But Lord, I’m lonely *now*!!!!

  561 views  

Well I’m going to start this post by making my customary observation that it has been so long since I posted here.

While this has also been true of my other blog (before a post I made today), in the case of this particular blog the reason for this is almost embarrassingly laughable.  And that is that I forgot my password and was locked out. Seriously!  The first Sunday I was just out of time, and dithered about writing a post right until the second Sunday, which is when I discovered that I just could not log on.  I could have forced a master reset….anyway, here we are now!

So I’d like to write today about something I was thinking about just a couple of days ago.  As anyone might know who follows this blog, I am a great believer in the idea of getting to know someone well before considering them romantically.  My last post here was on this subject, based on the fact that people say that you need to have known someone for at least two years before you can truly consider yourself to know them well. Actually, as I was thinking of the issues which I am here going to communicate, it occurred to me that insisting on two years might be an expression of faithlessness on my own part, because God could obviously work a lot faster. However I quickly put that idea to the side of my mind!

And so I found myself contemplating the unhappy thought of waiting a further two years from now, before even being able to consider someone seriously.  And I cried out to God in my spirit:  “But God, I’m lonely now!  I don’t need a husband two years from now, I need a husband as of two years ago!”  This following is a sobering thought.  That is, it has occurred to me since then (as it has occurred to me countless times before then) that the man I marry will be desperately flawed, as everyone is, so even if we are both Christians who pursue Christ as hard as we can, the marriage just may not provide the unmitigated joy and tender companionship that I expect to find there; that is, what I am lonely for.  However I have written about that countless times too! And then I also asked myself once again, yet again, if I am looking to gain from my marriage something that can only be gained from my relationship with God. In a way I know I am, because my mental hopes of my husband obviously tend towards perfection, and there is only One Person who is perfect, and that is God, and He is also the only Person who even comes close to being perfect.  To be brutally candid, I sometimes think that if I were to act rationally on what I know to be true about people generally, men in particular, and also the dynamics of marriage, I would run away as fast as I could even from the thought of marriage.

However, as the saying goes, “Hope springs eternal”.  So if, ultimately, if I do not get married, it will not be because I decided to act rationally or sensibly.  Rather it will be because, to my bitter regret, I was not able to find anyone!

But that is not what I wanted to talk about today!
What I believe I realised, or started coming to understand, is that my loneliness is not truly the underlying cause of all of this. Yes, on one hand I am truly and unmistakably lonely.  I am not going to pretend otherwise. On the other hand, I realised that there are certain underlying circumstances in my life which in a way curtail my freedom.  These have caused me to do something without realising it: to look upon marriage as a door to these freedoms.  And then naturally I can’t help thinking of my unmarried state as a hindrance.  Actually no, that does not truly describe it.  If those circumstances, for instance of being an entrepreneur, and the lifestyle that goes with that, did not appear to restrict my life so tightly, then I could let myself think of many other things beyond marriage as ways of adding joy to my life, and I could seek them out. I could possibly spend more time with my friends, pursue culture, travel more, also volunteer for good causes etc.  My potential happiness need not necessarily revolve around marriage.

Regarding my current lifestyle it is of course a “give and take thing”.  At the moment I am sacrificing for my businesses in the hope of attaining success which will grant more freedom.  While I have known that for a long time, it was only a couple of days ago that I came to see that the current pressures of my lifestyle were causing me to focus unduly on marriage. (That said, I know that my parents and many other people would say that at my age, I cannot focus too greatly on marriage!)

And then there is also the fact that I know, as much as anyone can reasonably know before marriage, that marriage itself will bring restrictions which will seem difficult and frustrating. I’ve always known that.  And yet, of late the huggie-wuggie thoughts and hopes have outweighed everything, including common-sense.

So by the grace of God, I am grateful to God that I have finally understood this. So now hopefully once these issues have been sorted out, then I can have a bit more leisure to wait for someone truly appropriate for me.  And by the grace of God I will also be able to release myself to enjoying these single years and making the most of them!

Bible Verses:
Psalm 68v6:

———————————————————————–
PHOTO CREDITS
Photo of Autumnal Scene from Pixabay
———————————————————————–
[Comment Details]