Dear friend,
Yet I wish that all men were like me. However, each man has his own gift from God, one of this kind, and another of that kind. But I say to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they remain even as I am.
I have been sitting with how an apartment can change on a Sunday afternoon, how the quiet that used to feel restful starts to feel like evidence of something missing.
Yesterday I offered you one angle on this. Here is another. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, spent real space commending singleness, not as a waiting room but as its own undivided way of living. I notice the text does not frame it as a lesser portion handed to those who could not secure the better one. That is not how most people hear it read aloud, and I think we have let one verse about marriage drown out a whole chapter that took the unmarried life seriously on its own terms.
I was married thirty-five years, so I write this carefully, aware I cannot speak from inside your particular hours. But I have watched two friends build lives of real substance without a husband in the house, and neither one was rehearsing for a life that hadn't started yet. What would change if you stopped reading your Sundays as a waiting room?
A prayer
God, You see the quiet in her apartment and the questions she carries into it. Give her a sense of her days as whole and not partial, and meet her there this afternoon. Amen.