Single in the City 5/1/2013

FOR ALL MY SINGLE FRIENDS (Especially the Christian)...Gut check, brutal honesty. If you feel down and discouraged because you may not have a “significant other” in your life, I might have an answer. You see, I’ve been struggling with being single (over 4 years now!). I’m an Italian, hopeless, horny, romantic and desperately want a God fearing woman in my life. And don’t get me going on internet dating!! It can be easy with internet dating to push my agenda and disregard God’s. God does use internet dating, I won’t deny that. Just don’t pursue it unless you have clarity from God that the time is right. Now, I’m not gonna lie…I’ve offered myself to God many times in prayer, “If you want me to be single for the rest of my life, I will.” Deep down I vacillate on really meaning that prayer. But I know God’s purpose is for a different reason. He wants me to have Him be the focus of my intimacy. I remember the single days before I got married…I was consumed by Jesus. The depth of intimacy was so real it was almost as if I could reach out and touch Him. God is calling me to return to my first love…that depth of intimacy with Him. And I know that the intimacy that is renewed with Jesus is going to have a transference effect on the woman He chooses for me. Revelation 2:3-4, “You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.” Wow...can I relate to that...the encouragement and the chiding! But I am building that intimacy once again. This may sound strange but God has opened a door for me to live in NYC to decompress. Most people escape the City to decompress, but I thrive on it! It has been 5 months and I’m just starting to get back to my spiritually intimate reality. And it’s awesome. Blurry eyes are coming back into focus…on the Cross. Maybe God is calling you to a new depth of intimacy with Him.

Thomas Merton on living alone:  “It is necessary for me to live here alone without a woman, for the silence of the forest (or in my case the courtyard outside my window In NYC) is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes that secret which is only heard in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most beautiful of all trees in the garden…the cosmic axle…the Cross.”