To Date or Not To Date—Guidelines for Christian Widows and Widowers
Gail Ruth Peterson
Copyright 2011 by Gail Ruth Peterson
Smashwords Edition
To Date or Not To Date…
A Guideline for Christian Widows & Widowers
We’d like to begin by describing our own dating experience after the loss of our spouses. While we credit God’s amazing orchestration in bringing us together, a worthy writing in and of itself to the right audience, our point in telling our story is in the hopes that you will relate to some of our experiences. We also hope our story will encourage everyone to seek God’s plan above the desire to fill voids and caves of loneliness. Our stories also set the stage for the dating experience by sharing things we learned and took with us into the dating journey—considering aspects of dating that every Christian needs to consider.
A few months after Vinnie passed away I was sitting at a traffic light and saw a solider drive by in uniform. I remember asking the Lord, “Would I miss Vinnie with the same deep sadness if he weren’t dead but was instead deployed and I was home knowing he’d return home one day? Would it hurt the same? Would I be just as sad?” No sooner did I ask these things did I get my answer. “Gail, you don’t have the picture right. He is Home. You are still deployed. Fight the good fight for I [God] still have things for you to do here until it’s time for you also to come Home.
In contrast, I often thought of my mother-in-law who was widowed for over 30 years. She remained a widow during those years, vowed to remain dressed in black for the rest of her life. She carried her husband’s picture with her where ever she went, visited the grave yard every day to talk to him for hours (except when she visited family in New York. During these times she settled for simply carrying his picture around, talking to it/him and kissing it at night). Reflecting on these two different perspectives of widowhood, I knew that God didn’t want me to hold onto Vinnie. He still had a life for me here and I’d see him again in due time.
When the picture of the soldier came to mind, it burned an impression quite different for my life than the one modeled by my mother-in-law. While her faithfulness and loyalty to her late husband was remarkable, I knew the Lord wanted my faithfulness to be in His plan for my life now, a plan that did not include Vinnie—I was to be about the Lord’s work. I had an image in my mind of Vinnie in Heaven experiencing joy & life like never before. It helped me realize that God wanted me to also experience just as much joy and fullness of life to the best as I am able while I’m here. In other words, it’s God’s will for both our lives to be lived fully and filled with joy in Him (Vinnie there, me here). I set forth the next year of my widowhood seeking, praying, searching and waiting for God to make this new plan for my life clear to me.
As I began to seek God’s purpose for me and eventually felt God nudging me to start some kind of ministry to help widows, I had a number of people ask if I’d also work with widowers. I was asked this enough times that I began to tell God that if He wanted this ministry to include widowers, He’d have to bring a widower in my life because I didn’t know any widowers and I didn’t know anything about widowers. Though I had absolutely no intention of getting remarried after Vinnie died, that second year as I prayed about God bringing me a widower to partner with me in ministry, I began to entertain the idea of marriage.
The idea that God might have a husband “out there” for me eventually led me to experiment with the Internet. I justified this scary venture by thinking that if I didn’t find a new husband this way, I’d at least gain experience about Internet dating that I could pass on and possibly help other widows also pursuing this venue. I learned a great deal about the dangers and scams on Internet dating, gained wisdom about dating at this age (middle aged) AND…I met my second husband!
I thought if God really had a new husband for me and we were to serve in a ministry together, I might as well think and ask BIG! I prayed for a man who was not only retired with enough income that we could both devote our time to ministry but that he’d be more interested in devoting his retirement to ministry work instead of spending the rest of his days traveling and playing golf, and I prayed he would be a widower with a heart for other men struggling in widowhood. Mike was everything I prayed for!
My portion of this booklet comes from what I’ve learned in this season of my life--from experience, from the Scriptures and some other literary resources. Instead of writing yet another book on the subject, we chose to simplify the subject into this quick-read booklet. We hope that it will lead our readers to their knees, asking the Lord for discernment, wisdom and to be genuinely open to whatever His will is for their individual lives. It’s highly recommended that with each step forward, the next step be to stand still for prayer. If so led in prayer to move forward, take the next step and stop for prayer again. There is a good chance that in the process of searching for a potential mate you will get hurt. It’s possible that there will be a number of wonderful short-lived relationships that will end for various reasons. It’s possible that the Lord will not have you marry again, and in this case, it’s our prayer that you will learn this quickly and find peace in whatever other direction the Lord may have for you.
At the same time, I also pray that your falling down a few times by boulders of disappointments won’t stop you in your tracks if it’s God’s will for you to carry on. This is why prayer after each step forward is so important. Only prayer will help you gain the discernment and wisdom you need to know if you are to stop and turn the other way or take another step forward. If there is one tiny nugget of advice I can pass on it would be to let God be your guide—not your heart!