Faith in Fragments

Fragment One: The Gift No One Wanted

I grew up Catholic.

It was hard being a Catholic child. Expectations and pressures I didn’t fully understand. Church felt more like endurance than encounter.

I believed in it, sure. It was a very meaningful part of my identity. It still is. I believed in God. I still do.

It just got more… layered over the years.

In my early twenties, I got swept up in a born-again wave. I wanted to be caught. And something did happen: I came out of a long depressive phase almost overnight. That experience was real. It gave me hope again.

But the struggle didn’t stay gone. The low moods, the anxiety, the fog—they came back, in waves.

Church, which was now supposed to be fun... well… it wasn’t.

I was still bored.

There, I said it.

The worship sessions that went on and on…

One time, during a visit to a church I didn’t belong to, after about half an hour, I sat down and began reading my Bible. This guy came up to me and asked what my problem was. I never went back.

Back home at my Catholic church (with the idols–yeah, don’t even ask!), you sing one song, and then you can move on to other parts of the liturgy.

Here, there was no liturgy, which was supposed to be a good thing. Except, to me, what that meant was that, after the endless worship session to start the service, there would be testimonials. Talks. Readings. More Talks. More worship.

And then there were the rules.

So many rules.

What you could wear, what music you could listen to, who you could date, and how.
The many, often conflicting, teachings about single life, relationships, marriage, and sex. Some sounded biblical, some felt suspiciously cultural. But all of them were wielded like truth.

It mattered to me—I was single for many years.

And in church, being single was often treated like a condition to be cured. A state to endure until God sent your "husband." But there were rules for waiting. Rules for dating. Rules for praying for your future spouse. And always the quiet undertow of blame if nothing happened.

Maybe you didn’t guard your heart.

Maybe you didn’t wait well enough. Didn’t pray well enough. Didn’t pray enough.

Oh yes, and the wild card! My absolute fav one! You weren’t ready! You might have thought that you were, but no, because He knew you weren’t! And anyway, were you even sure He was not intending for you to receive “the gift of singleness”? The one gift no one wanted.

And underneath it all, the quiet accusation:

Maybe your faith just wasn’t strong enough.

Once, I read an article—written by a Protestant minister, interestingly—about Mary as a model for single women.

I was furious.

Mary? She was a young girl when the arrangement was made for her and Joseph. She didn’t have to wait. She never sat in the pews aching with loneliness while people assured her, “The Lord will take care of it.” It was already taken care of. The family took care of it. Society took care of it.

Another time, someone had left a book outside my door: "God, the Matchmaker" by Derek Prince. No note. No explanation. Just an assumption left on my doorstep.

I was fuming!

I had read the book. In my twenties. We all did. If you were a Christian in those days, it was everywhere. It was huge. You couldn’t have got past it if you tried.

I need to provide some background here – bear with me.

Lydia Christensen had fully dedicated her life to God – before she ever met Derek Prince. Lydia had moved to pre-state Israel in 1942. If you think Israel is tense now, Jerusalem in the 1940s was a city on edge—war looming, streets unstable, curfews imposed, danger very real. That was when Lydia moved to Jerusalem, which was particularly volatile, to adopt orphaned and disadvantaged children. On her own. A single woman. In 1942. Her priorities weren’t in getting a husband. But they met when Derek was serving with the British Army in Jerusalem and they married in 1946.

We all wanted to be like Lydia Christensen.

But frankly… well, let’s face it.

We weren’t. Right?

We just wanted to have a regular job in a country where there was no civil unrest and all that, and then get married, and then have kids.

But anyway. Fast forward to when, over a decade later, this happened with the book on my doorstep.

I went to the minister about it. Oddly enough, he’d never heard of the book. He asked to borrow it and later told me that the whole premise—that God is a divine dating service—isn’t even clearly biblical. That surprised me, but I felt justified in my annoyance. Finally, someone much better versed in the Bible, was on my side!

I do not doubt the truthfulness of the story of Derek Prince and Lydia Christensen. No problem there.

The problem was how that story was turned into a blueprint.

A formula.

God will sort you out. You sit tight.

But life, as I found, doesn’t obey formulas.

And when it didn’t work out that way for me, I was left wondering—again—whose fault it was.

It’s strange.

Faith once saved me.

And yet over time, it also hurt me in ways I couldn’t name for years.

To this day, I haven’t let go of it entirely. Not quite.

I’m happily married now.

And still…

But these days, I carry it differently. Quieter. Gentler.

I’m learning to sit with my doubt as something human, not shameful.

And maybe—just maybe—that ’s what faith really is.