Dynamite.

Note: People are probably tired of hearing my thoughts on singleness. Maybe you don't want to read this because I've already said too much. So don't. I won't blame you. But I always assume that what I feel and think might encourage at least one person, and so I take heart, and publish what oftentimes seems like redundancies. 
Jesus said a lot of things three times. 
I am most definitely not Jesus. But Eloise's Nanny also said a lot of things three times. And I'm kind of like her, so I figure it's okay to repeat myself. 
So. Here you go, here you go, here you go. 

I found myself apologizing the other day for being single. 

I’m sorry you're alone, I told myself. I’m sorry you’ve been passed by. I'm sorry you're missing out. I’m sorry no one wants you.

I wanted someone to say all of that to me so badly. To come up to me with open arms and press me against their chest so I could finally just cry out those tears that have been brimming. But no one was there, so I said it to myself. 

But I didn't cry. Not like I thought I would
Instead I felt sick.

We are constantly apologizing for or are being apologized to, because we are single. And I see now that that is wrong. We don't have to apologize for being alone. You don’t have to apologize to me because I am alone. It’s not bad. It’s not a mistake. It’s not a sin. I am not single because no one’s noticed me or I didn't notice the right person. I am not single because I’m selfish. I am not single because the men I know are selfish. I didn't walk by my husband in the coffee shop and miss him. I didn’t deny someone’s pursuit even though I shouldn't have. I am not unattainable nor perfect. I am not a "Paul," and destined to go at it by myself. I want a husband. I want a family. I want to be loved and cherished and have someone devoted wholly to me. I want a human, a man, to be gentle and honest and transparent with.

Yet I am alone.

But I refuse to apologize for that anymore. Like I messed up somewhere along the way or missed my chance. And I don't want you to tell me that you’re sorry for me anymore. As if being alone is bad, and I only get half of a life. 

A big part of why being single is hard, is because we act like it’s wrong. 

Yes, marriage is a beautiful design, fashioned by the hand of the Carpenter. He intends for us to love and be loved. But when we walk around in despair because we don’t have that in the way we think we should, and then other people around us attempt to comfort us and tell us that someday we’ll get there, as if we are destined to reach that, we will always be unhappy. 

We will always be apologizing for being alone. 

It’s not okay. And I am not okay with it anymore. I'm done with it. I'm done with being pitied and pitying myself. I wrote that in my journal, those words, and then I also wrote,

So here's to being dynamite. 

Because I want to make a difference. I want to be big and blossoming and a giver. I want to shoot off sparks and blaze up the pathways of life. I want to be a world shaker, and I'll be darned if you tell me I will only be half as good without a husband while I do that. And I'll be darned if you think I am a lost cause or a sad case or not as influential as I could be. And I'll be darned if you think the most important thing in life for a woman to have is a rock that sparkles on her finger, because the truth is, she's what sparkles and if you don't see that, look again. We are who we make ourselves out to be. I am lit, for the cause for Christ. And I refuse to be put down or to put myself down because I have yet to fulfill a divine construction that God gifted us with. There is no excuse, and no excuse is necessary. 

I once wrote the words,

Why is it that we make excuses for singleness?

It's not a disease. It's not a sin. It's not a personal failure. It's not a shortcoming. It's not the edge of a cliff. It's not something you should have to reassure yourself it is okay to be. It's not God's obvious will for your life forever since nothing else is on the horizon. It's not a problem. It's not a bad thing. It's not because you're not trying. It's not a season of your life to 'date' Jesus instead of a boyfriend. It's not your church's fault. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's not the definition of you.

If you are under the impression that any of those is correct, I regret to inform you that being single is simpler than all that. 

Being single is just you, alone. It means that you are alone, you are one person, you are yourself. It is just a fact. And you have no need of defending or refuting it. Your only task is to live it.

Don't get me wrong, it's alright to fail at embracing your current state of being and get mad that no one puts their arm around your shoulders, but at the end of the day, you have to recognize that this is what it is. You have to stop looking for something better, other than being better. 

You are singular. 

And the less time you spend dwelling on and despising that fact, the more time you will have to do beautiful things. 

Don't make yourself out to be half a person. I dare you not to. Because trust me, you can do wondrous things for Christ now. 

Alone. 

Doing lovely things alone is not an impossible feat. 

If there is one thing I would add to that, it is this.

Singleness is not something we have to apologize for. If anything, what we owe an apology for, is the fact that we are lazy, and we are not dynamite, because we are too busy saying sorry for something we shouldn't be saying sorry for. We are too afraid to be bright, as if it is an inconvenience, to be a solitary mess of atoms and shine the most radiantly. 

Just because you are alone, does not mean you cannot be incandescent. 

I am actually good at being alone. I realized that a few months ago, on a blustery morning. I was walking towards campus, just coming from Starbucks, iced coffee in hand and the wind whipping my hair about my face while thunder rolled up above but the rain had yet to arrive, and I took stock of myself. A smile had creased the sides of my mouth for the past half hour, and as I heard my sandals slap on the concrete and pressed my fingers against a hole in the thigh of my jeans and glanced at the black gouache staining the back of my hands and wrists I thought, I'm happy. And I stuttered a little, because it was only a few weeks before that that I penned the words in my journal, There is no silver lining. But that morning, there was. There was a silver lining, and I was living in it. I was happy.
I am happy.
Most of my days are spent alone. Yes, surrounded by people oftentimes, but more often in solitude. I've taken to cultivating the garden of my heart, curating the collections of my bones, attempting to speckle wisdom throughout me and around me.

I am getting over myself, and I am brilliant and beaming and alone and I refuse to apologize for that. And you shouldn't apologize to me for it either. I'm not saying I will leave the wishing and wanting for a husband in the wake of doing all these lovely things whilst I am alone. 

What I am saying, is that I am determined to run into him while I am doing all these lovely things alone.

I don't want my future lover to find me pining away in self-pity and the pity of others while he has been a mountain climber and dream-chaser all this time. I want him to find me in a collision of luminosity while I am pioneering changes and making things better for those who need it.

I got to talk with one of my good friends the other week, and I told her this. Not in so many words, but the meaning came across. And she expressed everything I've felt while trying to come to this realization and conclusion. It's not fair, when you really think about it. I'll be honest, it's not fair. Because yes, time goes on and seems like it runs out, and one morning you're nineteen and on fire and don't care that no one loves you yet because you're going to do great things, and the next moment you're twenty-five and no one still loves you yet and you're tired of doing great things and it seems like everyone else has everything you ever wanted. It's really not fair.
But I am a big believer that life isn't fair, and it never will be. And I don't want to live a life so wrapped up in the belief that I am insufficient or dull or less luminous because some guy never asked me to marry him, that I don't do the things I should. That is such a waste; that is what is pitiful; that is what we must needs apologize for.

I do want to mention that the Church is guilty in all of this as well. We have approached singleness as if it's something we need to fix, or it's a season, or a ministry, when really it's just a bunch of people who need to be told they're capable–because they are. We have been foolish. We have acted as if we can cure people, or as if someone might be missing out because they haven't achieved the status of wife or husband, or as if one person is insufficient compared with a team of two. That's sad. That makes me sad. I don't want the Church to look at me anymore and say, Are you married yet? Do you need a boyfriend? Don't worry, we'll find you someone, and then you can be so close to Christ you'll never believe it...You're missing out. You need your other half. You'll never fully understand Christ's love till you're in the arms of that guy. I'm so tired of hearing things like that. I just want her to say to me, What are you doing for Christ? Because all throughout the Bible, God makes it so clear that singularity is key. Singularity is important. It's like we missed it and messed it up. Somewhere along the way, we forget that the whole point of marriage is for two people to become one. One. Single. Person. That's it. That's what marriage is, making one person. So why do we continue to sell other people short? It is ridiculous, the manner in which we approach the Christian life and walk. A couple is one. Yes, they are two people, but that does not mean they have twice the impact or twice the power or twice the influence that someone else has for Jesus. They are simply working together to do awesome things, while another is working to do awesome things as well.
The moment we recognize marriage as a beautiful picture that God designed and everyone gets to desire, but no one is promised, is the moment that people will get over themselves.
Marriage is most definitely God's intention for men and women [Genesis 2:18], but it is not a requirement.
Honestly? The Church doesn't need to "minister" to single people in the way that she does. They aren't broken. Yes, they need exhortation and encouragement and strengthening of faith, but most importantly, they need to be reassured that God created humans as capable creatures, and they are one of those capable creatures.
The less time we spend hanging out together trying to find a partner for this battle of life, means that we have more time to build wondrous things for the Carpenter.

I don't just want to meet some guy anymore. I want us to be holding hammers, knee deep in mud, arms covered in a brother's blood and someone else's load on our backs, fierceness written on our bones, and I want to look him in the eye and him to realize that we didn't spend our time waiting for each other, but dared to meet one another in the field.
I want miles of white out there when I fall in love, because I want to be in the middle of the harvest.
I want a marriage that starts in the middle of John 4:35. 

So here's to meeting in the trenches of life, blazing like none other. 

Here's to shining so bright you blind the ones you're helping.

Here's to setting everything behind you afire.

Here's to doing lovely things alone.

Here's to owning all of this.

Here's to being dynamite. 

Grace-giver

The orchard stretches for acres, so far that I cannot see the end of it."Pick four," He says with a straight face but a shiver of laughter, because He understands the temptation I feel the moment He limits me. After all, He was the one who created me. 

"Just four?" I plead, beg with Him. Four is so small, so tiny, so less than five or six or seven.  

"Just four." He stands by His decision. Four is enough. Four is more than enough for me to express the state of my heart to Him. I stare out across the gold and glory from the branch in the tree, and I choose. Slowly, carefully, picking plums that you aren't quite sure are the ripest and sweetest. Listening for the sticky, summer juices to speak to you, to pulse with the same thrumming that your blood is rushing through your veins with, and if you're quiet enough, you can hear it. Choosing swollen summer fruits. Choosing blessings. Just four.  

"Those are good," He tells me when I finish reaching my quivering hands up into my tree and harvesting those that I am unsure of, but still feel perfect to my touch and gaze. And I know, I know I've made loveliness for Him. I know I've given Him just a little bit of glory, a touch more of fatherly pride. I know that He is knowing me, bettering me, making me.  

"Thank you," I whisper to Him. "Thank you." 

Some mornings I count my blessings. It's actually becoming quite the habit. I do it in my bed, with the sheets pulled up to my nose and in a breathy whisper with bleary eyes. Or in the kitchen, sitting with my legs crossed and on the edge of the countertop, my hands wrapped around a hot mug of black tea. Or in my car, on the short drive to the university. Or in the shower, my fingers rubbing the sleep off my face and suds in my dripping curls. Everywhere it seems. I wake up, and I tell Him what I'm most thankful for, most blessed by.

This morning He asked for only four.

And so I laid there for a while, in the quiet sanctuary of my bedroom, light just spilling in through my window and the cold pressing on the pink tips of my toes when I snuck them out from underneath my comforter to aid myself in waking up. The Lord only wanted four, but I wanted them to be my best four, the four I was most sure of.
I was hardly sure of anything this morning.

"My childhood," I say after a brief hesitation.  

The wink is in His eye, but He never seems to wink. Maybe I just always miss it.  

"I like remembering all of it now. And I'm so grateful for it. Who it made me out to be, what I want now because of it. I never thought it would mean so much to me, but years build up with a weight that is fierce." 

He nods. He is the one who made that weight possible. 

"I appreciate it more now than ever before." 

One plum, plucked.

I've been learning how to be less. I'm at the end of C. S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce," and there's this part when it says, "Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountain." I think I understand that now. Here on earth, we make a decision to submit and nail our ear to His door, or to follow our own folly and reap that demise. If we choose the latter, we may become much in this place. But the first — if we decide upon the first, in the end we will be near nothing. We can only truly worship the Carpenter to the utmost of our souls if we give up all that we are and ever could be. And it is only then that we'll die enough to ourselves to enter His kingdom.
A lifetime of servitude for eternity with a white ribbon tied around it.
It's not so bad a trade-off when you recognize the worth on each end of the comparison. What is ninety years instead of forever? Nothing I want.

"People who offer more than is necessary." I get a little sad and choked up about this one. "I see how selfish I am now. How inadequate. How I don't give enough."  

He wraps His arm around my shoulder as I wipe a tear from my cheek with the palm of my hand. I feel His hip against mine as He envelopes me in His presence. "You will learn," He encourages me softly, gently. 

"I know," I tell Him. "It's made me love them more though, the ones who do give. Like they make up for my lack and fill my holes, replenish my gaps." 

He takes the second plum from my hands. "That's why I put them in your life," He tells me.

Jim Eliot once wrote the words in his journal, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." And in Luke 9 it says,
24For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. 25For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?
More and more the fact that I have to be less and less is becoming real and relevant to me.
I can't reconcile some things anymore because if it. This is a season of my life when I'm supposed to try and be attractive. I'm supposed to have my eyes open for that man to sweep me off my feet. I'm supposed to be beautiful and better and lovely. I'm supposed to capture the essence of what it means to be a wife so that someone will want to make me their wife.
I don't really want that though. Not in the same way I used to at least.
I want my whole life to be steeped in Jesus. Him and only Him. First and evermost. I want to preach Him daily, to present Him and His glory. I want people to notice me less, and see Him more.
I admit that it is hard. This is incredibly difficult for me. Because there is nothing I want more than to be a mother and wife.
Nothing, but Jesus.

I settle the third plum into his palm with little thought. It is an easy one, that called with a plumpness I could have recognized a mile away. "My ability to listen to sermons."  

His smile is unmistakable as He listens, and he presses a kiss onto my forehead.  

"I can remember when I didn't care. When I thought there was no one. When I actually believed I would be in my bedroom for the rest of my life only reading the words of C. S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers and Spurgeon and Hannah Hurnard, and I would never hear someone's voice say something so wonderful." I shake my head. "I remember believing that in all my naivety, C. S. Lewis' would be the only voice I ever loved so much. And I remember all the apathy that was born from that. But now," now I smile, "now there's Judah Smith and Mark Driscoll and my pastors and Tim Chaddick. All of them and more."  

"There will be even more," He tells me with delight.  

And I know, He will always give me more. I will discover them daily. And that sadness that I felt when I thought there would never be a voice along with the words of wisdom I loved so much will be gone. Because I can click a button, I can go to a service, I can call someone, and I can hear it. Out loud. Audibly. I can do that.

Because great men and women for the Lord live today as well. 

I was under the impression that I understood grace. But the Carpenter is continually placing me in churches and with people who want to talk about grace.
Grace and grace and grace.
This morning my pastor was preaching about Noah. You know what the point of the sermon was?
Grace.
And I sat there while he spoke, and I thought, I guess I'm not done with this. I guess there's more you want to show me Lord. And I think that's true. I wrote my older sister a while back, and I told her about remembering something my pastor in my church back home had said to our family. I remembered it with such detail that it made me cry. It was one of my defining moments, one of those ones that changed my expectations and my entire existence.
I had forgotten about it till this year.
It's things like that, they're pressing into my bones and whispering that this isn't over yet.
I haven't discovered everything there is to discover about grace yet.

"Promises." It is the last one I tell Him, after much thought and contemplation. "I am blessed by promises," I say. "Especially the ones that tell me who I will get to be someday. Those I cherish most."  

"Which are best for you right now?" He asks. Not expectant, just curious. He wants to know me better. That always surprises me, for He is the one who knows me most. 

"Redeemed. Repairer of the breach. More valued than the sparrow. Intentional forgiver. Kind. Daughter of Christ. Bride to the King, an Esther. Loved."  

"Quite the list," He says, and puts my fourth plum into his pocket. "But here's one more to add. I've been working on it just for you." He brushes my hair back from my ear and leans in close, His face soft against mine, His manner warm, His presence full.  

"Grace-giver," He tells me. 

I am growing so much in this season. Learning so much. Seeing so much. I'm listening to Judah Smith right now actually, and the one thing that he has said thus far that struck me hardest is this,
"God is good."
And we've heard it a million times. I've heard it a million times. But you know what? It's true. And I am recognizing it again and again and again, all for what it's worth. I am growing in it. I am learning it over. I am seeing it in a new way.
And I am becoming less.

At one time, I thought I understood how being worked. I believed I simply was and am and that you simply are and can be. But then I stared at the moon for far too long. I touched the white crests of the ocean waves. I pressed my hands deep into the cool earth. I watched the clouds fling themselves across the horizon with a promise of we'll be back tomorrow. I saw one too many sunrises. I spilled salty tears onto the palms of my hands. I closed my eyes and opened them and closed them again, winking, blinking. I heard the river pressing up toward the mountain. I breathed in wheat and gold and sunshine. I became small. I recognized Him.
I picked plums and filled His pockets with them.
And it was then I understood that I understood nothing.
Human existence is quite the delicate, fragile venture. Every morning when I wake up, I learn that I have discovered more, but I know less. We all sell our souls to something. And you don't quite realize it, but the moment you give in to all that surrounds you and nail your ear to His door, He begins to overtake you. Piece by piece, breath by breath, He changes me. He strips of myself, and develops me into a lesser being more capable of hosting His glory and grace.
The Maker makes me daily.
I cannot be but His, and so I don't really understand how being works. My entire life is about un-being for Him.
I would not have it any other way.

Count your blessings friends. It will change your life.