The Last Post ( for now )

A year ago today I wrote my very first post on this blog. It was two days after my birthday and I was sad because despite having a lovely celebration the next day I spend the official evening by myself and blew out the candle on my cupcake on my lonesome. 

As I blew out that candle I sobbed to God that this be the year that I meet someone, that this time of singlehood would finally come to an end. 

And as you can tell if you've stuck around, it has not.

But it's ok because as you can also tell He has blessed me with different learning experiences, fun times, sad times, friendships, repairing of friendships and other 'drawing me closer to Him' times in the meantime. 

There have been potential Bachelors come and go and now I'm taking a rest from online dating and trusting Him and seeing what He can do. 

I've been working on getting my fitness and my body back and I've lost 10kg in the past 11 weeks. 

I have a peace that I can hardly describe because He keeps holding my hand and taking the root killer out and ripping out the root causes to my anxiety and perfectionism. 

He gave me an out with the job situation that was causing my life to become a tangled mess and brought out the insecurities in both myself an in other people. 

New friendships were made solid thought it all and old friendships were tested but have come out the otherside different but hopefully stronger. 

I'm content and stretched at the same time.

And ready for the next 365 days.

Just not sure how often I'll be blogging about it.  I promise I'll be back if anything exciting happens of if I start dating or if I meet someone but for now this blog is going to have a bit of a rest. 

Thank you so much for those of you that read this regularly, commented, ever commented, prayed or are just reading this now. I am always contactable via 365christianandsingle@gmail.com and I will be popping back and reading your blogs. 

A Time for Everything

 ¹ There is a time for everything, 
   and a season for every activity under the heavens:

 ² a time to be born and a time to die,
   a time to plant and a time to uproot,
 ³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
   a time to tear down and a time to build,
 ⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
   a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 ⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
   a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
 ⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
   a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 ⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
   a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 ⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
   a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3 1-8

xMiss365

-234 Not so random thoughts

....I watched Once Upon a Time and thought of Jeanine from Wayfaring Girl on a Mission and prayed for her  and her family this past week, so sad for her loss but grateful for the certainty that she has about her Mum's salvation. But I also wish that I could have teleported myself over there this week to give her a quick hug too. 


....I saw a rainbow last week and I thought of Gail from Gail's Angle's new blog design and how she loves the rainbow tag cloud at the bottom of her page......


....I was in McCafe grabbing a coffee yesterday morning when I spied some animal crackers on the shelf and I wondered if Shannon had given up on her blog ( no she hasn't ) and that I now can't look at animal crackers without thinking inside my head "Shanimal's Crackers". True......




.....I was in a crazy classroom this afternoon and I thought of Chronicler from Annals of  Christian Single and her Tales of a Classroom in her early posts and I wondered how she would go in this one. And came to the conclusion that she would love it! ......


....I walked past a sock shop the other day and spied some Rainbow knee socks. Of course I associated them with Ms Blase from The Unpopular Girl in Womanhood and how I always have to copy and paste her name into my comments and I really need to ask her to tell me a shortcut to type her name properly ;).....


....and my Mum was talking about her cyber friend Michelle the other day and I immediately thought of the lovely Michelle that comments on my posts here and has always been so encouraging and supportive......


xx Miss365

So what's been happenin' Miss365?

Well yes. It has been a while. I have been thinking of you all and I have actually checked in a bit and had a peek at your blogs. I just couldn't bring myself to write anything about being single or my life here over these past 7 weeks. 


The best thing I have done in these past 7 weeks is not do any online dating at all. 


Ok. Well I did check into one former site when they gave me some free time. And I did find an email from a member about something random addressing something from a forum post from ages ago which sparked a four day conversation about music and fitness. But I had no illusions and once my time was up it was done. I didn't pay for the site to continue the conversation and he didn't ask for my details so I was able to leave it at that. 


So why was I able to leave it so easily? I mean this guy....smokin' hot. The former Miss365's mindset would think and possibly articulate "Out of her league" but Miss365 has had her butt in the gym for the past 6 weeks and if it's not already up there check out how much I've melted off my bod with clean eating and learning how to run.  The Miss365 now was thinking "Smokin' hot but I really don't have time for this." I know!


I have no time to think about men or boys for that matter when I am either cooking, exercising or wishing that my body wasn't quite so sore after exercising but secretly liking it because I know I've actually done some hard work. 

WHO AM I???

Lol. 


Which actually isn't a bad question really.


God has been quite persistent in getting me to work on this anxiety thing. He is way past the pruning stage and now has the root killer out. We are getting to root of the matter.


And it's surprising what is coming up. And who, how and where these revelations are taking place. 


I'm still a mess. My home is a bomb site. How Clean Is Your House would have a double epsisode here but not as many pots are rattling anymore. And when they start I have enough knowledge now to begin to think about what just "turned the heat up" and started them going. 


It's quite freeing really. Still very noisy inside my head at times. But now that I am listening to the rattling it's easier to work out why it's happening in the first place. Sometimes I can stop it with a scripture, other times a song of praise and other times just a stern word to myself to "Cut it out." Lol. 


I'm soooo happy in my job and praying that I can stay. It's unlikely because of reshuffling at a system level but I have enough support where I am at and with several people of influence that maybe, just maybe I will be able to stay. I figure that God gave me this "out" from that situation before - He's got this one covered too. :)


I've missed writing this blog but I needed to step back and concentrate on other stuff for a bit. I'm hoping that I'll be posting a couple of times a week again. 


Now I'm off to check out what you've been up to! :)


xMiss365

-236 A short heartfelt post

To those of you whom have left comments and sent me emails.

Thank you.

Thank you for your prayers, your words, your thoughts and for taking the time to notice I was AWOL with this blog writing. Your words were like a shower of glitter that blessed my heart when I finally logged into my email and read them.

Today was the first Sunday that God didn't deal with me in His persistently persistent way that I didn't have tears streaming down my face at least once today so the changes that have happened in the past 6 or so weeks have obviously made some difference.

There is still a fair bit of anxiety and obviously a fair bit of avoidance going on but I really believe that one of the things that has helped a lot is signing off from the online dating for a while and working on my fitness and nutrition.

I'll come back in the next day or so and write an updated post but now that I feel that I can write about being single and living this life again from this perspective and be honest about it  - I'm back. :)

Again your comments and emails made my heart sing more than you can imagine. I never would have thought that God could build a community like this so quickly and one that cares so genuinely, particularly since most of us have no idea what we all look like. ;)

xMiss365

-238 Sing My Soul

Image by Chaiwat

I thought I'd share with you a Part 2 to yesterday's post and tell you about how I ended my teary day.

Not all that long after writing my Help Fatigue Day -239 post, I shut down my computer, turned off the TV, stood in the middle of my lounge room and with tears rolling down my face sang songs of praise to God.

I can't tell you now because I honestly can't remember, what songs I sang but I can tell you that the bits of songs that poured out of my heart surprised me sometimes with their "vintages" and at times a tiny part of my brain was thinking "How on earth am I remember all the lyrics to this song? Haven't sung this one for years!"

But my spirit and my heart knew what I needed to sing to Him in my sadness last night.

Today was an ok day. Not amazing. Not horrid. There were a couple of great work moments. But it was an ok day.

And I'm fine with that.

xMiss365

-239 Help fatigue

This morning as I was leaving the flat I thought that I was going to come home tonight and write a nice, happy, hope filled post that was full of positive energy and sunshine and all things lovely. :)

And my day started off happy and all was good.

But I started to notice as the day wore on I was less inclined to want to help others when they asked for it. I didn't exactly say "No" but I was a little lazy in my answers. At one stage, after I had just bitten into a rather large piece of chilli in my Pork roll, that perhaps that was my consequence for giving half hearted "helpful" answers.

So after getting a fair amount of work done and having a slightly anxious conversation with colleagues about something that is coming up in our sector I got in the car, drove about 100 metres down the road and...

...burst into tears.

Yep.

And there have been random acts of crying since.

I won't bore you with all the details but I've prayed a lot this afternoon and I've reached the point of what I call "Help Fatigue".  My job is essentially helping others and speaking encouragement, wisdom and gentle "What on earth were you thinking?!" on an hourly basis every day.

I love my job. But it's a give, give, give job too.

And on other days I've felt like this in the past I've been in close proximity to kid cuddles or within a day or two of being involved in a community where someone may notice my sad eyes or because of that community I felt connected and less alone.

And the feeling passed.

But now I'm no longer connected to that community and I'm not in close proximity to kid cuddles -  I'm just at a loss.....honest post, hey? :)

So tonight I feel like I am suffering temporarily from help fatigue, disconnected & lacking in kid cuddles.

I'm ok. I promise.  And it has nothing to do with the Bachelor Updates or my retirement from online dating.

I just keep thinking tonight......

This too shall pass. :)

xMiss365

-240 Done with online dating.

Sorry it's been a while between posts. Potential Bachelor #5 and I were getting to know each other for a couple of weeks with voice emails and the like & one long Skype chat. 

And then that was it. 

Over a week and a half and nothing. 

I sent him a bright, cheery, short but not dismissive email about a week ago - just to remind him I'm still alive I guess and still no reply. 

I haven't seen him on Skype since so he's either not on, he's blocked me or he set up some other account that he hasn't logged onto again.

What I don't like about this online stuff is the ability to just avoid and never know why the other person lost interest in getting to know you. I've learned over the years that it most likely has nothing to do with me. He could have found interest with someone closer to home or some big family thing happened or he could have lost all fingers in a harvester accident....

Lol. 

Whatever.

And I do mean that "Whatever" with a shrug of my shoulders. 

But it would be nice to know sometimes. 

So Hurrah. My last online dating membership runs out in a couple of days so after much prayer I'm fairly certain that I need to let this go for a while. I think in some ways I'm trying to "control" God by persistently doing the online stuff. I know I need to just let it go and get on with doing other things. Like losing some more weight and being more than ok with being on my own again not just mostly. 

I've also realised that by participating in online dating I was using it as a safety net of sorts to not trust that I can attract men in real life. Crazy hey? 

So yes. Potential Bachelor #5 is done for reasons I cannot fathom. I don't think I'm that scary. Actually I know I'm not. 

On to the rest of the year getting fit and healthy again and seeing what God does for me with friendships and more in real life. Maybe nothing. But at least I won't be waiting by the inbox anymore. 

Worse than the days of waiting by the phone. ;)

xMiss365