GraceNotes DailyGraceNotes DailyNaledi has been answering the same question for nearly a decade. What she has learned about faith, singleness, and a God who doesn't see her life as incomplete.
5 min read · June 10, 2026 · GraceNotes Daily
She knows how to answer the question now. She has been answering some version of it for nearly a decade, at family dinners and church socials and work functions, and she can do it with a smile and a subject change so smooth that most people don't notice the pivot. Any news? Seeing anyone? The question always wears a different outfit but she recognises the face.
Naledi is thirty-six. She has been a Christian her whole life, has prayed about this honestly and specifically, has done the work of becoming someone she herself would want to be with. And she is still single. What frustrates her most is not the waiting. It is the way the church has made the waiting feel like a verdict.
There is a loneliness that belongs to single people in church communities that has nothing to do with being alone on a Saturday night.
It is the loneliness of sitting in a room full of people who see your life as incomplete. Who mean well and still manage, in the same breath, to communicate that where you are is not quite where you should be. First you were in a preparation season, then a character-building season, and then a divine appointment was apparently just around the corner. Now people have mostly stopped saying things directly and have started looking at you with a particular expression you cannot quite name.
Underneath all of it is a question she has asked God more times than she can count: have you forgotten?
The honest thing about Abraham's story is that the Bible does not romanticise the wait.
God made Abraham a promise when he was seventy-five years old: you will have a son, and through your descendants all nations on earth will be blessed. Abraham waited twenty-five years for it. The text does not skip that. It names the doubt, the moments where Abraham and Sarah tried to manage the timeline themselves and made a mess of it, the laughter Sarah had at the idea that anything could still come of this. It is honest about what twenty-five years of waiting actually looks like in a person.
And God held the promise through all of it. Through the doubt and the laughter and the mistakes. The promise did not expire because Abraham stopped performing patience correctly.
Psalm 27:14 says: wait for the Lord, be strong and take heart, and wait for the Lord. The Hebrew word translated as wait is qavah, which also means to lean toward, to stretch toward something expected. It is not a passive word. It is the posture of someone who has not stopped expecting, who keeps their eyes in the direction of what they are waiting for.
Ruth did not wait for Boaz to notice her before she became who she was going to be. She showed up, worked, was loyal to Naomi in a way that cost her something real. She built her character before there was any reason to think it would be rewarded.
When Boaz finally saw her, what he said was: all the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character. He had been watching. He had seen something that was already there.
You are not incomplete because you are single. The church has sometimes told you a story about yourself that is simply not in the Bible.
Naledi got married two years after that Sunday lunch. She met her husband through a colleague, in the most ordinary of circumstances, the kind that only make sense in retrospect. She says the wait prepared her for him, but not in the way people mean when they say that. She wasn't waiting to be ready. She was just living. And then he was there.
She still attends the same church. She still sometimes gets asked if there's any news, and now she smiles because there always is.
You are not behind. You are not forgotten. Your life is happening now. God is in it, in this specific season, working in ways that have not fully revealed themselves yet. That is not a platitude. It is a promise.
Part of the Between Sundays series. Available on Spotify.
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