Sipping tea and contemplating singleness

I am sipping tea tonight and not doing anything in particular. Just thinking. It has been a while since I was last on here. This is partly because I have started a personal diary. When I first blogged, I told no one. I blogged, I wrote in order to sort out the thoughts in my head. Now a few people can read this and know who I am and that changes things. There is not the same openness - there is not a readership of one anymore. It is like when I was a teenager and my brother found my diary - from then on what I wrote was coded or I didn't write it down at all. I am an open person however with my friends, unless I am hurt. Then I revert into myself and hide, like a turtle in its shell or a hedgehog with its spikes.

I am learning a lot about being single at the moment. Reading books about being a single Christian - about who I am in God and it is a healing process. I have always been single and must admit to having struggled with this, especially when my sister and many of my friends got married. I have felt myself to be a lesser person because I didn't have a special someone. People often ask you when you are single; 'are there any boys you like?', 'what about.....?', say 'you'll find him soon' but maybe I won't and maybe, just maybe I will find contentment in my singleness.

With singleness comes freedom in some respects - I can spend my free time with friends, spend an entire day in pyjamas, sleep in a double bed stretched out and not worry about hitting anyone in my sleep, work at strange hours like 5 on a Sunday evening, go for walks on my own and meander around London on my day off without thinking about anyone else. At the same time, I need to check myself - to watch that I don't become selfish in this and that I also use this freedom of time to help others and build on my relationship with God.

I am not holding up singleness as the best way - I look at mum and dad, granny and grandpa, aunties and uncles, my sister and bro in law, my friends who are married and see beauty and companionship. I value their relationships and appreciate them for what they have taught me and how they have shaped me. I also see how hard marriage is - that it is worth the effort is without doubt but it is hard. Fact. I should rather be single than married to the wrong man. If it is God's plan that I am married then fabulous. If not, I imagine that I will continue to struggle occasionally but I need to build my life upon more than the childhood fairytale of a girl-boy 'happy ever after'. I need to build it on God and it is in him that I will find joy and peace.

So I am not so much 'living with' my singleness as enjoying my singleness. I am enjoying the freedom that it brings and the ways that I am being molded through it. A part of me still longs to be romanced and loved by a man but at the moment, I am enjoying being romanced and loved by God. He is romancing me constantly with beautiful walks, views, holidays, dreams, conversations with friends, words of encouragement and love. This might sound cheesy but it is true!

When I was little I thought that life began when you found the ONE and ended as in many films - with a wedding. I don't want to be waiting - I want to be living now!