FINAL thoughts on singleness: Grateful Hearts

"Count your many blessings, name them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done."

I can remember singing this as a kid, and its true.  Gratefulness and worship may be a chore at first, words we say because we are commanded to do so, but soon the heart will follow.  With any disappointment in life, you have to mourn, but then you also have to get up, dust yourself off and keep on living. The best way to live in a way that glorifies the Lord (and selfishly, in a way that is happiest to us) is to focus on the blessings...

....which is why despite accusations by some that singless can be selfish by enjoying their free time, I think it is important to take advantage of that free time with travel, hobbies, friendships, etc. Recognize the blessing of freedom and enjoy it.  (And I guarantee that for most single Christians, this extra freedom is not tempting us to stay single longer, its just a reality of our current state...I can go get a drink with a friend at 8 pm because I don't have kids to bathe!)

Practice remembering what's good. I wasn't always good at that.  The older I got, I improved at counting my blessings.  With whatever you long for -- job, husband, kids, healing, etc, its easy to only see what's missing, but for all of us, single or married -- we have so many blessings! Besides the obvious blessings of God's undeserved forgiveness, salvation and grace, we all live in America and are blessed with freedoms and opportunities and most of us have family and friends and jobs and communities.

Plus, cultivating a heart of gratefulness is something to learn at any stage.  The first two weeks Dave was gone, we were grumpy with eachother and NOT grateful.  I felt I was doing all the work here, getting us ready to wed and marry and he felt he was doing all the work in DC- setting up bank accounts and finding a place and paying bills.  Our lack of gratefulness hurt our relationship, but the past 2 weeks have been happy and full of missing eachother and cheesy anticipation of seeing eachother again...all that changed was our attitudes.  We tried to be more grateful and more gracious.

I think I learned qualities like gratefulness while single...and I am sure I will struggle to be grateful many more times in life, but I hope that my lessons learned these past few years will encourage me to aim for gratefulness even when I don't feel that way.