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...

Painful the work God does in the heart, yet joyful its end.   That is my simple testimony so far this summer. A couple days ago I wrote a prayer based on Psalm 16, which captures my response to His work and His heart toward me, which are always, always good.   Your love draws lines around me; I am fenced in with beauty, freed up with joy! My heart is Your spacious place— there find openness for all You want to do, endless fields for sowing, deepest wells for holding Living water, richest soil for nourishing healthy, life-giving fruit. This, Your work— Your planting, Your vineyard— this is my...

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...

How deeply do we believe God will come through for us—help us? Do we really believe it’s worth it to wait on Him—from the simplest auto repair to the deepest desire of our hearts—especially when His work and His ways feel so invisible?   King David faced this question at his time of greatest need. His enemies flat out told him that no one was going to help him, especially not God. “Many are they who say of me,” he wrote, “’There is no help for him in God.’” (Psalm 3:2)   Those words are still spoken today, often deep in the vulnerable places of a long-time single woman’s heart: If I wait for...