Can I say something please?
I thought about starting a separate thread but decided to add this here.
While my friend Snowthy is adamant that he feels his calling by God is to be a single man I can relate to his feelings.
When I was living with my mother in our country town before moving to the city to stay with Aunt and Grandmother and we had our family rows I had felt God wanted me to live with mummy till death do us part and do Bible and other spiritual books readings with her. I did have feelings of attraction for a Christian female who helped to lead the Young Adults group of the local Baptist Church who had invited me as a practicing Presbyterian to join them. But I suppressed my feelings and eventually brushed them aside because I believed it was not God's will for me to be in any relationship.
Then when we had our falling out I started wanting to find solace in a woman's companionship so I spoke about putting an ad in all the Anglican Church bulletins for a young single committed to Christ Anglican female who would like a relationship. Mum told me no on the grounds that she didn't want me to be hurt but she didn't realize that I had already been hurt by our silly feuds. Otherwise I never would have wanted to meet somebody in the first place. So things got very bad as many of you well know from what I've shared in past threads of mine and eventually I had to move out and I found spiritual comfort in my eventual conversion to Catholicism. And God had been very gracious to me in restraining me from succumbing to commit either rape or suicide as a result of strong passionate longings unfulfilled.
And as I've said when I bumped up my old My turn to rant thread awhile ago I found comfort through the young girl who leads the Catholic youth group I've joined. I told her on her phone message recorder that I'd been starting to grow very fond of her and did she feel she was the one chosen by God for me. And she replied telling me that she believes marriage is a serious thing that should only be contemplated when you're good and ready for it. She's not ready for a relationship with a man. And she showed me some videos she has by a non-Catholic preacher who promotes that you should not date or go through extensive courtships but rather trust God's own timing to lead you to the right one for you and when you know you're both ready get married immediately. Since this is her belief and I truly do love her I want to respect her wish to stay single and cultivate her relationship with God, while making the most of my own singleness to do the same for myself. And she is pleased that I look at it that way and also praises God for how much my life and relations with my family has taken a turn for the better.
So the way I look at it, there's really only one woman I could ever be able to commit myself to, and if it is never to be either through her death or her honest feeling that God doesn't want us to ever marry anyway, I shall still always praise my God for the way He has blessed me through her. Because I asked her and she didn't say "Yes" and she didn't say "No". All she said was "I'm not ready."