I grew up as a church kid. My youth group years were riddled with “relationships” talks, to which I always rolled my eyes. The classic questions of timing and boundaries made their perennial appearance, as well as the classic admonitions against sex before marriage and the associated slippery slope arguments. All in all, I emerged with a full list of the dangers at the bottom of the chasm known as dating, across which lay the pleasant pastures of marriage.
It was the age of Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, when it sounded like a terrific idea to suppress any “fleshly” attractions and avoid the idolatry of infatuation. And with that, came my judgmental disdain of all of these high school couples that I know wouldn’t last. To some degree, I always prided myself on being someone who wasn’t always bogged down with endless relationship drama.
And now, having grown just a bit older, I’ve had the opportunity to taste and see even more of the inherent complicatedness of relationships, the risks involved, and the brokenness that so often ensues. There are no easy answers, no formulas, no secret recipes. In light of it all, I—and I suspect others of my generation, with world-wearied eyes—am tempted to forswear it all, to spurn the possibility of eros, to dismiss such feeling, and to reject romance even if it does come my way. If the chasm of dating is so mysterious, so treacherous, let’s avoid it at all costs.
But what if we’ve taken the admonition of Proverbs 4:23, to “above all else, guard [our] heart[s],” as an excuse to not not trust God, living instead out of fear of vulnerability, with the goal of avoiding heartbreak? What if in guarding our hearts so closely, we reject His gifts, avoiding committing to good, godly relationships?
In response, I am reminded of this classic C.S. Lewis quote in The Four Loves, as he writes:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
And yet at the same time, predominant church culture has been on the other side of the spectrum. As a whole, we’ve failed to affirm, downplayed, and even outright rejected the gift of singleness. So often we pull out scriptures that say “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18), and “two are better than one” (Eccles. 4:9), while ignoring Jesus’s and Paul’s endorsements of the unmarried. As it now stands, the church’s message to singles is that they are clearly missing out on the pinnacle of human fulfillment—the American dream of being married with kids with a nice house and a nice car.
But Paul doesn’t see singleness as a curse or a hindrance, but a blessing, an opportunity to single-mindedly serve the Lord, to pursue pleasing the Lord with an undivided focus. To Paul, singleness was a freedom from worldly anxiety, not a cause for it. What if we, the church, could have a vision for our unmarried brothers and sisters, bigger than being relegated to the Singles/Career group, better than staring into the abject loneliness that our culture says is the only alternative? What if the church could provide radical community, as we embrace the truth that His love is more than enough, better than any human love we could find here, and that knowing and serving Jesus is already the greatest good, better than any fulfillment marriage offers? How can we make singleness feel more like the blessing it is, and not the curse our culture says that it is?
(I don’t have all the answers to these questions, but even beginning to wrestle with them is a good start. I haven’t yet read it, but I hear that Wesley Hill’s book Spiritual Friendship offers some fantastic insights on these questions, as does his collaborative blog of the same title.)
In 1 Corinthians 7:7, Paul writes that “each has his own gift from God, one has this gift, the other has that.” So each of us has a different call, a different gift. If God gives singleness, it is a gift. If God, in His timing, gives marriage, it is a gift.
Let me not reject the gift God gives to me, but embrace it, trusting that He is a good Father who gives good gifts.
“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.” (Psalm 16:6, NIV)
a cup of kimitea 