These past few weeks, I've been reminded that a satisfied single Christian woman is like a tall glass of sweet tea on a sticky, 95-degree Louisiana day.


Refreshing and heavenly.


For many saved single ladies, it seems that romantic uneasiness--try that for a PC term--hovers around the post-grad school, starting-to-master-your-career, relatively stable late-twenties-or-early-thirties season. I know of 3 such sorts: the Christian sister who is bored, so she dates recreationally while lacking purpose or a futuristic scope. The sister who grows paranoid, so she lowers...okay, totally lowers...her guidelines. She sells herself out, figuratively speaking. And then there's the sister who clings to one man, usually a respectable brother whose yet to commit to her, and develops an emotional attachment, a soul tie.


It's not my pattern to write columns that offer no solutions, no practical steps toward improvement. So it pains me that that's the case today; I have no answers. I just want to send encouragement to the masses. I've been there. I know how easy it is to get disillusioned by love, or the lack thereof. And I have a few sisters in mind who need to remember that, as the recent runaway bestselling novel, The Help, simply put it "You is kind. You is smart. You is important."


If you are a sister whose lost her course--who plays with love...or, in contrast, covets love...or isn't guarding her heart--I want to pour on you showers of blessings and positivity today. Here's a poem that I dedicate to you:


I need my happy back.
Me. Satisfied. Today. Right this second.
A while ago
I boarded the right train
But got off at the wrong station (1)
Year and a half detour
Eventually found my route
To Exit Contentment
And while on the wrong train
I had a window seat
Delectable sight
Won't somebody please
Nominate this landscape for best cinematography?
Sun toasting my face
Funny how pretty the wrong way can be.


I need my happy back.
Hey. Set. That. Down. Right this second.
Put down my happy cause it's too fragile for you.
I had such good moments with HIM
Luckily, some of them actually happened.
Used to say "Please don't have another option but me"
But he had one hand on his littleblackbook
The other hand on me.
You see,
Today I picked up a bottle of "I love HIM"
Noticed that the expiration date had passed.
So I tossed it out.
Funny how I never even tasted that mold on that Love.


(1) For this sole line, I have to give credit to the talented Audre Lorde who in 1986 wrote my favorite poem in the universe Stations. And although I didn't quote from it, I also took inspiration from Ntozake Shange's Somebody almost walked off with alla my stuff which Loretta Devine so vivaciously portrayed in For Colored Girls (2010).