GYC SE 2008: ReGeneration

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GYC Southeast

Alan and Nicole Parker: Letting God Write Your Love Story

Nicole Parker

Letting God Be the Author of Your Love Story

Alan Parker

Making and Keeping Your Relationship Healthy

Single and Satisfied

Father in Heaven, we just ask for your spirit to be here with us.

Open our minds to your word, Lord, and to your will for each 1 of our lives.

I know you have a beautiful love story you want to write for each 1 of the people who are here.

First, love with you, and second, If it's your will, love with someone else.

There was a time in my life when I was very single and very not satisfied.

I started dating when I was about 14 and in the procession of guys that I dated between then and 16, I figured out this was just not a good idea.

So when I committed my life to the Lord, I also committed my dating relationships to the Lord and that meant for me no longer dating.

I didn't date from when I was 16 until I was 23.

Initially I was like, how am I going to live this way?

You know, I shared in an earlier seminar how I was such, I was known as being a huge flirt.

And I just thought, how am I going to live this way?

It's just like, you know, I decided I was going to do the God thing and for me the God thing meant going off to the convent And just deciding I wasn't going to have any relationships with guys and I was going to try to do everything 100% the way that God wanted me to.

But I have to admit, I thought, you know, God certainly does have some harsh requirements here.

But I realized that I needed to get my thought life straight.

I spent a lot of time dreaming about guys.

And when I'd come home and lie down at night, I really longed for somebody to be there with me so I would create imaginary stories.

My best friend Dana and I, we were going to be novelists together and write novels under the pen name Danica.

And we wrote lots of wild love stories that were very romantic.

And we were captured by Indians and all kinds of things.

But you know, the bottom line was our lives were not even, it was not possible for us to be captured by Indians.

And it was no more possible that we actually find true love with the mindsets that we had.

And so when we parted ways, when I chose to take 1 direction in my life and sign off from dating, she chose a different path And it wasn't a very happy 1.

And what I thought was such a terrible sacrifice that the Lord was calling me to, I can tell you, was 1 of the greatest blessings of my life.

Not only did I make so many rich quality friendships, both opposite sex and same sex, because I found that once I couldn't feed that hormonal high of flirting with guys and feeling so good because I'd have these deep, intimate talks with guys who I wasn't dating.

We're just like brother and sister, blah, blah, blah.

But once I didn't have that and I wasn't feeding that anymore, I found that being friends with girls was a lot more attractive than it had been before, when I could compare sitting down with a girl and spilling my guts versus sitting down with a guy and spilling my guts.

But I built close friendships with girls.

I've found that being single could truly be satisfying.

And that's what I want to share with you today, the keys to how I found that and how I believe that God wants to have that for every 1 of you.

If you're not married, God wants you to be single and satisfied.

Now I shared a little bit about this study earlier.

According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, most people were no more satisfied with life after marriage than they were prior to marriage.

How many of you were here when I shared this earlier?

This study took 24, 000 individuals and looked at how they reacted to getting married.

And they found that they generally stayed at pretty much their personal set point of happiness.

And they'd have a little blip of extra happy around when they got married, maybe the year before when they're engaged, and maybe some of the year afterward.

And then they go right back to being just as happy as they were before.

The miserable people were miserable again.

And some people are happier than others, the researcher Diner concluded.

And there are things you can do to make yourself happier.

But something external, like getting married, isn't a royal road to changing your set point.

Oh no, my husband is putting slides in beforehand.

So yes, That means that, excusing that slide that sneaked in, this is a seminar on how to have a happy marriage.

By sitting down and learning how to be a happy single, you're learning how to be a happy married person.

Because the same principles are going to apply.

Marriage is different, but it's not necessarily better.

I like marriage better than being single, but I think it's mainly because the path of the just is as a shining light, the Bible says.

It shines more and more unto the perfect day.

Marriage is better because it's wonderful, it's secure.

I feel so safe in knowing my husband loves me forever.

But I realize for most people who get married, they don't have the same security that I do because we didn't cheat on each other.

We didn't have sex with anybody else before we married each other.

Because I know when my husband goes to work, I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that he is being faithful to me, whether he's in my sight or not.

But it's also happier because as I'm spending more and more time, every year I become more of who God wants me to be, by God's grace.

And marriage is a wonderful way to grow, to learn so many things about myself that I didn't realize.

You don't really realize how stuck you are in your own ways until you try to load a dishwasher with somebody else.

Don't try to reason with a rational person like my husband.

Marriage is great, but it's not as romantic as dating.

So some people, they get married expecting, wow, now we're going to live an intense, you know, The wonders of engagement are just going to be multiplied.

Boy, everything is just going to be so intensely exciting all of our lives.

I remember when I was like, I don't know, 10 years old or so, and I was just thinking, man, if someday I could only be big enough to drive, big enough to go sleep over at my friend's house, Big enough to whatever it was.

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Series

Alan and Nicole Parker: Letting God Write Your Love Story

Single and Satisfied

Transcript

Parent Series

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