Okay, so I can hear you saying it now:
My Christian friends: “Oh my word, I can’t believe she used the “v” word.”
My non-Christian friends: “Is Cheryl getting all ‘holier-than-thou’ on us?”
My young friends: “She’s really old. Hope this isn’t like being lectured by Mom.”
Male readers: “Why would she want to write about that? I just don’t understand women!”
Liberal readers: “At last. A Christian who’s not afraid to talk about sex.”
I will answer each of you in order of appearance:
- Don’t worry. This title was just the shortest way to say that I’m middle-aged, never married and childless–and unashamed.
- Chillax. God’s not impressed with my righteousness and neither am I. I don’t speak King Jimmy English anyway. By the way, that’s short for the King James Version of the Bible which sounds like Shakespeare. This is why we came up with versions we can actually understand.
- To my young friends: Stick around. Barring certain fatal events or the return of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, you’ll be this old someday and then you’ll wish you had listened.
- Listen, boys, men compartmentalize everything. We ladies see the bigger picture and how everything interconnects. Hence women’s intuition and why husbands should listen to their wives.
- Sorry, friends. This blog is not going to be about sex. I am not going to give anyone advice on marriage, parenting, trading on Wall Street, or negotiating with terrorists since I have had experience in none of these. Although at this point, the probability of me negotiating with terrorists seems more likely than the chances of me getting married. And terrorists are probably far less work.
All joking aside, (Really? Shucks. And I was having so much fun too.)
“Sub-culture,” seems to be the “word about town,” these days, particularly among teens and youth. Single ladies who are no longer in the “young adult” category, (over 40 and up) find themselves in a unique sub-culture, categorized still further into sub-divisions of never married, widowed, divorced or, in today’s climate, transgender.
Depending upon our circumstances and which end of the “older” spectrum we find ourselves, we struggle with a particular set of life questions, challenges, and changes, needs, and fears. Most churches don’t know what to do with us, especially if we’re not widows or divorcees. So we find ourselves groping blindly through the social morass around us, often too busy for an adequate social life. Yet we long for fellowship with both genders without the pull of hormones that so often accompanied out interactions many years in the past.
I honestly cannot identify with many older, single women around me. Until perhaps five or six years ago, I was quite content to be single—and I’ve never craved sex. My unmarried state has allowed me the freedom to satisfy my spirit of adventure that needed only a few words of encouragement to push beyond inherited fears and poor self-esteem to spread its wings and fly.
So far I have traveled to a dozen different nations in missionary work, visited Hollywood several times, was within only a couple of miles of a guerrilla attack in Bogota’, Columbia, South America, nearly ran out of gas in the Haitian outback, and dined with a governor in the Philippines.
Someday I may get to glide down the Amazon river to preach to a jungle tribe, or visit the Great Wall of China, or teach new converts from Islam all about Jesus. I will publish that novel, get back into acting, and do many other things that I would otherwise have to consult my husband about first. And most of all, I can be totally free to pursue the Lover of my soul who is able to meet every need.
And yet, for the past several years, the loneliness has begun to creep in and I’ve found myself growing weary of doing everything solo. Once, I found myself with the odd sensation that I was only half a person and my other half was somewhere, “out there.”
No season of our lives needs to be winter. Whether we marry or remain single, the most important thing is that we find our value in God’s love and in being who He calls us to be right here and right now. May He give us the grace to enjoy “where we are on the way to where we are going.”
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