someone else.

I so fiercely enjoy being known as my own self that I Read More

My Pretentious Pride

.Reading time 6 minutes.

My 10-year college reunion will be next year, and a couple of classmates have already contacted me to see if I’m attending.

10 years! Oh, the nostalgia. Oh, the comparing-myself-to-everyone-my-age – and not just to the people I knew in college, but also to all the people I knew in high school and before.

Looming reunions are, I guess, appropriate times to look back at what I’ve accomplished and celebrate where life has taken the people from my past – a time to compare jobs and families and relationship statuses. But I seldom actually just say something like, “Oh, that’s nice” and move on; usually, I have to decide who has had the better life – me or them. Read More

My Life of Good-Byes

.Reading time 6 minutes.

A few weeks ago, my friend Ashley and I were discussing the challenges of singleness vs. dating, and how the Gospel of Jesus applies to it all.

Ashley is dating a man in our church, and she said that one of the things she’s looking forward to someday is never having to say good-bye to him. When (if) they get married, he won’t have to walk her to her door and go back to his own home. They will be able to go to their home, and spend every evening, night, and morning together.

I’ve heard other couples say the same thing – that it gets harder to say good-bye, the longer you’re together. One of my roommates literally takes up to an hour to say good-bye to her boyfriend.

I poke fun at my roommate, but I remember when I was in Australia, and I felt like my Read More

Guest Blogger – Dave

.Reading time 15 minutes.

I wanted to tell more than just my stories on this blog; I wanted to get stories from other people – men, women, dating, single, living at home, living not at home, etc. So I recruited some guest bloggers. I’m excited to share Dave’s story with you today.

The Weight of Singleness

As a teenager, I had many aspirations but only a few that, from what I perceived from the world at that time, were realistic. Along with the dwindling 1st grade hope of becoming a professional football player, there were more realistic ambitions in my life, such as earning starting positions on the football and wrestling squads, a 4.0 GPA, and – like any young teenage boy – getting the girl. Of course, the assumption was the marriage thing, along with kids and the comfortable family structure that was modeled to me growing up, would follow.

As a teenage boy, there is not a lot of deep thought about marriage or a family. It was just assumed that was the way life would lead because that is what I saw to be the norm. Never did it once cross my mind that I would be approaching the age of 30 and, instead of sharing a house purchased by my hard-earned money with my wife and 5 kids, renting a 3-bedroom apartment with 2 other men. Read More