Do you know a single mom in your church?
Maybe you want to witness to a single mom?
Perhaps, you just want to dig deeper and get to know single moms.
Either way, you’ll find out what we’re REALLY thinking here in this post and it just might surprise you!!!
9 Things You Need to Know About Single Moms
First of all…
We are exhausted
We carry a LOT. We not only have to run the wife duties, keeping a home, tending to the kids, but also the husband’s role: finances, working, fixing things on the house, etc.
There’s a TON of stuff we do and at the end of the day, we are tired.
If we have a job, like blogging or customer service for example where we give all day long to the world and other people, our energy is even more drained. We often forget self-care because there’s so many needs out there and we want to help.
Investing in us is the best way to get our attention. Anyone who pays attention to OUR needs or the needs of our children is going to get our attention. I remember a time when someone helped me move and took the time to teach my son how to lock up the house and be responsible on our way out. That was the #1 thing that caught my attention.
It wasn’t just that they were investing in me or my needs at the moment, but even more, that they were investing in my kids.
And here’s the thing. So many people tell me, “Well, just go to church and the church will naturally have people in it that will invest in your kids.”
But they don’t always do that. People are busy and in churches it’s the same thing.
I went to a church here for 6 years and was super involved and it was extremely rare that anyone ever even SPOKE to my kids outside of kids class or something like that. It was like they were invisible. It hurt my heart so bad. I’d have someone say hello to me, but rarely would they greet my children.
Why is that?
CHILDREN of single mother’s often-times feel invisible. Left over. Rejects. Someone no one cares about or notices.
When someone rejects or ignores the children of a single mom, the single mom will automatically think your “hello” to HER is fake or just done out of politeness. She will think it’s not GENUINE care or concern.
But when someone takes the time to talk to her kids and treats them like every other child, it stands out. They get the children’s attention, and in doing so, they get the mom’s attention too!
If you know a single mom, say hi to her in church, but address her kids too! I promise you, she will notice it! Even if she doesn’t say anything about it or call it out, you will become someone she knows cares.
We’re careful who we share to
Everyone is so busy, and no one wants to be burdened. Many married ladies are able to talk to their husbands, but single moms often don’t have anyone to talk to. Sometimes, it’s just about listening.
Listening with genuine curiosity and concern is such a powerful way to connect. When someone truly listens, remembers what’s said, and shows they care, they become a good friend.
If you want to be a friend to a single mom, you’re going to have to listen more. The more you listen, the more they will share and open up. The more they will know you legitimately care. 🙂
We don’t usually have a good support system
People will tell me, “If you go to church, you have a good support system.”
Do you?
Not always.
The previous church I went to, there was a single mom with 5 kids that went there. I was making friends with her, asking her lots of questions and just talking. She told me that she was coming to the church to get her kids involved in church and wanted a better life for them. That sounds great!
But it wasn’t a few months later, that she confided in me and told me that she felt like no one cared about her there. That she was invisible. She couldn’t make friends well, even though I knew her to be super outgoing and friendly and was showing up at many events.
I say with grievance that, that church was not caring for single moms.
I remember talking with a girl who had only been coming a couple weeks to church, she was splitting with her boyfriend and was crying after the service while I was investing in her and listening. The men in the church, started closing curtains and making it super obvious we needed to leave.
WHY would you begin kicking out people, while they are crying? Is that not what a church is for?!?! For the lost. The hurting.
I overheard two men talking. One saying, “Don’t close the curtains, they are talking (referring to us).” The one closing the curtains, had the audacity to say, “They can finish their conversation outside.”
I was internally APPALLED! It was literally only 12:10 pm. It wasn’t like it was 2 pm or something. Church had just let out at 12 pm!
Listen, I get that churches are filled with imperfect people, but that is just down right unacceptable. It’s sad too because a Biblical church such as that, is known as what Revelations describes as the lukewarm church of Laodicea.
When that happened, that was the first time that I thought to myself, “This is not the right church for me anymore. I can’t love on people here, minister to the needs of others here. I’m not allowed it seems.”
When looking for a church, look for one that genuinely cares about the people it says it’s in existence for.
Support systems are hard to find, sometimes even in churches. Many single women don’t have families they can turn to. They rely on the grace of others.
If you want to reach the heart of a single mom, support her.
Get her involved in a good support group that genuinely cares.
Do you have a single’s program at your church? Do you take time to notice the single moms? Or are we so busy as a society, even in churches, that we don’t notice other people anymore?
We are a lot weaker than we look
Seems like everyone thinks single moms are tough, strong girls but most of the time, we’re just not.
We feel like a bag of nerves waiting to explode.
There’s no one to hold us, no husband’s shoulder to cry on and so at the end of the day, we don’t get the love we need like many married women do. Even if you get one shoulder to cry on once every 365 days, it’s still more than we get!
Therefore, our strength comes from Christ, not in of ourselves.
If you want to see Jesus, look into the life of a Christian single mom. I promise you that you will see more of God in her than many because there’s no way she can get through everything on her plate WITHOUT Christ!!!!!!!!
It’s impossible!
It’s just too much for any single mom to handle on her own, apart from God.
We are always on our guard unless you are a 100% trusted friend
We’ve been hurt, scarred, and taken advantage of.
Single moms are, sadly, a major target for scams. The world sees us as a target to take our money, for example. We have to be on guard, quite literally, a lot of people are out to get us.
So many companies are charging us MORE because we’re single, knowing we don’t have any other options. We’re sitting ducks and to get through everything, we have to be pretty clever.
Wanna gain the trust of a single person, don’t try to take advantage of her. If you have opportunity to take advantage and you don’t take it and that happens over the course of your friendship a few times, she will learn to trust you.
And trust is a very valuable thing to her. To her, it’s her most prized possession because not many have it.
When you do have her trust, she will be more loyal to you than you can imagine. Because she knows you are a rare person indeed! One that doesn’t manipulate, lie, bend the rules, or take advantage of people. It restores her faith in God and also in humanity.
She’s been hurt and you are something really special to her.
We are prone to neglecting our own needs
There’s always someone out there who needs something and we sacrifice and forget to take care of ourselves in the process.
Because we’ve been through trauma ourselves, we are more apt to helping others too because we know what it’s like. And that can become a little exhausting at times. For me, I LOVE to serve. It’s literally one of my spiritual gifts, but it can be demanding too and without a husband to help carry the weight, it gets tough.
We constantly struggle with balancing it all, even if it looks like we have everything together, we don’t. But we try our best to manage everything and manage it well.
Wanna get our attention? Want to invest or get to know a single mom? Think about HER needs. What does she need? A home-cooked meal when she’s NOT sick? Someone to watch her kids for her to give her a little tiny breather?
At one of the churches I went to in Oregon, they were super-serving focused like that. They were constantly asking me if I needed a meal. I wasn’t sick or anything, just out of the kindness of their hearts. When they showed up with the meal, it was an entire meal with “more than one thing on the plate”. haha.
As a single mom, more than one or two things on the plate, is usually left for holidays. 🙂
It was shocking to see such grace and kindness.
It’s a real treat to be able to relax about dinner for a night. To have a good meal and it’s not a holiday.
It was truly a joy having such good friends. I remember one lady made me a meal and told me to KEEP the Tupperware. It was so expensive. Legit Tupperware! People can be so kind. And that’s what you want to be involved in and do for others too.
Show them you care. Show them they are loved. SHOW THEM!
We can become bitter more easily
Because we’ve been though a lot, sometimes, it feels easier just to throw in the towel and be done.
We can replay things in our minds over and over and say how it was wrong of that person to do this to me. How a company is taking advantage of me, etc. It can very easily lead to bitter thoughts.
Such was the case with my mom. She was a single mom and lived an incredibly bitter life.
She was like poison to everyone around her, which only fed her bitterness (“No one likes me” mentality). It was super hard to watch, growing up. She was, until I was around 8, a really great, happy person. But something happened in her life, a situation and for the rest of her life, she was bitter and angry.
Her lack of forgiveness and willingness to release all that, destroyed her life….and mine.
Sometimes I fight bitterness too. Really bad and I really have to pray and take every thought captive. We have to really fight it, not letting Satan get a foothold.
Wanna invest in a single mom? Encourage her. In anything. It’s so simple, right?! <3
Our priorities are different
So many things that other people struggle with aren’t at all what we are thinking about in the least bit.
Whether or not your spouse is a pack rat is high on your priority list as a wife. I’ve heard, “He doesn’t pick up his socks”, and I totally get it (I was married 14 years), but for us, we are more concerned with things like: am I messing up my children for the rest of their life because I’ve been given a bad hand to deal with.
Socks? I’d love to have some to pick up!!!! haha.
Trash? I’d love to fight about who’s going to take it.
–> Single moms BEG for YOUR problems. Trust me!
They are jealous of your problems. I’m not saying your problems don’t matter or they aren’t as heavy, but that you have what we don’t…help. You pick up socks, but you have someone to fix the bathtub when it’s stopped up.
I have to dig in there with my hand and take all that hair out myself. Uhm. EWWWW. Or, kill the spider on the wall as my kids are screaming bloody murder because they swear it’s gonna get them, even though he’s in the next room! Meanwhile I’m terrified I’m going to get bit because he looks mighty HANGRY! haha.
I’ll trade ya! I pick up the socks. You kill the spiders and mow the lawn and fix the bathtub, deal? <3
Point is, no matter if you’re single or married, we ALL have issues to deal with. It’s just a different set of problems.
Wanna help a single mom? Offer to change a lightbulb! All the single moms reading this post are like “YEAH!” right now! haha.
Cuz you can’t pay me enough to get me on a ladder to change it. I’ll sit in the dark! haha. And who do you even call to change it out? A handyman who charges $70/hour with one hour minimum. It costs me $70 to change a lightbulb, yo! #notkidding
Don’t cross the Christian single mom
Let me put this as gentle as I possibly can. God takes extra special care of widows, orphans, and single moms.
If you are a Christian single mom, you have way more power than most. Why? Because God KNOWS you’re alone.
When someone takes advantage of you, HE will fight for you. You don’t need a husband to fight for you when you have the God who made the whole Heaven and Earth and everything in it fighting for you.
Take advantage of me? You go up against my God!!!!!!
There’s power in that single ladies.
I don’t go out looking for trouble but I tell you one thing, I have been a Christian for 12 years now and single for 8 of them. I have not seen any ONE of my enemies win. God subdues them all.
It’s not that I don’t have any or have never had any. I assure you, I have.
Being a blogger. Being a HUMAN. You’re bound to have enemies at some point in your life (you could live the perfect sinless life as Jesus did and STILL have enemies), but I’ve never seen one of my enemies win against me.
Maybe they’ve hurt me.
Maybe they’ve done bad things.
Maybe they’ve set me back.
Maybe they’ve taken my money by extortion.
Maybe they’ve tried.
But God is my protection and if something happens, He’s allowed it and He takes care of it on my behalf. What a wonderous God we serve!
Did I tell you the reason I started looking for a platform to sell my first binder in?
Years ago I had a blogger who hated me, gather up a couple of her friends and start leaving negative comments on Amazon to destroy my income on my ebooks.
I wanted a platform that I could control my own reviews so that if that ever happened again, I could delete them. On Shopify, I can. And now I make really great money on Shopify.
God used that situation to get me off Amazon and onto Shopify. He used my enemies at the time to help me! And as a little follow up to that story, the main enemy I had is now completely happy and married and she seems super sweet online now. I’m beyond happy for her and I love to think of her often and how she’s turned things around for herself. It’s awesome!!!!
See how God works things out?!
It was the same thing with my ex-husband. He was trying to do some downright dirty things to harm me, my kids, and my income and I immediately started praying.
I prayed, “Lord, judge between us. If I am guilty in this, kill me! Take my very life (that’s how confident I was that I’m not in sin with the situation). If he is guilty, punish him. Get him away from me. Don’t allow him to harm me or my family or my income.”
What happened?
God judged against him and I saw the whole thing. Praise the Lord! <3
Consistently, I’ve seen God handle my problems and vanquish my foes over the years.
When you have God fighting for you, standing behind you, you can sleep safely knowing that everything is in His worthy hands!
If you want to invest or befriend a single mom, orphan, or widow and take advantage of them, make sure they are not Christian. Because if they are saved, you’re in deep trouble!
It’s a great thing to remember, even for myself. I need to make sure I’m not doing ANYTHING to harm one of God’s children (or anyone) but if I harm a Christian, they can pray against me and I’ll be punished. So we have to be super careful!
It’s something I always am thinking about. Like with my kids too. My daughter prayed against me the other day and I WAS wrong. God came to me and was convicting me why did I do that and I immediately had to pray and ask forgiveness. She was absolutely right and she took it to God, exactly what I’ve taught her to do! Go girl!!! 🙂
It was amazing to see how much God cared for her and the situation and how quickly He was coming to me, convicting me too.
Watching God work is something that is so fantastic. We just want to make sure we are on the right side of things! 🙂
Did I miss anything about single moms?
