the Second on Singleness

What would happen if you took all the time you spent daydreaming about a romantic relationship, all the affection you wish you could poor out there, longing, waiting, desire, and expectation for that and instead directed it toward your relationship with Jesus? Would your life change? These are the questions I have to ask myself. Because if I haven’t tried loving Him with my whole heart, not really, then I have no grounds on which to complain about my relationship with Christ feeling like not enough.

When David says in the Psalms, “For my soul longs, and even faints for you,” have you ever pursued that deep longing for Christ like you have for earthly relationships? Do you give yourself over to Him in all your thoughts and actions as often as you would when you have a crush on someone? Do you take the kind of risks for Him that you would take for somebody that you were in love with? Because if what He says is true, then what He promises us is much greater than earthly romantic relationships. In fact, I really believe those relationships cannot be satisfying apart from knowing that far superior love of Christ.

And let’s be clear here,

God’s not saying, ‘be okay with singleness so you can have a husband or wife.’ God is saying, ‘be okay with singleness so you can be okay with singleness.’ God does not just want to get me through singleness so I can get to the thing that is better in store for me. He is my very best.

And if you are single (or ever have been), have you ever protested in your prayers, “God, I’ve been so good and so faithful! WHY am I not in a relationship?!”

First of all, let’s be real. God doesn’t owe us anything. A real Christian doesn’t obey God to leverage Him. Second of all, when I consider all of the blessings I already have in Christ, to be upset over what I do not have is outright ludicrous. If we are trying to get into a relationship because we think that THAT is what God has to offer us, we are sorely mistaken.

And here’s why: Because Jesus IS the reward.

And here’s another thing that’s good to come to terms with. We are not going to be married in heaven. If that idea makes you upset or uncomfortable, you might want to reconsider your idea of what your relationship with Christ has to offer. In the end, if He is all you have, would He be enough?

And if we take a good look at what the relationship between husband and wife is meant for in the Bible, we find that they are a picture for us to fathom what the relationship with Christ is like with His Church. That’s us—collectively. And when God said, “it is not good for man to be alone” He created not just this one kind of relationship, but every possible type of human relationship. We just have to keep in mind that these loves are not the real thing—these relationships are not the ULTIMATE. I think this is why Paul sticks in these verses smack in the middle of while he is talking about relationships in Corinthians 7:

“But this I say, brethren, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess; and those who use the world, as though they did not make full use of it; for the form of this world is passing away.”

Okay, I’m going to take back what I said about not being married in heaven. Because as the bride of Christ, we will all collectively be married to Him. That sounds weird, and it is, I don’t get it. I’m not even going to pretend that I fully understand that.

But still, even if we can grasp that concept a little, it creates a really uncomfortable tension between the mindset locked on the eternal and thinking about the needs that we have now. But I recently had a friend explain it to me as kind of being in a long-distance relationship. We have letters we can hold on to, a lot of examples we can look to of His love, and a future we can look forward to when we will be with Him forever, but for now it’s really hard and downright painful at times.

And I’m going to close with another quote from C.S. Lewis because I think he wrote out this concept so much more beautifully than I can try to convey it. This is from the book, “The Four Loves,”

“The dream of finding our end, the thing we were made for, in a Heaven of purely human love could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.

But all of that is far away in “the land of the Trinity,” not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation. We are then compelled to try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved.”

the First on Singleness

Forewarning: my experience is not going to be the same as everyone else who is currently or has ever been single. I come from a background where it is almost like you automatically get pitied if you are not in a relationship. I’ll say something honest like “I’ve resigned to the fact that I might just not ever have a boyfriend or ever get married.” And people often come back with, “Oh, you’ll get married. You’re really pretty!”
I still don’t get that. It’s not like I was fishing for compliments; I was just recognizing a very real possibility.
Then sometimes after intentionally declining a suitor, deliberately choosing not to be in a relationship, I can just feel people’s disappointment in me. I tend to respond very defensively. Why is it that people care SO MUCH about that part of my life? It makes me rather caustic towards dating/marriage in general, though I truly am not opposed to the idea (even if the reason why I’m single right now is by my own choice).

So as I struggle through all sorts of dynamics of the life apart from a partner, I’ve found that literature has opinions across the board telling us how to feel and think about singleness. It goes beyond literature. I can hear two opposing views from people I trust—and both seem to make sense. Most of it seems so conjectured—like everyone is just making up these principles based merely on their speculations and there is no set way we can structure our thinking about it to be healthy 100% of the time in 100% of the situations we find ourselves in. Even in the Bible when Paul writes to the Corinthians about singleness he makes it clear that this is his personal opinion.

This is Paul’s concession (not command), his opinion (not the Lord’s). He says, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say, it is good for them to stay unmarried as I am.” V. 8.

Then he talks about remaining where you are at. “Nevertheless, each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him.” V. 17, So I look at that and think how this goes along with the whole concept of knowing your ground or (as Jim Elliot says), “wherever you are, be all there.” If God has me single now, God wants me single now. So I should want me single right now… right?

Paul continues (again, not as a command from God, but as trustworthy advice), “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord, but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.” And he says the same thing about married women, that their interests are divided. (V. 32-35)

Then he goes on to talk about if a man is engaged, it’s fine to marry the woman, but the man who doesn’t marry her does even better. And then he says this crazy thing about how if a widow wants to get-remarried, that’s fine, but in his opinion, she’s happier if she stays single.

Now that’s kind of a very brief overlook of the richness of that passage, but we can kind of get this idea that Paul (who was a man who gave everything to pursue Christ) thinks being single is actually preferred over being married.

My first reaction is to be like, “HA! Take that, VALENTINES DAY!”

And it’s true that some days really I get what Paul was saying in how being single gives you greater opportunity to serve God. And some days I rejoice in embracing that freedom I have to not be tied to another person.

But sometimes I don’t feel like that at all. I just feel alone. And I feel deficient. And I feel inadequate.

And very truthfully and honestly, this is a giant struggle. This is my thorn to contend with. As much as I pride myself in my freedom of singleness and no matter how much I know my attitude should be, I still spend an awful amount of time thinking about relationships. What I am finding is that what I TRULY want most is to be satisfied in Jesus alone. I want it to be so that I feel so loved by Him and so well-taken-care-of in Him that to seek out the love of another feels almost like a waste of time because His love is all that matters. I want to know, TRULY KNOW the kind of love that IS all I need. I want being pursued by a man to pale in comparison to how it feels to share intimately in the heart of God. I want to comprehend how all human love falls short of what I already have.

But, I have no idea how to do that.

So I start to think that the real problem must be that somewhere deep down I must not believe that Christ can satisfy me as much as a relationship with another person could. But I a lot of times I go about changing this the wrong way. I start to think that the solution to this dissatisfaction is to just remove every other desire from my mind. Example: If I start to care about a boy, I will fight every feeling until I kill it.

But I’m not actually so sure that it is an achievable thing--to just try hard enough to rid ourselves of every desire that is not Christ. I’m not so sure that’s what He meant for us.

Our desire doesn’t need to be removed, but maybe it does need to be re-routed. What I mean by that is this: If we try to seek the blessings of God instead of just seeking God, we’re probably on the wrong track. The solution is not reactive (like, stop liking boys so much!) but it is proactive (start loving Christ more).

“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.  We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.  If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with [lesser desires] when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.” –C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

the Intro to Singleness

At first I was really excited when I was asked to speak on singleness in front of around a hundred-ish of my Christian college-student piers. I was all like “Yeah, sure, I’ll talk about singleness! I know all about that. I’ve been single for twenty-two years! Never even held hands with a boy. Totally got this.”

But as I began to struggle with what to say, I realized I didn’t even know where to start. I had way too many opinions I wanted to spout out at people—stuff I’d collected from years of thinking over input from books, magazines, parents, teachers, conferences, seminars, classes, pastors, Sunday-school… both worldly and counter-worldly sources. Then after looking over past journals and thinking about everything that I SHOULD UNDERSTAND by now, I began to feel a little bit like I should be the last person that others look to as an authority on this subject. Mostly because the things I know and the way I live very often contradict one-another.

The one thing that I had going for me to give a talk like that was a whole lot of experience. So Instead of shoving a bunch of hard-to-follow advice at everybody, I tried instead to be as honest as possible and hoped that Jesus showed them something about Himself in the midst of it. I love public speaking, but preparing for that was TOUGH. It felt more like I was being prepared.

I’d like to take the next couple blog posts to expound on my notes for that. What with all the worried family members  asking me about "any new boys" and with hearing the constant worries of single friends who are terrified of getting left behind, I think this may be worth re-hashing.