Tag: gospel-centered singleness

My Quasi-Purity

.Reading time 10 minutes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is Part 2 of 2 on the topic of Virginity and Sexuality – or at least my experience with it.

I sat in Freshman Biology my first semester of college, averting my eyes from the PowerPoint slides and picking my jaw up off the floor. I was stunned and horrified because

  • I had just learned was sex was.
  • It took me until I was 18 years old to learn this.*

Over the years, I’ve been so embarrassed by that second fact that I’ve just lied and told people I was “like 15 or 16” when I learned about the birds and the bees.

For years, I still somehow managed to remain mostly innocent, despite some of the not-so-innocent books I had to read in college. I fast-forwarded certain scenes in PG-13 movies, whispered the word “sex” the first few times I had to use it in a non-gender-related way, and refused to laugh at Read More

My Unplanned Virginity

.Reading time 10 minutes.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is Part 1 of 2 on the topic of Virginity and Sexuality – or at least my experience with it.

I am a virgin.

I am 31 years old.

I never would have guessed the crazy/awkward/unexpected conversations and situations this fact would get me into.

  • Like the time a few months ago that I went for a check-up, and the doctor didn’t believe that I’ve never been sexually active, ever. He kept looking at me like, “Are you suuuuuure there isn’t something you want to tell me?”
  • Or the time my host mom in Australia found out I was a Christian and immediately asked, “So I guess you’re a virgin, then?”
  • Even my carpool buddy at work would get asked by coworkers, “So Charity…she’s never…you know…done it?”

Ummmm…no, I haven’t. Read More

My Selective Faith

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I sat on my bed in the basement, boxes packed and piles sorted. I would be leaving the next day to travel for an indefinite amount of time with my job. God had heard my angst and found a way to get me out of Minnesota, and I couldn’t WAIT to get on the road and explore the county.

I plopped backwards, exhausted from packing during recovery from wisdom tooth removal surgery, when my friend walked in. We’d been friends for 10 years, and he had come out from the East Coast to help me move down to Missouri.

He had his “Let’s have a serious talk” face on, and I graciously suppressed a groan and scootched myself up onto pillows. I watched him sit down in my pink desk chair, thinking, “Please don’t let this be a DTR, please don’t let this be a DTR.”

It was a DTR.* Read More

My Bed of Self-Pity

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I came home from work, gave my mom a kiss hello, headed to the basement, kicked off my heels, and flopped down on my pink bed in my pink room – the quintessential picture of someone torn between girlhood and adulthood.

I was 28 years old.

In the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to teenage angst, I called out to God, “My life tooooootaaaaalllllllyyyyyy suuuuuuucks! <sob> I just don’t know why-y-y-y-y! <hiccup>”

I’d moved with my parents to Minnesota about 11 months earlier, and it was getting rather old to have to follow the same rules as my 11-year-old brother while living with my parents.

“God, I hate it here!” I sobbed and Read More

My Statistical Doom

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I took a bite of crock-pot spaghetti, enjoying my church’s weekly potluck. Little did I know the conversation I was in for.

“I read a blog by a pastor this week, who was advocating for young marriage,” David said.

My ears perked up, and the rest of us at the lunch table turned toward him.

“Yeah, he was quoting statistics on how people who marry before the age of 26 have the lowest divorce rate,” David expounded. He sighed, “I’m 24, so I guess I have only a year or two to find a wife.”

My immediate response was one of offense: “How can that pastor say that? How can he tell me, a 27-year-old single woman, that I’m doomed for divorce just because I didn’t find the right man by now?”

The other people at our table jumped into the discussion, and I sat there a little bit horrified as people of all ages ended up agreeing with the pastor that David had mentioned.

I drove home from church, Read More

My Unfair Assumptions

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In the spring of 2009, Melissa was married, my best friend Evie was engaged, and my other friend Noel was about to be engaged any minute. I could have papered my walls with wedding invitations.

It seemed so easy for everyone else. I even asked some of them, “How do you get a boyfriend?” The answer was always something like, “Well, you find a guy you like, you Define The Relationship (DTR), you date, you DTR again, you get engaged, and then you enlist Charity to help with the wedding.”

That answer was infinitely frustrating. At 26, I was SO TIRED of watching everyone else meet their men or women, fall in love, and get to plan their weddings – like it was no big deal to just *poof* find the love of your life and *poof* get married.

I joyfully performed bridesmaidy duties twice that summer, musing over my lack of love life thus far. Read More

My Best Solution

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Melissa and I packed up our apartment – taping boxes, sorting through junk, navigating piles that made our living room look like “Bed, Bath & Beyond” sneezed in it. Wedding decorations here, Goodwill there, Melissa’s stuff, Charity’s stuff…

Melissa was getting married and moving out in the same day; I (in probably the stupidest decision I’ve ever made) was also moving out the same weekend as the wedding.

Basically, I had three (very first-world) problems: Read More

My Wandering Eyes

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I had my visa, passport, plane ticket, and 140 lbs of luggage in hand – headed, beyond my wildest dreams, back to Australia for a year to work. I was turning 23, and I clearly hadn’t been looking for a man in the right places in college (2:1 girl:guy ratio, after all), so it made sense to buckle down and get a man before I came back to the USA.

Nothing in my worldview had prepared me for the idea that I might be single without marriage prospects at the end of college. And what better place to find a man than Australia? The Sydney Opera House is still the single most romantic place I’ve ever been, and I’d like to go there on a date sometime – which could prove expensive if my man weren’t in Australia already.

So I looked. I made the year unnecessarily stressful with almost constant thoughts of “Is this the one? How about that one? No? Ooh, he’s cute, can it PLEASE be him?” (Granted, my options were limited once I ruled out all the men who were my students or housemates.)

After a year of working in Oz (slang for Australia – I feel so cool right now), I moved back in with my parents in Oregon. The exotic men of Australia were replaced by non-Christians at work and suuuuuuper homeschooly men at church, so obviously I didn’t marry any of them.

Clearly, I needed to try online dating. At my sisters’ suggestions (“Come on, you’re turning 25 on Valentine’s Day weekend!”), I created an eHarmony.com* profile during a “free communication weekend” and went man-shopping.

A couple of years later, I fussed around with ChristianMingle.com. After I moved to San Diego, I checked out the free okcupid.com. I found out from a friend that there’s such a thing as reformedsingles.com; I didn’t know whether to join to be serious or to make fun of it.

My coworker in San Diego once convinced me to go so far as to pay for one month on ChristianMingle. She and I tried sooooooo hard to find me a man on there.

None of the sites kept my interest for long, though, because

a)      It was too much like shopping online for shoes (search for men by keyword? Really?), only with a higher-stakes return policy.

b)      It was too much effort for the little bit of return I got from it.

So at some point, I deactivated all of my online dating profiles, crumpled up my working mental list of potential husbands, threw up my hands, and said, “God, You’re in charge.”

(I’m not knocking online dating; I know many people for whom it has worked out great. I’m just saying that, for me, it was one more way of trying to do God’s job for Him.)

I’d like to report here that, having identified behavior that is not respectful to God’s plan, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that the “marriageable until proven otherwise” way of looking at things is probably not healthy. I’d like to say that I’ve started to trust God – like, really trust Him, not just say I do while still checking out every man in a suit.

But I’m not good with this. I still have a running list of bachelors with “Eligible to Date Charity” status. I do crumple it up every once in a while, but only so I can start from scratch.

I didn’t know at first how to make this blog post Jesus-y. I really had no idea how the story of God/Jesus applied to this post, and I almost decided to scrap it. But then a friend reminded me of two things:

Jesus was not exactly the man I would take home to my parents. He was unattractive, unemployed, homeless, and connected by choice to scumbags and unlovely people.

How funny is that? If Jesus had a profile on plentyoffish.com, he wouldn’t meet any of my search criteria (except maybe “loves to travel”). Yet, He is the One I absolutely need. He fulfills my greatest spiritual need (salvation from my sin – Luke 19:10), my greatest emotional need (comfort – I Cor. 1:3-4), and my greatest physical need (life – Col 1:16-17).

Regardless, Jesus is taking me home to His Father.

If Jesus had a profile on match.com, I wouldn’t meet any of His search criteria. I’m not 100% perfect (Rom 3:23) or completely loving (I Cor 13). Yet, despite my ugly sin and my tendencies to judge people by keywords, Jesus voluntarily takes my sin from me (Rom 4:25), clothes me in His righteous royal robes (I Cor 1:30), and gives me a home with Him for eternity (John 14:2).

I don’t know if those two thoughts will keep me from searching for my man, but I hope to keep them in the forefront of my mind the next time (and the next and the next…) that I want to ask God, “What about this one?”

The answer is, of course, “It doesn’t matter; Jesus is better than the future Mr. Charity” – whether that lucky man is in Australia, online, or in the next pew.

(On an unrelated topic, does anyone feel like jaunting on over to the Sydney Opera House with me?**)

 

* It didn’t take long for me to give up on eHarmony. I spent an hour telling the much-hyped personality test stuff about myself, and the site spit all that same information back to me in grammatically incorrect sentences. Is anyone with me on this?

** Now taking applications for a travel buddy – preference given to Jesus-loving bachelors.

My Deserved Reward

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The airplane’s wheels touched down in Portland, Oregon, and my heart jumped up and down in anticipation of seeing my family again. The plane took foreeeeeeverrrrrrrr to disgorge its passengers, until I could skip down the corridors of PDX, straining to see my family past the “No Re-entry” sign.

I’d been in Australia for a semester with 32 other American students, and I missed them already; but there’s nothing like the carpet at PDX to make you feel good about being back. Not only that, but I’d made it through college and would be graduating in a few days.

Despite everyone’s good intentions upon my departure to Australia a few months before, I did not actually find an Australian man to date. In fact, this conversation grew really old really fast: Read More

My Pursuit of Happiness

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“I don’t need a man, in order to be happy,” I remember telling my mom one day when I was 21 or so.

At the time, my life was super fulfilling, and my outlook on my circumstances was rosy. I’d gotten a taste of globetrotting with a semester at Oxford; I had a job I loved; I’d found outlets for my passionate creativity, in class and in editing and writing for the school newspaper.

Plus, I mean, I was a senior in college, and this finger didn’t have a ring by that spring, or the one before that, or the one before that… So I had decided to stop waiting for the (pink diamond) ring and just live life.

The plan was great on the outside. Read More