Ditch the Paper Plate and Thrive

There is a KitchenAid stand mixer sitting on Molly King’s counter. It is apple green. She bought it herself, for herself, and she will tell you without apology that it was one of the best decisions she has ever made.

That might sound like a small thing. It isn’t. For Molly, the mixer represents something she had to fight hard to believe: that her life, as it is right now, is worth fully inhabiting.

Molly is a pediatric nurse practitioner with 13 years of experience in cardiac intensive care units. She has also served on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, written a public health curriculum in northern Iraq, and built a successful wellness practice that helps people regain a sense of calm. She is single and has been her entire adult life. And she has a few things she would like the church, her married friends, and every woman eating dinner off a paper plate to hear.

The Lonely Initials

Molly has bought three houses on her own. Each time, the signing process is the part that gets her.

“There’s always a spot for two sets of initials and two names,” she told Kelly. The first time she bought a house, she was 25. By any measure, it was a remarkable achievement. But sitting at that closing table, surrounded by paperwork designed for two, she felt something she could only describe as a case of the lonely initials.

It is a phrase that captures something real and specific about singleness that is hard to articulate otherwise. Not loneliness exactly, but the accumulated weight of being the only one who signs, decides, initiates, and shows up. Well-meaning friends often frame this as freedom. Nobody has a say in your life! What they don’t hear themselves saying, Molly noted gently, is nobody has any investment in your life. Nobody cares what you choose.

She has learned to push back on that narrative, not by dismissing it but by questioning it. By asking herself, “Is that actually true? Is there any other possible explanation? If the answer is there’s another possible scenario, then I have to let it go.” And then she does the harder work of choosing to believe what God says about her worth, even when the paperwork tells a different story.

Paper Plates and the Life You Are Actually Living

Years ago, Molly read a book by Elisabeth Elliot that included a passage she has never forgotten. Elliot wrote about the danger of living a paper plate life, of eating off disposable dishes while the good china sits in a box, waiting for a future that might never come.

Molly took that seriously. She bought the plates she wanted. She got the silverware she loved. She decorated her home with intention and care. In almost every area, she refused to put her real life on hold.

Almost every area.

For years, she held out on the KitchenAid stand mixer. It was going to be on her wedding registry, the one splurge she was saving for that future. She limped along with a janky hand mixer that was not up to the task. And then one day she looked at herself clearly and made a decision.

“Every other decision that I’ve made up to this point has been in support of pursuing the fullness of life and doing it well,” she told Kelly. The mixer arrived. It is apple green. She loves it.

The point Molly makes is not really about kitchen appliances. It is about the quiet, daily choice to treat your actual life as worth investing in, rather than a placeholder for the life you imagined.

“Don’t live as though you’re getting married tomorrow because that’s not guaranteed and you’re missing out on really great opportunities to honor the Lord.” —Molly King

What She Blames Renee Zellweger For

Molly is warm and funny and direct, and when Kelly asked her about the myths surrounding singleness, she did not hold back.

The question she is most tired of is some version of “what’s wrong with you?” Maybe your standards are too high. Maybe you’re not putting yourself out there. Have you tried online dating? People mean it as a compliment, she acknowledged, because they see a capable, educated, functioning human being and genuinely cannot understand why marriage hasn’t happened. But embedded in the question is an assumption that singleness is a problem to be diagnosed and solved.

Molly traces a lot of this thinking back to a cultural obsession with romantic completion, one the church has enthusiastically adopted. She blames, specifically and with some delight, Renee Zellweger.

“You complete me … the worst line in a movie ever.”

—Molly King

“You complete me,” she said, dropping the Jerry Maguire reference, “Like the worst line in a movie ever.”

The idea that a person is incomplete without a spouse has seeped so deeply into both culture and church that it shapes everything: the sermons, the small groups, the sympathetic head tilts from well-meaning women in the foyer. What Molly wants, instead, is simpler. To be asked how she is doing. To be invited into conversation about her walk with the Lord. To be seen as a woman worth discipling and encouraging, not a problem to be solved by marriage.

The Church She Has Been Looking For

Molly has lived a fairly nomadic life, which means she has been in a lot of church environments. She speaks about this with honesty and without bitterness, though what she describes is genuinely painful.

In one church, the leadership structure was clear: elders had to be men, married men, ideally men with godly children. Women’s voices in that body were channeled through their husbands. As a single woman, Molly heard a message that was never spoken aloud but was communicated plainly. Her spiritual insight, her leadership, and her voice did not have a natural home here.

“That’s damaging,” she said simply. “That’s not okay.”

She is not asking for anything radical. She is asking for something biblical. She longs for a community that looks at the full sweep of scripture, including the way Jesus elevated women within his culture, and takes seriously what it means to honor that legacy. She wants a church that is ardent about the Word and also capable of seeing who is actually sitting in the pews.

Kelly had shared statistics before the conversation showing just how many women in the church are single, and even Molly was struck by them. “I think we tend to hide in the church too,” she said. A quarter of the body of Christ is invisible by default.

She is not asking married male pastors to pretend they understand her experience. She is asking them to have the conversation. “It’s hard to know the plight of someone else if you haven’t talked to them,” she said. And she is asking that single women be given a seat at the table where those conversations happen.

She also issued a quiet challenge to the college women sitting in those Sunday morning sections, looking at their young married leaders and assuming that is the only story available to them. “These women need to hear the voice of someone like me,” Molly said, “who’s in her mid-forties and has been living this single thing for the last 20-plus years. And it’s not all bad. It’s not as scary as I thought it would be.”

Where God Has Been Faithful

Molly’s work has taken her to places most people only read about. She was off the coast of Liberia on a mercy ship when she realized the depth of her own gaps, and she went back to school not out of ambition but out of a desire to show up fully for the vulnerable children who needed her expertise. Molly works daily in a cardiac ICU where tiny milestones, a first hold, a first diaper change, a number that moves in the right direction, are the texture of faithfulness.

“I’m living my life, and if a man happens to be moving in the same direction I am, and he wants to partner with me, awesome. Let’s do it.”

Molly King

She has also wrestled with anxiety most of her life. She has found a kind of regulation she did not have before through essential oils, honest self-examination, and the steady practice of returning to what God actually says about her. Molly has a dog named Slinky, whom she describes as the biggest gift. She has a full, textured, faithful life.

“I’m living my life,” she told Kelly. “And if a man happens to be moving in the same direction I am, and he wants to partner with me, awesome. Let’s do it.”

There is no desperation for marriage in that statement or resignation. But a woman who has made peace with the present tense.

Molly’s story does not resolve the tension of singleness. It doesn’t tie it up or explain it away. What it does is something more useful: it shows what it looks like to stop waiting for a different life and start honoring the one you have been given.

Get the china. Buy the mixer. Sign your own name on the paperwork, all of it, and know that God sees every lonely initial.

That life is not less than. It is simply yours.

This article was adapted from an interview with Molly King. To hear the full conversation, watch the complete episode on the Mission Single Podcast, hosted by Kelly Werner.