Editorial Notes

I hate it when I get writer’s block. I’m supposed to be writing an "editorial blurb" about the strip that is loading below, but it’s very hard to write anything about the inspiration for this strip without giving away the plot. Nevertheless, I shall try to write something meaningful for you to read while the strip is loading. Now, I may fail. You may read to the end of this editorial and find it to be totally meaningless, but by then the strip will have mostly loaded anyway, and the "blurb" I’m writing here will have done it’s job.

This strip is the first installment of a series of strips that will deal with dating and courtship: a subject that is, or probably has been, near and dear to all of us. Since I can’t go into any kind of detail concerning the comic strip, I thought I would just bore you for a while with some more details of my own courtship history. I will try to make this at least as interesting as drinking skim milk, and hopefully more interesting than sitting there watching graphics slowly download and build in your browser.

I spent the better part of a decade at a church with several hundred members. Like most churches with several hundred or more, this church had what is generally known as a "singles group". Or, to put it more accurately, a series of planned events targeted at unmarried Christians. If you go to these events over a period of time, you start to feel like you are part of a group because you see certain people in the church much more often than you see others.

Not only did I spend a near-decade at this church, I spent it in the "singles group". This group did a very good job of keeping me single. Of course, it wasn’t really their fault. I wasn’t totally convicted that I wanted to get married, and I would not ask a woman on a date just to socialize if I already knew I would not ever want to marry her. I wasn’t a "casual dating" kind of guy.

So, I spent a near-decade in a Christian singles group, and I saw the formation of a lot of relationships that resulted in marriages. Or course, there is always the speculation about who may be "seeing" who, and which relationships might result in marriages. I sat through many marriage announcements wondering if it would ever happen to me.

After leaving this church, I spent several years in small churches where the "selection" (for lack of a better term) was much more limited. As the years went by, my attitude toward marriage softened to the point where I actually decided that it was time to find a wife. But as my attitude was softening, the "selection" of eligible women continued to decrease. By the time I decided to marry, I was too late! Or so it seemed.

I suppose I could have returned to the church I had left and "played the game" for a while, but I couldn’t see myself returning to something that had already not worked for so long. I visited a very large church of several thousand that had not one, but two singles groups. One was for people above a certain age, and the other (you guessed it) was for people below that age. I forgot exactly what the "cutoff" age was, but I know is was "thirty something".

I also know that at the time I was just slightly above that "cutoff" age. For some reason I was to be allowed access to women many years older than I was, but not to women just a few years younger. Who thought of this system anyway? So, I infiltrated the younger group and just hoped I didn’t get caught!

It didn’t work. The person who said "quantity has a quality all its own" had never been to a Christian singles group where there was a horde of people who seemed to have their minds on anything but the Lord. Just attending the social functions seemed like torture.

I finally decided that I was going about this all wrong. I renounced Christian singles groups once and for all and prayed to God for a wife. A few months later, I met her. And the rest, as they say, is history. With God all things are possible.