SINGLE AGAIN

Loneliness, hope, despair, expectation, emptiness.

Temptation, purity, being loved by God.

Years and years…

Years of prayers sometimes with tears….

Sometimes content, mostly longing, waiting, asking, begging, repenting, protected, Helped by God to remain pure.

Rescued from being unequally-yoked.

I never had a father in the home. I went to an all-girls high school. I was “boy crazy” but so shy.

When i became single again, at first i was content, so busy learning about God, getting to know Him.

As time went on did i lose my first love? Was it a sin to want to remarry? But i saw what the original purpose of God’s plan for marriage and longed for this…

My ex-husband remarried quickly to a wonderful woman who has always been very kind to me.

He has recently passed away and she is a widow now. I thank God that God provided a good unselfish wife for him that brought him happiness for the rest of his life on earth.

There were adventures in being single-so many silly stories 

…me bringing a homeless elderly man to my apartment making my friends frightened, …being silly with single friends in church who understood the longing and loneliness, …visiting older widows in the nursing home, ….taking a man who was not a Christian on a dinner date to explain to him why i couldn’t date him because i told him “you can’t build a house with two different sets of blueprint”…loudly singing Broadway musical love songs while mopping the floors and cleaning toilets at my janitor job. …Counseling young college girls about why you should not casually date and not “give away a kiss without carats” and then in answer to this they presented a “ring” of threaded carrot slices on valentine’s day. 

Visiting my widowed Aunt Ruth taking her to Detroit’s tourist places both saying we were “two blondes out on the town”.

Spontaneous dancing with the college kids, being silly, wandering all over the college town together. Us girls answering a frat boy asking, “where’s the party?” With “in heaven with Jesus!”

The girls driving me for an hour at 2am to take me to the hospital to say goodbye to Aunt Ruth and tell her that i loved her just as she died.

My thought was that i might be single all the rest of my life or He might be preparing me to enter into ministry with someone special. I did not know. I could only trust and wait.

Please see the poem “Winterberries” in the poetry section of this site….

I was encouraged by missionaries like Amy Carmichael and Elizabeth Elliot and so many that trusted God and sacrificed marriage for the sake of the gospel.

At that time in my life, now that Justin was grown, I felt sure that I was supposed to go to China as a single tent maker missionary. I was learning Chinese from local grad students from China. I was terribly afraid of being tempted to get off this course I had planned that God would take me on to serve Him.  

God later surprised me later by shutting that door to China very soundly.