Stay Single: Trusting God’s Greater Plan For Your Heart

A sample of Stay Single: Trusting God’s Greater Plan For Your Heart

Trusting God’s Greater Plan for Your Heart

By Rebecca Simon

Contents

• Foreword — 5
• Maybe Right Now, Your Journey Isn’t About Love—It’s About God — 9
• If God Closed the Door, It’s Because He Saw What You Couldn’t — 13
• It’s Okay to Still Believe in Gentle Love — 17
• If They Didn’t Choose You Fully, It Wasn’t Your Forever — 21
• Heaven Is Still Preparing the Love You Prayed For — 25
• You Were Never Hard to Love—They Just Weren’t Ready to Love Well — 29
• Some Goodbyes Are Answers to Prayers You Were Too Afraid to Pray — 33
• Read This When You Start to Resent the Waiting — 37
• If You’re Wondering If You Already Missed Your Person — 41
• It’s Not That Love Passed You By—It’s That God Said Not Yet — 47
• God Doesn’t Just Prepare the Love—He Prepares You to Be Able to Hold It — 51
• You Can’t Call in What You Don’t Yet Believe You Deserve — 55
• God Isn’t Just Preparing Them for You—He’s Teaching Them How to Recognize You — 59
• When You’re Grieving a Future You Never Had — 63
• Peace Is the Proof It’s From God — 67
• You Can’t Build a Future on What God Asked You to Leave Behind — 71
• The Right Love Will Know How to Stay — 75
• When You Learn to Be Alone, You Stop Accepting Almosts — 79
• When You’re Afraid You’ve Become Too Independent to Share Your Life — 83
• You’re Not Waiting to Be Chosen—You’re Waiting to Be Matched — 89
• The Wrong Love Was Just the Reminder That You Were Meant for More — 93
• What to Do with All the Love You Have Nowhere to Put — 97
• The World Teaches You to Play Games—God Teaches You to Be Genuine — 101
• The Hardest Part of Healing Is Learning You Can’t Fix Someone Who Doesn’t Want to Be Healed — 105
• The Culture Tells You to Move On—God Tells You to Be Still — 109
• When You Realize You’re the Safe Place You’ve Been Searching For — 113
• When Love Feels Too Good to Be True—Believe It Anyway — 117
• When God Asks You to Love Without Attachment — 121
• The Weight of Being Misunderstood When You Love Deeply — 125

Foreword — pages 5–7

I know what it feels like to look at the life you once imagined for yourself. The life with the shared table, the life with the steady hand to hold, the life with the love that was supposed to have arrived by now. I know what it is like to feel the heaviness of its absence. I know the exhaustion of being the one who is always becoming, the one who is always preparing their heart, the one who is always in a season of growth, while the depth of what you actually desire remains just out of reach.

I know the loneliness that ropes itself to your heart when you try to reconcile God’s goodness with the silence of an unanswered prayer for connection. It is the kind of loneliness that makes you doubt the beauty of the love you were bred from. It is the kind of loneliness that makes you wonder if you are being overlooked, or if your blessing was forgotten in the unfolding of everyone else’s story.

This book was not written to give you a timeline for your hope. It was not written to promise that if you pray a certain way or heal a certain wound, the right human being will appear at your door tomorrow. Instead, this book was written to remind you that your life is not on hold in the quiet.

Your journey right now is not a waiting room; it is a sacred space.

This book is for the moments when you feel like you are hard to love because you care deeply in a world that only knows how to exist on the surface of itself. This book is for the moments when you are tired of being your own safe place. This book is for the heart that is learning that a closed door is not a rejection from God but rather a protection of the person He is still building you into.

If you have ever felt like love has passed you by, if you have ever questioned why God is taking so long to recognize and reward your readiness, if you have ever felt the ache of being misunderstood because your heart is soft in a culture that is hard—this book is for you.

In these words, I want you to see that God isn’t just preparing a love for you in the future, He is teaching you how to hold the weight of it now. He is teaching you that you are not irrational for wanting something genuine, something timeless, something that mirrors the way He loves you.

Let these essays be a companion for your loneliest nights. Let these essays witness your strength on your bravest mornings. Let these essays remind you that your heart is not behind; it is not a project to be rushed into completion. Let these essays remind you that you are not alone.

You are being matched, not just with a person, but with a purpose that only this chapter of your life could will into existence. You are being led into a love story that started long before you met anyone else: the love story of a God who saw you, who chose you, and who stayed with you, even in the quiet.

—Rebecca

Maybe right now, your journey isn’t about love—it’s about God — pages 9–12

You thought that by now, love would have cracked within your heart, would have arrived at your doorstep.

Because the truth is—you have been calling in deeper connection for as long as you can remember. You have been praying for it since you knew how to call it by its name. You’ve prepared your heart. You have grown it. You have let go of the things that weigh heavily within it. You have told the truth about your past, you have turned it over inside of yourself. You have tried to become more aware, more honest, more rooted, and still, you feel like the one who is always becoming and never arriving. Still, the love you are hoping for hasn’t found you, hasn’t met you where you are.

It’s deeply human to start questioning yourself in this kind of waiting. It is human to wonder if your heart beats too loudly in this world. It is human to wonder if you are too late or too unfinished to be worthy of good love. It is human to assume that there is more to heal, or more to grow within, or more to endure, in order to find your counterpart. So, you pray harder. You soften more. You learn how to hold your own hand through the quiet, how to be your own safe place, but the desire still aches within you, the longing still hums.

But what if this season isn’t about who is coming into your life?

What if this season is about what is being built within it? Within you?

What if this season isn’t about love at all—at least, not in the way you thought? What if right now, your journey is about learning how to live like you are already loved? Not by another human being. Not by the version of your life that is still out of reach. But here and now. Without conditions. Without needing to edit yourself down or will change into your atmosphere. What if this season is about God, and the kind of relationship that anchors you before anyone else is anchored beside you?

Because the love you are praying for will not always be light and easy, it will not always be virtuous and light-filled. It will be real. It will require strength, it will require self-awareness, compassion, and the kind of depth that comes from the most honest part of you. It will ask you to be steady enough to hold space for another person’s humanity. It will ask you to understand yourself well enough to stay grounded and tender when things get hard, when hope darkens.

At the end of the day, maybe that’s what this part is really about. Not the absence of love, but the practice of becoming someone who can receive it without losing yourself inside of it.

This isn’t your heart’s waiting room. This is its preparation. This is where you learn how to stop roping your identity to someone else’s willingness to choose you. This is where you learn how to feel chosen in who you are, in what your soul was bred from. This is where you learn how to be proud of your progress as a human being, even when there is no one else there to clap for it. This is where you learn how to feel at home in your own life, in your softness, before inviting anyone else into it.

It is okay to want love. It is okay to feel the weight of its absence. Still, don’t forget what is already here. Do not rush by the peace that is still available to you right now. Do not miss the growth that is happening beneath the surface of your life just because it isn’t being witnessed yet. This part of your story is not less sacred. It is not less full. It is not less meaningful just because you do not have someone to share it with. You are not falling behind. You are not being punished. You are not any less whole just because your heart has yet to be chosen.

Love will come. You will experience that kind of beauty, that kind of tenderness. But right now, it is okay if your life isn’t rooted in that experience yet. Right now, this chapter is about you and God, and that is not meaningless—that is the foundation of everything. That is where your greatest love story actually begins.

If God closed the door, it’s because He saw what you couldn’t — pages 13–15

You didn’t imagine it. The connection was real. The way your heart softened, the way something settled inside you—it wasn’t just chemistry or fleeting desire. It was something sacred, something gentle. It felt like God had opened a door, like this could be the resting place your heart could finally exhale, could finally experience something real and rooted, could finally experience something good.

Naturally, you let yourself believe. You let yourself hope, not because you were naive, but because you were ready, because something about it felt honest, felt anchored, felt true. And that willingness to trust, to see a future before you stepped into it, to have faith in something you had yet to hold safely in your heart—that wasn’t weakness. It was faith. It was courage. It was proof that your heart still believed in what it was created for; it was proof that your heart still hoped.

So, when that chapter ended suddenly, in the middle of the page, without warning, and without reason—the loss wasn’t just about a human being you felt something special with. It was about everything that person symbolized in your life. It was about safety. It was about stability. It was about a softer version of your heart, a softer version of your future, of your hope. The grief that followed didn’t always look like heartbreak—sometimes it looked like quiet, like self-doubt, like the ache of wondering why something that felt so close to becoming real had to end before it even began, had to slip through your fingers.

The truth is—not every ending you experience along your journey is something you were meant to prevent, is something you could have willed into working out. Some doors close without you doing anything wrong. Some things fall apart simply because they were never built to go the distance. And even if those things felt aligned, that doesn’t mean that they were meant to last, or to beat the odds. That doesn’t mean that they were meant to carry you where you were destined to go next.

You only saw the moment. God saw the pattern. You only saw the version of them you wanted to believe in. God saw the version they would eventually become. You were left holding on to the potential—God was protecting you from the price it would have cost you if you had continued to hope in that direction, if you had continued to resist letting go.

Even though the loss didn’t feel like a kindness when everything broke down, and you were left in the aftermath of the hurt—it was. Because sometimes the most loving thing God can do in your life is to remove what you would have settled for, just to show you what you never have to settle for again.

This part of healing is where trust stops being gentle, and it starts to become real. This is where you loosen your grip on the version of the story you wanted and begin to believe that an unanswered prayer can still hold mercy within it. This is where you stop searching for closure in places that already made you feel small—and start recognizing that peace was never meant to come from someone else’s capacity to apologize or explain themselves. Peace was always going to come from within you; closure was always something you were going to have to give yourself.

Let the door stay closed. Even if it was, for a moment, everything you had ever wanted, everything you had prayed for when you were growing up. Let the door stay closed, even if part of you still aches for what it could have been. Let the door stay closed—not because it wasn’t meaningful, but because it wasn’t meant to last. Let the door stay closed because God saw the cost, because God knew what it would have taken from you in the long run, because God loves you too much to let you settle into a place you were only ever meant to pass through.

Publication details

Copyright © 2026 Rebecca Simon.

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