Your current relationship status. If dating/married, give us a glimpse of your story! If single, share about this special season.

I am single. No significant other, no kids.

In some ways, I’m alone. It’s not anything cosmic or melodramatic, just the reality of a new-ish city…seven months in, you’re still easing into friendships and, you know, you’re never around someone you’ve known for more than seven months.

And I am relishing it. Every second. Glorying in it.

Whenever I take stock of this season of my life, I realize how much I love it. I will love it as a season, or I will love it forever.

I’m thinking of how people will process these words, and I feel pretty certain they will come across as whitewashing, or badly disguised sour grapes. But it’s not either.

I absolutely get lonely sometimes, the kind of lonely that goes on a caving expedition in the middle of your chest. But disparate facts can exist at once, and I am also grateful for this time to just be me, alone, to talk to myself in my apartment, to buy symphony tickets on a whim, to choose.

The future is misty to me. Maybe it holds little souls to mend and mold (and perfect baby hands), and wedding rings, and an SUV and a (gulp) mortgage.

Or maybe it will be like this forever. Pinterest doctrine holds otherwise, but God does not promise or mandate marriage. Paul says it in plain language, in his first letter to the Corinthians: “God gives the gift of the single life to some, the gift of the married life to others.”

I’ve gotten in the habit of trusting His gifts.