Lent: Singles aren't Freaks

I remember my first crush: it was before Kindergarten and it was on none other than Zack from Saved by the Bell. I remember dreaming about what it would be like for him to love me back.  I think part of me honestly believed that I was in the running for his affections - obviously he would find my four-year-old self alluring, witty, and intelligent. Even from a young age, I always imagined myself as part of a pair.

Around the beginning of the year, I got breakfast with a really wise man - let's call him Frank.  Frank and I set out to talk about something completely different, but ended up on the topic of marriage and dating.  With a twinkle in his eye, he challenged my long-held expectation that I would one day get married.

At this point, I wanted to reach across our Panera booth and smack that brazen grin right off his face.

But seriously, I think the suggestion actually made me mad. After all, human beings are designed for marriage, right? In a sermon by Tim Keller (I'm sorry, I don't remember which one), he looks at Creation as a relational God creating relational people.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam was lonely before the Fall. His craving for intimacy wasn't a function of sin, but rather God crafting relational beings in His image. Keller says, "Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect but because he was perfect."

But still, Frank had a point [I type with gritted teeth].  He went on to note that, somehow, marriage often muddies and complicates our singleminded love for and pursuit of God.  He encouraged me to suck the marrow out of my singleness, to dive in and let it refine and shape me.  But more than that, Frank warned me against assuming that I would be a married woman, ever.  When his daughter was growing up, he never said "When you get married," but "IF you get married."

*Barf*

But why did I chafe so strongly against his warning?  Look at all the wise, effective servants of God who were single.  I mean, c'mon - Christ himself was single! 

Perhaps my strong aversion to his warning stems from this lie: if you're single, you must not be there yet - spiritually or otherwise.  Rather than merely a relationship status, "singleness" seems more like a diagnosis for which the prognosis is bleak.  Unfortunately, I think that this lie is often propagated by Christian culture.  Well-meaning friends try to couple you with other singles; book titles like Lady in Waiting suggest that singleness is an incubation period meant to prepare you for Mr. Right; many churches' and parachurch ministries' primary focus on family often excludes from the dialogue members who are single, divorced, widowed, and those struggling with their sexuality. 

I don't say all this to blame Christians for my issues.  But I want to open up a safe space to be single and not be a freak or be pitied by married friends.  So this blog series is meant to embrace singleness, to complain about it, to acknowledge that it's a powerful gift and a pain in the ass. But this is not a space to try to fix it or make it more palatable. 

I'll close with this quote from Larry Crabb's  Inside Out:

"No longer do we resolutely bank everything on the coming of a nail-scarred Christ for His groaning but faithfully waiting people.  Our hope has switched to a responsive Christ who satisfies His hurting people by quickly granting them the relief they demand.  That hope, however, is a lie, an appealing but grotesque perversion of the good news of Christ.  It's a lie responsible for leading hundreds of thousands of seeking people into either a powerless lifestyle of denial and fabricated joy or a turning away from Christianity in disillusionment and disgust.  It's a lie that blocks the path to the deep transformation of character that is available now."