Have you ever missed someone for every single day for over a year?  I have.  When my beloved and most favorite Aunty Agnes died in 2008 from sarcoma cancer, I grieved and mourned her death and missed her a lot.  But to be honest, I didn't miss her every day, and not in the way I miss you.  You set the record.

Encouragement to people like me on Valentime's Day

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Question 10: What Hope Does God Offer Lonely Singles?

Many Christian singles who cannot find a spouse end up dating non-Christians and compromising themselves. What does Christ offer a Christian who is tired of the weirdness of Christian dating, who longs to be married, who is sick of being lonely, but who doesn’t have any Christian prospects, and isn’t getting any younger? What would you say to them?

First, I just want to totally affirm the desire to be married. I don’t want anybody to ever feel guilty about that desire. I feel like so often, particularly single women — God bless them — they feel like the only message they get is: “Find your contentment in Christ. Isn’t Christ enough for you?”

And I think that’s such a terrible response, because the desire to get married is agood desire. It may even be a desire woven into them by the Creator of the universe. If the Bible says, “He who finds a wife, finds what is good” (Proverbs 18:22), that’s all I need to affirm a desire for marriage in men and women.

But like all desires, they have to be placed where they belong. I want to affirm the desire for marriage and I want to warn against the fear of loneliness becoming a desire so far up in your list of desires that you would be willing to compromise and put yourself in a situation that would be more horrific and far more lonely for you in the future.

Unfortunately, a lot of godly women get to a place where they are tired of the “weirdness” of Christian dating and the apathy from Christian men to actually pursue them, and it has led them to marry — I won’t even go as far as to say “lost guys” — but what I will just call “neat Christian boys” who go to church a couple of times a month and own a Bible. And on that basis, a woman justifies getting into a relationship with a man — a man who will not lead, who doesn’t really love the Lord, but who does come to church.

This ends almost every time in heartbreak. Now they are in a covenant, she feels trapped in that covenant relationship, and so she tries to “fix” her husband. That’s not working, so she hopes maybe having children will fix their marriage. They have children, and now the father is discipling their children not toward the Lord, but away from him.

So in all of this, the way I have tried to counsel our singles at The Village Church is to give themselves over to ministry and to serving the Lord.

Women, give yourself to ministry. There’s a woman who lives with us. She’s in her mid-30s. She leads a ministry, running discipleship groups of women all over the country, in 11 or 12 states, pouring her life into 50 or 60 leaders. She walked these discipleship groups through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, and more recently though the book of Genesis in a robust study of God’s word. And she would love to be married, but she is not waiting to be married for her life to matter, for her life to count.

And even when I think of the young woman who helped shape some of these questions, she has given herself over to serve the Lord, to write and to teach and to disciple and to open up her home to care for other women and to encourage other women to grow in biblical literacy. And I think that that is what Christ has for them — fulfilling, soul-stirring, soul-satisfying, gospel ministry.

(copied and pasted from desiringgod.org 10 Questions on Dating with Matt Chandler)

Progress

Wouldn't you agree that it's always nice to know that you're making progress and growing.  Moving forward.

Praise God!