I’ve actually done quite a bit of writing over the last year, mostly for work. Since this website was at one point supposed to be a portfolio, I figure I’ll cross-post some of the pieces I’ve written for anyone who’s interested.

So! Since it went live on Monday, here are my thoughts on singleness via my workplace.

4 Reasons Accountability is Critical for Singles

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

If you’re at all familiar with this verse, you’re probably used to hearing it in the context of marriage. Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or during a wedding ceremony.

And if you’re living in prolonged singleness, perhaps every time you hear it, you feel somewhat less-than-sufficient for not having somebody. Or maybe the opposite is true, and you have a sense of smug superiority, and you think to yourself, “Relationships are for other people. Me? I can do it all on my own.”

But this verse is about more than marriage. Nobody, not even those who choose singleness, is ever called to do life alone. Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, and Paul always traveled with companions. Or consider James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

In reality, we singles need to stick together. Those of us who live alone are especially vulnerable to temptation simply because there’s nobody there to walk in on us. So whether our temptations are to watch pornography or to waste our lives on TV or video games or to wallow in bitterness over our lack of relationships, accountability is critical for us to continue growing in Christ.

Read the rest…

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

There are three main reasons that I love this book. The first one is that it actually, heaven forbid, looks to more than just the book of Ruth or 1 Corinthians 7 to explore Biblical singleness. I mean, any book that actually seriously references the book of Leviticus gets major bonus points from me.

The second is that McCulley goes for breadth, not depth, in offering strategies for living as a Proverbs 31 woman. Things like whether or not to buy a house (if you’re financially stable and able, her answer is to go for it). Or ways to strategically develop relationships with the families in your life, and to be an influencer among kids outside of, say, Sunday School. She touches on so many things that it’s easy to find several specific tips that I can actually apply to my own life.

The last point requires an explanation of me as a single person. I am a self-described perpetual bachelor, having adopted this term for myself as early as 2002. I’m 28 and have had one boyfriend. One. And I really shouldn’t have been with him in the first place, since there were glaringly obvious religious differences. We dated for a month, then I got a grip on myself and called it off while we could still remain friends. (There is, of course, a much longer story behind this.) But other than that one weird little blip in 2003, I’ve never been in a relationship. And, to be quite honest, the only times I’m unhappy with being single are those times I have an active crush on someone. If I never get married, I think I’d be content. But the problem is that I keep meeting Nice Boys, thus disrupting my contentment. I’ve prayed during my last four crushes that the guy in question would be the last, and that whether nothing happened or we got married, I’d never have to go through another crush again.

I needn’t state how that turned out.

So that’s one of the ways this book was refreshingly honest and strangely encouraging: McCulley actually talks about the fact that the desire for a husband never really goes away. The last chapter starts with a conversation with a 50-year-old woman named Lisa (go figure) who mentions that she still wishes she could be cuddled up on the couch watching football with her husband.

Like I said, bizarrely encouraging. Those who talk about the gift of singleness as if it were something handed out like the gift of serving or the gift of speaking in tongues probably don’t get it. They’re probably married and quite possibly assume that single people are single because something’s wrong with them or they’re between relationships or have some sort of supernaturally-given lack of desire for a spouse. The latter may be true in a handful of extremely rare cases, but there *is* no magic switch that says, Okay, you’re now a card-carrying member of the Society of Perpetual Bachelors, and as such you’ll never fall in love again.

It’s a simple, stupid realization, but honestly, I needed that jolt. Because of course life doesn’t work that way, but I keep waiting for that moment to arrive – the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. But the reality is, even if I never get married, and if I die an old maid at 90 in a nursing home, I’ll probably still have a crush on the nice 87-year-old down the hall who still has most of his teeth.

Weird, right? That this would be encouraging? But it actually is. Like, I’m not doing singleness wrong if I *do* like a guy. That doesn’t give me liberty to obsess, of course, but when in the course of time I inevitably do, it’s because I’m a single human female who may one day yet get married, and not one who absolutely never will. It’s because both singleness and marriage are temporary states, both of which could end at functionally any moment for any number of reasons.

The thing about this fact is that it’s so patently obvious that nobody ever addresses it. Even this book only addresses it incidentally. Most seem to ignore it entirely, instead focusing on the whole “don’t be the aggressor in the relationship” thing. These books always feel like they operate under the assumption that (1) women choose when they fall in love and (2) single women are by default desperate enough for marriage to initiate a relationship. Okay, talk about that, but (1) initiating a relationship as a female does not guarantee its failure, and (2) some of us have long since learned that knowledge and can we please move on to something else. So it’s also really nice to have a book that helps you live like a single in spite of your emotions toward any particular man.

So those are my two cents. This book did raise one other interesting question to me, though: are there books written to single men? Every book on singleness that I’ve read has been written to the ladies. Since in the general Christian culture the man is supposed to be the initiator, though, I’d think that in some ways a book on singleness would be highly important to them. Like, a brief bit on what men should look for in wives, but also how to handle rejection and whether or not they should make the concrete decision to never get married.

So: do books for single men exist? And are there any books in particular that have helped you out?

Tip #1: Adding a few lines, illustrating muscles and shadows, works wonders at conveying motion and depth. Tip #2: Sometimes drawing is counterintuitive. Or, at least, I’ve trained myself to draw things in a more cartoony style–so if I’m trying to draw, say, a slender leg, I’m used to cutting down a lot more than is actually accurate. It’s hard to explain, but imagine looking at something through a concave and a convex lens. Intuitively, I want to draw more in the concave style–my brain reads “slender” so I try to taper things almost immediately–when in reality convex is more accurate–that is, you notice a dramatic inward sweep because it has the outward angle first.

Tip #3. Drawing is as much about the negative space as it is about the occupied space. So–you illustrate the space between the torso and the dangling arm, because in some ways that empty triangle of space is more dramatic, more defining, than either arm or torso. It’s a concept that translates rather easily to the graphic design work I do–it’s about the white space giving shape to the page.

Which has always been difficult for me, because my natural instinct has always been to fill every inch of open space. It’s why my bedroom walls have historically been covered with posters or tapestries or art, even if it’s cheesy. I just have that hard a time with the emptiness.

And it’s a concept that translates rather depressingly well to my life in general. Right now, I’m in a bit of a downward slump. I’m done with grad school, and still adapting to the concept of full-time work. All of a sudden, most of my evenings are open. And while there’s always something going on in the background that I should be doing (editing, for example), I still find myself with a glut of undesignated time.

Hence the drawing class. And actually the lifegroup I’ve joined through church. They fill up the “negative space” of my Monday and Tuesday evenings.

And my entire life continues in that negative space.  Life’s in a bit of stasis. I’m not in a relationship, I don’t have any long-term committments, and I don’t even have a permanent, salaried position (for whatever “permanent” means in Michigan in this economy). I don’t even have any good, productive hobbies to work at in my free time (see also why I’m taking the drawing class–to see if I’m interested in doing something vaguely art-related as a hobby). I’m feeling a little purposeless at the moment. It’s monotonous. But it’s in that negative space–the time between promise and fulfillment–where God does some of His most important work. See also Moses herding sheep for 40 years in the wilderness before being called to herd Israelites. Or, before him, Abram and Sarah waiting for 25 years and full impotence between when God promised Isaac and when he was actually born.

Because sometimes, the negative space is necessary to give shape to a life.

Dear Body of the Living Christ,

My brothers and sisters,

Change has come to America, and we the church had very little to do with it.

I’m not talking about the political landscape, per se, because we had as much to do with that as the rest of the citizens. Some of us voted for Obama. Some voted for McCain. Some even voted for third-party candidates. Those of us who voted made our voices heard. And whomever you voted for, Obama is now our president–has been for almost 48 hours, and will be, by the grace of God, for the next 4-8 years. And he has a lot of worthy things to say–like stepping up and helping each other. Like doing good deeds in service to one another.

President Obama’s not the problem. He merely highlights it.

See, here’s the thing. Half of America thinks that Obama is going to be the greatest president since Lincoln, minimally. They expect him to restore the economy. To rule with justice. To set the (political) prisoners free. To bring peace to the planet.

In short, they expect him to be the Messiah.

Can you see where I’m going with this? They expect him to be the savior because we’ve failed to show the world the real one! We’ve failed to preach the gospel, and when we have, we’ve failed to back it up with compassion. And even when we do show a strong outpouring of love, it’s often not of our own initiative. A bunch of churches in Lansing, for example, teamed up to provide financial support for a food bank, and I believe we supplied three times the amount of money requested–but we came together at the request of the MAYOR–the government’s initiative, not our own.

I’m not saying that we don’t do good works or that we don’t preach the gospel. We’re just not doing it enough. I’m certainly not. And because of our failures, our fellow citizens are looking to the government to save them, to provide the answers to their questions.

Wake up, churches of America! Don’t be like Laodicea, neither not nor cold! Be Smyrna, be Philadelphia! Love your family, your friends, your enemies. Let the unbelievers see our good works, that they might be receptive to the Gospel and glorify the Father in Heaven! There’s only one Savior. We need to make sure the world sees him.

In Christ, who has made us new creations,

Lisa