Tag: birthday

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 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