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…

This is my local grocery store. More to the point, this is the construction blocking my usual parking spot at my local grocery store.

I was…less than thrilled when I saw this, mostly because this work required a change in the flow of traffic, and also because there was no advanced warning. Most construction areas have some sort of sign, advertising the future site of some building or other. Nothing here, though, just signs telling you that all of a sudden the drive is one-way, and lots of fences and confusion. All this on a busy Sunday afternoon when the students are back in town. Needless to say, it was not the most enjoyable shopping trip I’ve ever had.

A friend called just after I finished unloading groceries. She’d had a bad week and, understandably, needed to decompress. (Among other, more personal things, she was forced to switch offices because hers had black mold.) And she asked me how a rather large personal project was going. (The answer? Stressful.)

And after she hung up the phone, I thought about the grocery shopping experience in conjunction with my friend’s and my stress, and thought: “Construction is irritating and inconvenient. But this means improvement follows. Sometimes the outcome is visible; sometimes it’s not. But it often means good things are coming.”

1. Visible Outcomes

Inconvenience is easiest to deal with when you know why it’s happening. For example, I’m usually patient with road construction, especially if it’s on a road I drive frequently. I can handle a few months of slower traffic if it means that a large patch of potholes are going away. Or Weight Watchers. I’ve been on it for a year now. It’s a pain to forego the candy or french fries, and I know I’ll always have to be careful about what I eat, but the positive goal of actually being a healthy weight for the first time since high school means I’m willing to keep at it, especially since I’ve already seen certain benefits.

My personal project falls in this camp. It requires a lot of hard work and eats up a lot of my free time, and there’s no guarantee of success, but if things work out it will be well worth the trouble.

(By the way, I’m not quite ready to talk about the personal project on public channels, but I’m willing to talk about it if you ask.)

2. Invisible Outcomes

It’s harder to deal with inconvenience (or worse) when you don’t know why it’s there. My friend’s office move falls into this category. My own office had its own set of stupid drama about a year ago. I’ve seen a depressing number of people lose jobs. My dad was (semi-voluntarily) unemployed for several months. Several friends have had rough pregnancies. At least one has had a miscarriage. My car has broken down more times than I can count. Some of these are worse than others, and I feel bad about lumping things like, say, my office drama and my friend’s miscarriage in the same category. “Inconvenience” is far too mild a word. But large or small, such things result in a (hopefully short-term) lifestyle alteration, often with no visible purpose.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’m a firm believer that “All things work together for the good of those that love God.” For instance, at my workplace, we had constant upheaval for months. It seemed like just as we finally adapted from the previous change, some new chaos was introduced. But we finally shook things out, and honestly, all the turmoil truly did make the Marketing department, at least, a much better team than we had been. Or for my friend, the inconvenience of having to switch offices may result in better relationships with her new officemates. Or, in a rather dramatic example, my company’s president lost his wife and children in a horrible accident with a semi, and eventually used the settlement money from the trucking company to start the company. I quite possibly would not have a job had he not lost his family years ago, not to mention the fact that the service our president created has helped countless people overcome Internet pornography addictions.

This don’t make inconveniences, big or small, much easier to handle. But just about all inconveniences can be opportunities if you let them.

I bring this up because Yi noted that  Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.