By Kathy Breslin

I used to wonder how singleness could be considered a gift.  I’d heard all the typical responses to that question: “it allows you to serve God,” “you’re time isn’t divided and you can focus on Him,” “think of all the wonderful ways you can help the church,” etc…  I’d heard them all and in my heart I couldn’t help but think “is that really a gift?”  But as I’ve lived my life as a part of this church, my response started to change. 

Change doesn’t happen over night and this was no different.  There was no one thing that I did or heard that caused my change in perception about my singleness to happen; but rather God’s faithfulness in my life.  As I started to serve more, in my Community Group, in Alpha, babysitting for some of the families at church, reaching out to friends who don’t know the Lord, and so on, I was seeing God move in His people and my attention moved away from my own desires and focused on Him and His grace in my life.

God promises us in Psalm 37 that if we delight in Him he will give us the desires of our heart.  What strikes me about this verse isn’t that he’ll give me the desires of my heart but that this is a promise from the One who formed me and has the power to shape me and change me.  While my desires to have a family one day have not changed, my desires to see God’s name be great have grown.  One day this may be through a family but I am excited with what He is doing through me today.
 

In this season the Lord has also given me a clearer idea of what the gift of marriage is all about.  My view of marriage was that it was very much about me and my dreams, needs, and wants, rather than about the Lord.  As some of my closest friends were getting married I started thinking more about marriage and the sacrifices my friends were making to care for their spouse, family, and home.  The more I thought about this the more I realized that the sacrifices I was making to serve the Lord and the church were minor in comparison to those my newly married friends were making in their own lives.  Don’t get me wrong, my friends speak of the many blessings that come in marriage.  But I now have a sober appreciation for the need for grace to be married, not just to be single.  

This also made me freshly grateful for my parents and the sacrifices they’ve made for me and my sister.  They laid down their own desires and wants to be there for us even to this day.  I might never know the full extent of the sacrifices that have been made on my behalf but I know I am grateful for them and for whom they’ve allowed me to be as a woman.  

By writing this, I don’t mean to imply that I’ve arrived or that it’s never hard being a single Christian woman.  But God’s faithfulness to me is greater than my circumstances and he has graciously placed me in a church that encourages me and challenges me to continue to fight the good fight.  And while it’s tempting to list my phone number at the bottom of this page, just in case my future husband is reading, I will refrain and trust the Sovereign One who has provided me with more than I can ask or imagine.