The Joy of the Christian Single Life

I’m not going to lie here, but it took me a while to find the joy of the single Christian life. Getting saved in my late 20s, I was ready to go save the world one person at a time, and I was going to do it with my Christian husband by my side. Why? Well, because that’s what the church told me was the right way to live my life. According to them, it was the only way to live the Christian life. We get saved, we get married, we have little Christian children–and the cycle continues.

Did any of that happen?

Absolutely not.

And I’m soooo much better for it.

The Christian Single Life’s Joy Gets Stolen

Finding joy in the single Christian life didn’t come easy, because the church steals it from us. Honestly, we get one narrative. So prepare yourself, because here’s the negative part of this post! I get really frustrated with how hard the church works at drilling this marriage narrative into everyone’s heads.

Really, I don’t know that I was ever meant to get married. I’ve tried to picture myself with a husband. In my dreams he was always a blank, bland, blurry thing. I chalked it up to God just not being ready to give him to me yet.

After many prayers and much soul searching, I realized that it wasn’t God not dropping a man in my lap. It was that I was meant to be single. I was trying too hard to fit myself into the church’s model of what my life should be rather than living out God’s plan for my life. My unhappiness and frustration was because every year I got older I felt more and more like a failure and a pariah. I just wasn’t fitting this picture perfect Christian woman persona.

It was making me so bitter, and I was getting turned away from the church.

Finding Freedom in the Christian Single Life

Ah, but here comes the better part of finding the joy in this Christian single life, because we don’t have to live in the parameters that any church outlines for us. We just need to live by what God wants for us. We have to live by the words that Jesus speaks. Once I started realizing that, I found so much more freedom.

I look more now at life with joy. I have my own time. My own space. I don’t look at the world like I have to find a husband everywhere I go. I felt this pressure lift and waft away. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t meant to get married, and I wasn’t going to have kids.

Scandalous, I know!

But I was so much happier admitting it. I found myself again, because I wasn’t trying to live up to this lie that the church had built up. I went places on my own. Hung out with single people and didn’t look for a man the entire time (or lamented about being single all night). I enjoyed the company for their company. I dated, but didn’t put the pressure of marriage on every date. It was so much more FUN.

I don’t believe Jesus meant for us to lose the fun in our lives. We need to have joy–and that also means finding the happiness in the Christian single life. We can embrace the singlehood. Bathe in it. Love it. It’s an amazing place to be.

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