Have you ever been disappointed about something—oh, let’s say, a date that didn’t happen, or the fact that you’ve just turned 30 or 35 or 38 and you still don’t have a boyfriend—and you make the mistake of expressing your feelings to an unsympathetic person?   “I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” they say. “There’s other fish in the sea.” “Don’t worry, you’ll meet someone sooner or later.” “God has a plan.”   Well, all those things may be true—or not. The point is that when you’re hurting, most of the time the first step for healing isn’t to paste truth over the wound like a Band Aid. The first...

If you’ve been single for a long time, you can probably think of at least one occasion on which your singleness caused conflicting emotions. You might have been happy for the friend whose wedding you attended, yet deep inside you felt discouraged, forgotten, jealous, or all of those things.   I think it’s safe to say that Hannah’s “bitterness of soul” (a topic I introduced in my last blog) contained more than one emotion. Though I can’t imagine her feeling any ounce of happiness for her rapidly reproducing rival wife, I’m certain her bitterness of soul was as mixed a bag of emotion as any...

I’m so glad the Bible blatantly portrays people as they were, thousands of years ago, learning to walk with Him. It turns out they were not so different from us. When it comes to disappointment, one lady seems to have been on the same page as me after my lifestyle of non-dates. Her name was Hannah.   She wasn’t single. But she was infertile, and she desperately wanted a child. So did her husband, and that’s why he married Peninnah—Peninnah, the other wife, the epitome of Mother (with a capital M) with her abundance of children. Peninnah, the one who enjoyed rubbing it in Hannah’s face.  ...

Recently, I thought I was going to get to go on a date.   I was very excited.   It might sound pathetic, but it’s true: dates don’t come my way very often, so when someone wanted to set me up and the guy was willing, I began to look forward to it.   But it never happened. Blame it on communication setbacks if you want to. Regardless of the real reason, my date became a non-date. The opportunity passed and is not likely to return.   I was so disappointed.   The non-date became a representation of the cumulative disappointment I felt from all the other nonexistent dates I’d had...

Tonight, ladies, I write for myself, for my heart of late has felt deeply its need. It’s grown weary in a season of long endurance. Life, at times, seems to thud along, like horses plodding down a muddy path in the darkness.   Don’t you, as a single woman, sometimes secretly wish you could look out the window and see a knight in shining armor riding one of those horses, and know, like the heroines in epic tales, that he’s coming for you?   I do.   That’s why this Scripture in The Message Bible caught my eye: “Blessed be God, my mountain…my rescuing knight, the high crag where I run for...