Category Archives: singleness

What You Really Want, part V

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pixabay/IsaacFryxelius

pixabay/IsaacFryxelius

Continued from Part IV:

Admitting and acknowledging loss is healthy, but staying in the place of endlessly verbalizing everything that’s wrong in your life will make you ugly. Guaranteed. You’ve got a choice, no matter where you are, to wither into bitterness, or bloom into joy. Emotional honesty is one step in the journey. Choice is another.

Choose Joy

In every season, life is going to be cruel and relentless and you will cry your eyes out over a myriad things, but you can choose joy. Things won’t ever be fair and your friends will have privileges you don’t, but you can choose joy. Could it be possible that you have gifts they’d like to have?

There is glory and beauty in the darkness, could we but see! And to see, we have only to look. (Giovanni, 1513)

In every life stage, we will need to choose joy and live with purpose in order to live fully. Technically, it’s the same for everyone: be thankful here and now, and carry the posture of living with open hands to accept whatever is given. Practically, it’s going to look different for different people with different giftings.

For you now, when you read stories to children who aren’t your own, can you try to delight in their shining eyes and pudgy fingers? When the tenth friend loses her heart to a wonderful man and you feel left behind, can you find just two things today to put on your Thanks List? Can you intentionally plan a way to serve someone beside you, choosing to be less princess and more servant even if everything in you screams against it?

Probably the most insidious temptation is to believe the lie that even God has forgotten you, left you behind, and thus you’ll have to cope on your own forever. This lie is absolutely toxic. Please don’t swallow it!

God, in His endless faithfulness, will give you reasons to believe the truth, but you need to keep your eyes open to see it. The changeless truth is that He’s intimately acquainted with everything that makes you ache and smile. He’s never turned His face away from you—not even for a second—and even when you feel like despairing, He’s up to something good. It’s true!

Joy is far more than positive thinking or collecting cute sayings on Pinterest* or posing with a Starbucks cup. Joy comes from knowing your designer’s heart and knowing His intentions for you are good, good, good. Always. You can hang your heart on that and you will have joy that bubbles out often, and even if no man notices it, that joy will make you beautiful!

Which is really what you want, isn’t it?

 

This was an article I wrote for Daughters of Promise, a beautiful magazine for young women. Maybe you want to subscribe to it for the year, or give it for a gift?

*Relax–I LOVE Pinterest! And Starbucks. =)

What You Really Want, IV

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wedding-342678_1280

Continued from Part III:

When you start looking for things to be thankful for, you’ll be surprised at what emerges. Try it!

Self-pity equals wrinkles

Think of the most beautiful lady you know. I’m going to guess that she doesn’t spend much time pitying herself, but that her face is turned toward the light, and that she shines even when she’s honest about hard things.

There’s very little virtue in chirping “I’m alright—everything’s fine—who needs a man anyway?” I’m always on a search for emotional honesty because it’s at that point that truth can start soaking in, change us, and bring us to freedom. It’s ok to tell God that you’re tired of waking up alone and that it stinks to go to weddings alone. God’s big enough to take any rants you have. I hope that you also have a few friends with whom you can be honest. It’s ok to cry. You’re allowed to admit that you grieve a love that has no name or face.

Being honest (Jesus can take it off you!) means being vulnerable but also knowing the truest, most loyal love you will ever know.

You will not know the comfort and companionship of Jesus if you always insist that you’re ok, don’t need any help, and are never lonely.

While I was writing this article, I was drinking coffee in a darling café in Warsaw. (The café’s name was “Między Słowami” which means “among words.” Yes, it was as idyllic as it sounds. I’m very, very rich!) I looked up suddenly, and across the room, a tall, dark man was watching me. He was so handsome, I stopped breathing for a minute. He was too far away for me to see any emotion in his face, (Interest? Curiosity?) but a wave of something washed over me because suddenly I wanted to be noticed, delighted in, seen as beautiful, because no man does that for me.

Being honest about the voids I feel is ok, but I couldn’t stay there, and left the café when my coffee was finished.

Admitting and acknowledging loss is healthy, but staying in the place of endlessly verbalizing everything that’s wrong in your life will make you ugly. Guaranteed. You’ve got a choice, no matter where you are, to wither into bitterness, or bloom into joy. Emotional honesty is one step in the journey. Choice is another.

What You Really Want, III

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wedding-342678_1280

Continued from Part II:

Because—and this is something to face squarely—you’re not a princess. As the Polish say so smoothly: you’re not the bellybutton of the world! Less princess and more servant will make your life richer than you can imagine.

Thanks multiplies joy

Being intentionally thankful for specific things makes your life blossom. One day I was pitying myself about being far away from my friends and my friend Jenny said, “Anita, you HAVE to give thanks NOW for THIS. If you don’t, you’re going to become a bitter, miserable person.” I burst into tears and said I don’t want to be bitter and miserable. So later that day, even though I felt everything was gray and dismal, I heard a CD playing beautiful songs and I made myself thank God that I could hear. I was washing dishes and looked out the window and saw bright blue sky and made myself thank God that I could see.

It was a baby step, but it was in the right direction, and I started thinking about how overwhelmingly rich I am, just by acknowledging two senses.

My friend Sarah says being thankful is life-changing. She was burning out by working full time and going to college and pulling all-nighters for brutal classes. She found a little hide-out in a stairwell at college that became her refuge. Here she could sit on the carpet and cry and list the things she was thankful for, despite her extreme exhaustion. One day as she sat there, she heard another student in the stairwell on his phone, talking for ten minutes, telling his friend that prayer makes a difference and that he should keep praying because God hears. Sarah put that conversation on her list. When you start looking for things to be thankful for, you’ll be surprised at what emerges. Try it!

What You Really Want, II

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wedding-342678_1280

Continued from Part I:

I know there are times when aloneness hits you and the idea of joy feels like a joke. I don’t know if anyone really gets used to being alone. But do you want to live without joy? Please don’t write it off as an impossible quality. Even if your dreams aren’t coming true and even if you fight back tears while the sparkly-eyed bride unwraps her gifts.

Looking beyond our bellybutton

Let’s look for some perspective. To do that, we many need to think outside our boxes.

What if you’re single now so that you can love on the troubled little ones at Kids Club? Could it be that your being unattached frees you to be more flexible and available to serve in places that need undivided energy and passion?

Is it possible that this season is giving you tools that will improve the rest of your life—skills like discipline, mindfulness, sensitivity, thankfulness? So where you’re at now does have purpose! While marriage is our design, no time of our life is solely a waiting area. Every stage is preparation and experience for the next step.

Let’s not waste time by pitying ourselves or begrudging others’ gladness. If I marry, I don’t want to look back on these years with regret. I want to have lived to the hilt and colored my days with the materials I had because I’ll know that today was preparation for my “new now.”

Being intentional means that sometimes you have to take yourself by the scruff of the neck and do what you don’t feel like. For example, when you’re going somewhere alone and you feel extra lonely, try singing. Maybe prayer songs? Or “Abide With Me”?

On a night when your best friend is going on a date, you could try to plan something that will keep you focused and involved with at least one other person. Not as an escape, but as a way to be pro-active and forward-thinking and not so near-sighted.

Because—and this is something to face squarely—you’re not a princess. As the Polish say so smoothly: you’re not the bellybutton of the world! Less princess and more servant will make your life richer than you can imagine.

What You Really Want

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wedding-342678_1280

The next 5 blog posts are going to be installments of an article I wrote for Daughters of Promise, a beautiful magazine for young women. The theme of the current issue is “intentionality, direction, and cheer”, so that was the over-arching theme I aimed for while writing about singleness.

If you and I would meet over coffee today and we’d introduce ourselves, I wonder how you’d describe yourself and your days. Maybe you’d tell me you were planning a bridal shower last night for your best friend. And tomorrow you plan to babysit your nephews after work. And that you love your job and your nephews and can’t wait for your friend’s wedding.

I’d notice your smile and the way you nod in anticipation. Would you also have the courage to talk about the pang that lies just under your happy activity?

Talking honestly about the ache of singleness might be taboo for you, but I’d like to erase some of that hesitance. Here is where we call it what it is, because honesty is the first step in walking toward freedom and light.

So on the night of that bridal shower, if something stabs you with wishing you could have some of those pretty things and lovely dreams, this is permission to admit the stab. Or your hunger when you hold your nephew to read a story and put him to sleep and you want your own little one to hold.

This is also a call for decisively stepping out of the pool of pain you could drown in. It’s not Operation Bootstrap. It’s the posture of open hands that will save you. Intentionally choosing another way of looking at things will also save you, as well as adopting purpose and joy here and now. These are some of the habits of abundance that God created us for.

I know there are times when aloneness hits you and the idea of joy feels like a joke. I don’t know if anyone really gets used to being alone. But do you want to live without joy? Please don’t write it off as an impossible quality. Even if your dreams aren’t coming true and even if you fight back tears while the sparkly-eyed bride unwraps her gifts.

We Have Only to Look

Posted in life, Poland, recommendations, singleness by

the winds of skagit.

Recently I read the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. It’s the riveting story of her childhood, raised by her artist/hippy/rebel/paranoid parents who were always on the run. She writes with great candor and grace, never bitter about how she got dangerously burned while boiling hotdogs at age 3, or how she was forced to root in the garbage cans for food in high school because she was starving.

(It’s a really rough story in spots, and I don’t recommend it for young readers or to anyone who takes offense at honesty.)

I listened to several interviews with Jeannette, and something she said keeps coming back to me: the worst thing that happens to us is actually the best thing that happens to us.

So she was starving during much of her childhood, but it means that now she appreciates how she can go to a grocery story and buy ANYthing she wants. Their poverty limited them terribly, but it didn’t keep her dad from taking her out on the porch and giving her the planet of her choice for Christmas. He’d said she could have any star she wanted, but when she asked for Venus, he said “It’s Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.” What other child ever got Venus for Christmas?!

It keeps coming back to me–the idea that the things that are ‘bad’ can become something good. I say it carefully here, because I’ve not walked through the deep, devastating losses that many people have. But I want it to be true, that pain doesn’t have the last word, and that the yucky can be changed into good.

In my days and hours and minutes, it looks something like this:

  • When I repeatedly bruise myself in our poorly-designed kitchen, it means we have food to cook and dishes to wash.
  • I don’t like living on the first floor of our apartment building, but just outside my bedroom window yesterday I got to watch an older man carry a wooden cabbage slicer the size of Texas. It was wide enough to take a whole head of cabbage. Only in Poland!
  • A student who drains me is the reminder that I have energy to work and I have a job where I can be creative and be challenged every day, keeping boredom far away.
  • Housemates who have different priorities than I, resulting in potential frustrations, means I don’t live alone. Thus, I’m rarely lonely, and hopefully I won’t become stiff and unbending. (For an excellent read on this phenomenon, please treat yourself here.)
  • Being single when most women my age are mothers of teenagers means I am free to plan trips with my friends at a moment’s notice. Or pile books on the empty half of the bed.
  • Having undergone a harrowing surgery and long recovery gives me sensitivity to others’ physical pain and limitations.

Part of me doesn’t like listing these things, in fear that it feels chirpy. No one who is walking through a dark time wants to hear glib, pat words like “Look–you have dishes to wash which is more than some people have!” Or “Hey, be thankful for your freedom to travel!”

I think the transformation of good coming out of bad is a process of perspective that is hardly possible in the middle of the mess. There is value in being honest and saying “This really stinks, and I hate this.” But to walk out of that and look back on it from a safe distance is redemptive and healing.

Which is what God is all about. The change of perspective is way more than positive thinking and pulling yourself up by your own shoe strings. The picture of peace and joy and glory shining out of negative situations has God’s fingerprints all over it. Because His character is light, and the darkness will never, ever, ever over-power it.

This is what I hang my heart on.

Read The Glass Castle if you want to read a story told by a masterful writer. But more importantly, maybe today you can try to step back from your story and find the streaks of light piercing your clouds.

The beauty might surprise you.

There is glory and beauty in the darkness, could we but see!

And to see, we have only to look. –Fra Giovanni, in 1513

Why You Need My Book

Posted in My Book, recommendations, singleness by

In case you didn’t get the memo, my book has a brand new look!

This is the new and improved edition:

ta daa!

 

book cover

Because I’m more artist than business person, it is super hard for me to promote or manage or try to sell my book. But here I am, trying to do that.

Why would you want to buy this book? (This is the first tool of the salesperson, you know: create a need for the product.)

You need this book because you feel left behind while your friends are all doing amazing things like dating, or planning weddings, or having babies. You’re watching it happen all around you but it’s not happening to you. You nearly swallow the tantalizing lie that God is organizing others’ lives, but expects you to manage your own by yourself.

Or some of those exciting things have happened to you but you feel empty and your days blur into each other and you wonder if life is just about surviving every day until the supper dishes are washed.

If none of this applies to you, you know you have a friend who feels this way, almost dipping into desperation sometimes, and she needs a message that she can identify with. She needs to know that she’s not the only one to feel this way, that other women say “You? Me too.”

After you buy this book that you need, you find that you like it too. You like it because of the perky little fish on the cover that decided not to keep swimming in circles. You like it because there are sweet swirly graphics between the chapters. And an engaging study guide in the back.

And best of all? In my opinion?

There are lots of sidebars throughout the whole book–and none of them repeat any words in the text. This is my pet complaint in other books: they have little distracting sidebars here and there, and when I finally read them, it only repeats what I already read on the page, and it makes me impatient. Not in this book. The (pretty) sidebars are bonuses to the text, not repetitive distraction.

This new and improved edition has the same general message as the first edition. This one has been edited for tighter writing, fewer exclamation points, less italics (though you wouldn’t think it, seeing this post) and more clarity.

This book won’t answer all your questions or give you pat answers or neat formulas. But it does walk with honesty into basic questions such as Who is God, and who am I, and what shall I do with my unwieldy dreams?

This is not about taking charge of your own life, nor about proving that your life is better than another’s. It’s about living in the reality of knowing that the greatest thing that could happen has already happened–the creator of the universe chose you for eternity–and nothing can ever, ever change that. It’s about making choices decisively so as to guard against selfishness and stiffness. It peers into others’ stories to give you perspective and a sense of not feeling so alone.

Because one of the deepest fears of a woman is that she is alone. This book confronts that fear and reassures you that you are never, ever, ever alone.

If you don’t need this assurance, you know someone who does.

Order your copy from your local book store or the helpful staff at Christian Learning Resource:

Toll Free: 877-222-4769        Fax: 814-789-3396              Email: clr@fbep.org            Online: www.Christianlearning.org

 

Who is a Mother? Part II

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If you sit with empty arms on Mother’s Day, and your life feels devoid of beauty and miracles, ask God for opportunities to be His reflection of love and nurture.

In Isaiah 54:1, He promises that the childless woman will have more children than the mother with a husband and family. God keeps His word in amazing ways—try Him and see! When I asked God to help me be as Christ to people, He gave me opportunities that I would never have imagined. But, as all birth mothers know,  high callings and great privileges come with the price of servanthood and selfless love, and sometimes the cost makes me stagger.

After the Emmaus walk with Jesus, it was in the breaking of the bread that the men recognized Him. If we women symbolize bread as nourishment for our world, it is in the breaking of that bread that Christ is made visible. Spiritually broken and consumed in hidden, thankless, ordinary places, we are part of a calling that is bigger than any of us—the privilege of introducing the real Christ to people for whom He may be only a dusty relic.

Motherhood—nurturing in brokenness—is a beautiful but demanding calling to which childless women are not exempt.  This calling is not just a spare hole to fill in life’s puzzle. It is the whole purpose for which He created us women.

Following Christ’s example of love and service can make us feel drained and exhausted. But God anticipated these feelings of being used and spent. In Isaiah 58: 10 & 11, He promises that if we spend ourselves in behalf of others, He will satisfy our souls in return. While we pour out our lives as Christ did, God pours out even more life to us. We can never out-give Him!

And His care is not only spiritual or intangible or theoretical. He sends people at just the right time to remind us of our worth and help us feel the sun on our shoulders.

When my sister-in-law became a mother and was looking forward to celebrating Mother’s Day for her first time, she anticipated how some of us would feel, and she ordered a bouquet for the church house. After the Mother’s Day service, all the ladies who encouraged and influenced younger ones were invited to choose a flower from the bouquet to take home.

I chose a white tulip—white to symbolize purity and a tulip to symbolize hope. Because hope does good things to my heart even if I’m never given what I long for. And I can know that even if the shape of my life is different from most women my age, my calling still carries value and beauty.

It is Mother’s Day and I am not a mother. But because I am God’s daughter and want to reflect His character of care and nurture to a world devoid of these virtues, my identity is already sure. My value is not based on how many babies I have borne. That He should trust His perfect character to be reflected by this fallible, easily-distracted lady is a high honor indeed.

For this privilege, I thank Him today.

Yesterday: Part I

It’s All Good News

Posted in life, My Book, recommendations, singleness by

The lecture comes first and then the fun part:

I was with my family visiting another family whom we didn’t know well. When us girls were getting acquainted, one young lady’s first question to me was “So, do you have a boyfriend?”

I said no. I was so stunned by her question that I still, eighteen years later, remember reeling from the realization that having a boyfriend was the way she valued/ranked her life and her friends’ lives.  While I wanted a boyfriend, I still felt deeply that not having one wouldn’t keep me from living well. Some years later, this girl was so crushed when her sisters married, that she couldn’t function well, and was so desperate that she made tragically unwise, harmful decisions to take whatever man would take her.

In our sub-culture that is pro-family–and rightly so–the girl who has no boyfriend or husband feels a lot of pressure and silent questions. She might be 20 or 29, and very satisfied and fulfilled.  OR she might be 19 or 23 and feel cheated and left behind and missing out. People wonder if she chose to be single. She wonders if she’ll ever get to choose a baby name. People unhelpfully recommend a good man to her, but what can she do about him?

I wrote a book called Life is For Living–Not for Waiting Around for the girl who is forlorn and desperate, because I know that God had infinitely more in mind for her when He first dreamed her up. The book doesn’t answer the unanswerable questions, nor resolve all the hang-ups we get stuck on. One of my friends said that when she reads it, she feels like I understand her and am walking with her in this solo walk. It was high praise, and fulfilled part of what I dreamed the book would be.

Because a big fear of women is that we’re on our own. I think we can do anything if we know we’re not alone. My book is a kind of companion that says “I get it. I know, me too.”

Wives and mothers tell  me they like the book as well, because everyone needs a voice beside them that urges them to search out abundance and fullness in Jesus. Romance and children are beautiful and rich  gifts, and not everyone is given them. Is that fair? Hardly. But the good news is that life and fulfillment for every lady is found in one person, and his name is Jesus.

The fun part is this: we’re doing a close-out special, a 60% discount, on my book until March 31.  Which means it’s $4.40 now instead of 10.99.  Order here from Christian Learning Resource. Wholesalers, contact the office and  get 75% off. 

This would be a good chance to buy copies for a study group. Contact me and I’ll be glad to send you a study guide–free!–for your group.

Spread the word–let your friends know, forward this post, share it on your networking places–and I would be so grateful!

Joys and a Bargain

Posted in books, My Book, singleness by

Because it’s always fun to get a bargain, and because it’s becoming that time of year when you need gifts for girl friends who already have everything, here’s a deal:

You can order my book, Life is for Living from Christian Learning Resources and when you buy one, you get one free. If you buy 10, you get 10 free. You get the idea.  (Wholesalers, you get 70% off orders over 20, that way you can pass on the deal to your customers.  Wholesalers should call 877-222-4769 or email clr@fbep.org to place an order and receive this discount.)

The promotion is alive now on the CLR website, and closes on January 1.

I wrote the book for single girls aged 20 -30 who felt left behind and forgotten and depressed while all their friends were getting married. But mothers and pastors wives have written me to say that they benefited from the book because the gist of it is to embrace life and look for the joy wherever it is because it really is everywhere.

My joys the last few days:

1. brilliant sunsets

2. a surprise box filled with goodies all the way from the US

3. morning coffee with a drop of cream

4. hope of snow