the Intro to Singleness

At first I was really excited when I was asked to speak on singleness in front of around a hundred-ish of my Christian college-student piers. I was all like “Yeah, sure, I’ll talk about singleness! I know all about that. I’ve been single for twenty-two years! Never even held hands with a boy. Totally got this.”

But as I began to struggle with what to say, I realized I didn’t even know where to start. I had way too many opinions I wanted to spout out at people—stuff I’d collected from years of thinking over input from books, magazines, parents, teachers, conferences, seminars, classes, pastors, Sunday-school… both worldly and counter-worldly sources. Then after looking over past journals and thinking about everything that I SHOULD UNDERSTAND by now, I began to feel a little bit like I should be the last person that others look to as an authority on this subject. Mostly because the things I know and the way I live very often contradict one-another.

The one thing that I had going for me to give a talk like that was a whole lot of experience. So Instead of shoving a bunch of hard-to-follow advice at everybody, I tried instead to be as honest as possible and hoped that Jesus showed them something about Himself in the midst of it. I love public speaking, but preparing for that was TOUGH. It felt more like I was being prepared.

I’d like to take the next couple blog posts to expound on my notes for that. What with all the worried family members  asking me about "any new boys" and with hearing the constant worries of single friends who are terrified of getting left behind, I think this may be worth re-hashing.