Single for Valentines Day?: Part 1 ~Choose~

This post is the first one in a short series I hope to write called Single for Valentines Day? (if time permits)!

Reading one of my favorite blogs today I clicked on everyone of her links ... the two in this post, these two, and this one (I was particularly struck by this one). And as I was reading I was struck with how people are going about Valentines Day!

I have gone through the time in my life when I felt so lonely and sad (and at times I still do) because I didn't have a man. It didn't even have to be Valentines Day. Any holiday would get me down, sad, lonely and feeling sorry for myself. In fact it didn't have to be a holiday either, any day would be as good a day as any for me to sulk and be lonely. Any time I saw a couple together I was instantly sad and lonely.

To help "cure" my loneliness I would write stories and, in my stories, of course, there would be a girl and a boy, both lonely and sad, much like myself. In the story this and that would happen, they would meet, they would like each other and thus began the most romantic stories of all time.

And for a time I was happy, not quiet as lonely. I would take the joy my characters "experienced" and live my life with that joy ... for a day, at the most two.

So while waiting for another of the best love stories of all time to pop into my head I would read love story after love story from the library. Taking what joy I could from them as well.

But looking at it now, at all the time I felt lonely and sad, wondering if I was ever going to get married, I think: isn't loneliness a choice? I don't mean the actual state of being alone, I mean the choice to feel alone? You make the choice to love? So do you make the choice to feel lonely?

As Elizabeth suggested, let's be positive. But I'm going to change that just slightly. Let's not just be positive, let's choose to not be lonely, let's choose to be rejoicing, let's choose to be giving, let's choose to be loving, let's to choose be like Christ! Instead of thinking of what we, as unmarried Christian ladies, don't have, namely a man, let's choose to think instead of what we do have. And I won't lie, at times it's hard, so what do we do? Pray! God will give you the strength to do everything He has called you to do, even being single. Ask Him for the strength to choose to be happy, to choose to love Him and to choose to not be sad and lonely.

We have the best man we could ever want, one who is perfect in every way, who will never leave us lonely, who will never disappoint us (as human men can), who has given us His love, what else could we ask for? God has given us all we need for living to honor and glorify Himself right now, at the point in life that we are at ... all we need right now! If God saw that we could love and serve Him better with a man, don't you think we would already have that man?

So thinking about what we do have again we can remember ... we already have everything we need! Perhaps, it's not everything we want, but God knows what we need, when we need it. If He saw that we were ready for a man, as I've said before, we would have him. But if we don't have him, let us take this time to love Christ more, to rejoice in the time we have to learn more about Him and grow in Him, to submit to being tried, tested, purified, so that we become not only what God wants us to be, but so that we are shaped, more and more into the women that will be perfectly made for the man God has for us!

More to come...