Moving On, Indeed

Something really wonderful happened to me this summer. I got accepted into a type of grant program that is paying for me to attend a month long workshop for teachers in California. I’m actually writing this blog entry from the “patio” (aka a segment of sidewalk with two folding chairs sitting on it, but the hotel prefers a more glorifying naming system, of course) of my hotel room, and I’m looking out into a bay full of fishing boats, with sea gulls calling in the background. The other teachers who are here are all very nice and we’re supposed to be able to take some pretty neat tours here in a few days. Really wonderful stuff.

And I’m completely miserable.

For someone who normally fully enjoys herself at professional development related events and is fascinated with astronomy (the topic of our workshop), I should be thrilled to be here. I should be thrilled at the vacation location aspect of this place (misnamed sidewalk included), but I’m homesick. I should be excited about the new people and sights and I should be completely enamored with the idea of getting access to a nationally recognized observatory, but I’m overwhelmed. I should even be glad to kind of “get away” from everything and just relax a little but plain and simply, I want more than anything to just go back home. So I’m sitting here watching fishing boats sit on the water and I’m trying to figure out just how exactly I’m going to get through three weeks of something that I’m miserable with after only two days. At first I chalked all of this insanity up to the fact that I’m just tired from the traveling and time change and in a day or two, things will pick up and I’ll have a blast. Then the three weeks will be done before I know it. However, I think that something different is happening with me this time that makes it different from all the other times I’ve left home for similar purposes. I was thinking about Darla’s blog about moving on and the words “moving on” have been flitting across my mind for a while this morning. Then I had a bit of a revelation - maybe I'm miserable here for a reason - maybe, just maybe, God is getting me ready to move on (not just move home, ha ha). The last several months have left me thinking about where I want to take my career. Do I want to go get a master’s and get a more competitive job that I’ve been offered recently, or do I want to stay at the position I'm at? Or do I want to take a completely different route and direct my thoughts and energy more towards growing a family, instead of focusing all of my energy on a career and stronger resume?

Suddenly, today, those questions don’t sound so hard to me at all. It occurs to me that God just might have sent me on this trip for reasons completely different from why I filled out the application. I think, that in the midst of this cold wind and foggy air, God is telling my heart that it’s ok for me to put down some potential career ambitions and turn my heart to something else. I think He’s letting me “get away” from everything so that I can see what it really is that I want to get away from. And if you think about it, maybe God uses a lot of “miserable” situations like that to convince you to move on. If He needs you to move on to something else, He’s not going to have an easy time persuading you to do it if you’re fine and dandy with where you’re at. But if you find yourself in a place that you aren’t comfortable in, or just aren’t happy with, then you’re motivated to grow in a direction that will take you someplace new (example: if the Israelites had been happy in Egypt, they wouldn't have been at all supportive of the idea of following Moses out into the great unknown, but God needed them to get to the promised land to fulfill His covenant with Abraham). It’s such a simple idea, but one that I forget sometimes. That is, I had forgotten it until today.

So yeah, maybe I’m surprisingly miserable when I should be thrilled at what I thought would be a blessing.

But maybe that’s a blessing too.

Moving On

I attended the same church for the last several years and when the single adult ministry that we attempted to implement failed for the second time - there just didn't seem to be a place that I fit. So for months now I have not attended anywhere. I'm not sure that they have missed me yet as I have heard from not one member of the church. I must say that if very frustrating to me.

I am also a part of an interdenominationsl singles group and all of a sudden there are girls nights out which all of us girls are not invited to. Due to my work schedule, I am unable to attend very regularly, but for the first time since I met this group, I feel left out.

I also have a group of women who I spent many years sitting with in the bleachers watching our kids play various sports. We go to supper a few times a year and once more there have been several activities recently from which I have been excluded.

I think the hardest part of being single, for me at least, is going places alone. This is especially true on Sunday mornings.

Yesterday, I decided that it was time to return to Church after a LONG break. So, since I have many options in Abilene, I started thinking about which church I would be the most comfortable sitting alone in. Then I considered going to another denomination, with my friends but that doesn't seem right to me either. So I chose one of the smaller Methodist churches here in town and with all the power I could muster, I drove there and walked in. As I walked in I found several people sitting alone. While there were not many people my age, I still felt welcome.
However, to be fair, I had forgotten that my great-aunt went to that church, so I had someone to sit with. I still consider it a big step for me - just walking in the door.

What are your biggest struggles with singleness? Let us know.

Which Way Are You Looking?

To answer the question in the title of today's post, I'm looking in several directions at once to try to pull this article off. I've been catching up on my reading on the Boundless website (see the link over to the left) and thought that the Boundless writers had some really good points this week that have been on my mind too. So I'm gonna connect some dots here and put a couple of those good points together.

Here is something for you to think about - when you were, say, in your teens or twenties, what did you think you were looking for in a husband or wife? When I first started college, my list wasn't really that hard to follow. I didn't want a guy that partied all the time. I wanted a guy who might take me dancing now and then and was a gentleman. That was really about it. I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life at that time. I didn't know what city I wanted to live in, or what I wanted to do when I got there. In fact, you could probably say that I was sort of counting on Mr. Right to influence those decisions. So whenever I met a new young man and we started dating, I was fairly open minded. If he didn't party all the time and could be a gentleman, I could even do without the dancing (I know, I know, it was a big sacrifice!).

And I dated a few guys that could fit those expectations, but none of those relationships lasted over a few months. By the time I was a senior in college, I had realized that I wasn't going to meet my future husband before graduation and that I was going to have to decide where I was going to live and what I was going to do when I got there on my own. I didn't want to put my life on hold until this man came along, so I also filled my extra time all kinds of new hobbies, volunteering and interests. If you had asked me what I was looking for in a man by the end of last year, my list would have looked far more complicated than my first one. It would have read something like this: "The man in my future must be responsible, a gentleman, must not be afraid of education, church or the big words I learned in my microbiology class. He's got to like being outdoors and be interested in digging up fossils with me, now that I like doing that. He's got to appreciate music, because I play music now. He's got to want to (fill in the blank), because by now, I've dated someone who didn't like doing that with me. AND, on top of that, he's got to have some kind of reason to be passing through this tiny little town I live in, because how will he find me otherwise???"

Do you see any differences between my two lists? Did a comparison between your lists show the same results? The longer we stay single, the more experiences and identities we will start to carry with us. It is no surprise at all that I got frustrated with dating when looking for someone to fit that second list. It's not that I don't believe that God can't create the people we dream about, it's just that I think we're limiting Him when we focus so much on who we are to determine who we want. The longer I am single, the more I learn about myself, and the more I date, the more I learned about what kind of person I do (and don't, more specifically) want, which is fine. However, I think that it is easy to get mighty caught up in all of those details that I miss the details that matter. (Oh, and here's the Boundless article that talks about the same thing, more or less: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001772.cfm ).

What details should I focus on, you ask? Well, we've talked about it before on this site and, ironically, Boundless referenced the exact same article this week too. (http://www.boundless.org/2005/answers/a0001766.cfm )

I also think that the longer I am single, and the more unsuccessful relationships I experience, the harder it gets to see past those people behind me. A friend might want tell me about a young man they saw earlier that week and tell me I should call him. I reply with something like "Yeah, but I've already dated someone who (fill in the blank)'s for a living, and we all know how that turned out...", and then mope on my drive back home out of the sheer frustration of it all. There have even been times in my life when I would look back at my own dating history and decide that I couldn't even trust myself to choose a person of good moral character, much less a potential life mate. Look at all of that looking backwards! It's a cliche that graces countless country songs, but it's got so much truth to it that I'm gonna type it out - you can't see tomorrow if you're still looking back. You can't get away from all of those things behind you if that's all you look at. You're not going to see the person you could spend your life with if you're not watching the horizon for them, but are instead focusing on all of the other ships you've already passed. (What? Are you rolling your eyes at my analogies again? Well, maybe you'll like Boundless' better: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001763.cfm ).

I don't know if this site has been useful at all to anyone else out there. What I do know, is that since starting this site, I've really had a wake up call on the things we've discussed. God can do incredible things when we point our eyes in the right direction.

Which way are you looking?

Membership Renewal Notice

Have you noticed how many commercials, junk emails and websites offer some kind of membership these days? For just a small fee of anywhere between $19.99 and 100 bucks a year, or maybe a month, you can join just about any kind of club. With your membership, you get to do all kinds of things that all of those nonmembers can't do. You can chat, you can share pictures, you can watch videos, you get access to top secret documents, or, as I tend to look at it, you can get suckered into nickel and diming your paycheck away. Now think about the groups you see most often offering some kind of membership on TV. Does a dating service come to your mind before anything else? E-Harmony? Match.com? Chemistry.com? "Come join us with your membership," they say "and then you can take this quiz that will identify you on 29 and a half different levels and then you can talk to all of these other really great people you can't meet otherwise, and thus meet the man or woman of your dreams." That's what they're telling you.

Believe it or not, this article isn't actually about online dating. It's about a really good point that those commercials are hitting on, even though they aren't mentioning it. If I had to name what it is that single adults are looking for in the world around them, including within the church, I don't think that it's a singles group, exclusive club, or complete and total acceptance from another person. I think that what we're really looking for is community. We want to belong somewhere and that's tricky when a lot of us have already moved to a different county than our parents (moving us away from our familial community), and most of our social interactions may occur at work but mostly take place through a computer. We want a group of people that all know each other, that care about each other and can therefore sort through life together. They don't all have to be in exactly the same life situations. They don't have to all be the same age or share every single goal and interest. It's diverse groups that are the healthiest, if you ask me.

So now look at those dating ads and think about what they are really offering.
1. Membership - the feeling that you are a part of a small group of people
2. The Quiz - those get-to-know you questions are probably designed to give you the feeling that someone out there knows the real you. Intimacy.
3. Other members - People. We need people, like it or not.

If these dating services didn't have those three needs of singles figured out, they wouldn't be using them to sell their product.

And can it be backed up biblically, this importance of community? You bet! Think about when Moses was leading his people out of Egypt. God specifically told the Israelites that they were to be their own community and even told them not to mix with other groups of people. Community, you see, is very important because you can draw strength from the people around you and you have to choose your community carefully, because strength isn't the only thing you can draw from the people around you. People travel in tribes through much of the Bible and one of the worst punishments those tribes could give was to kick a person out (Cain got kicked out, for instance, Hagar and Ishmael were sent away, Jacob had to flee). There was reason to rejoice when a person joined a tribe or came back (Think prodigal son, Jacob finds his mother's family, then later goes back to his father's land, etc). God even tells us again and again that he has known us since before we were even born and that he knows our hearts. Why do you think He said that? Because that is a need that He put in our hearts. We need community, so He reminds us to pray - so we can talk to Someone who loves us and cares about us. We also need to remember that we have been entrusted to love the people around us. God designed us to live in a four-part harmony, as my pastor says - harmony with God, harmony with nature, harmony with ourselves and harmony with each other.

Now the question is, where can you find your community? A lot of that depends on where you live and what you do. Community can be found within an office, it can be found in a study group at church. In college, the one place that kept my sanity was a little church on the edge of the city that had prayer services on Wednesday nights. There weren't but about fifteen people that came there, but that was enough. They knew who I was and were always glad to see me walk in the door. We'd spend about thirty minutes singing songs and praying to ourselves and then we'd go home. It wasn't anything fancy. But it was community. Maybe you can find community with the neighbor next door. My neighbor is close to forty years older than me, but we love to sit on her back porch in rocking chairs and talk and laugh and watch the birds. It's a community of two people, but it does wonders for our souls.

Are you behind on your membership to a community? Have you let it fall on the back burner? If so, think about whether or not that's something you need to renew in your life. This is your official membership renewal notice. No gimmicks. No fees. Unless, of course, you don't feel like you're getting the real deal without that whole $19.95 thing, and if so, then you can send your payment to - oh nevermind. :)