What Singleness Is Not

 I saw something in my Facebook feed the other day that rubbed me the wrong way. As is often the case, it had to do with singleness & how Christians talk about it & often view it.

Whether meant exactly how it sounded to me at first read or not, the immediate read that I & others in the comments who have been singles for longer, had hurt. I always do my best to give people the benefit of the doubt & assume the best in their intentions, but that doesn't mean saying nothing when things should be said. Even if the way it was read was not the intent, when multiple people read it in a way that causes real pain, it reveals just how much the choice of  words matters.

So, I'm going to address what was written & how it was read here today.

Here's what I read:

"Singleness is not a disease that needs to be cured, but rather, it's an important stage of life that needs to be passed through as God shapes us, molds us, & loves on us." (emphasis mine)

Now, I'm going to start with what's right & good & needs to be said more in the church. Too often, especially in the church, we view singleness as a disease. When we find out someone is single, we start looking for reasons why they are & solutions or cures to it.

We need to be clear in our refusal to see singleness as a disease to be cured or a problem to solved. This view has done much harm over the years to many, & I appreciate statements that challenge this thinking.

But, as good as the first part was, the rest of the statement was hard to read. It turned singleness into something we go through (see the underlined words in the statement above) as if it's a step toward maturity. It perpetuated the all too common & hurtful view that singleness is a temporary state for everyone. That it's somewhere people are for a while until they inevitably move to the next stage of life where they are married.

Here's the thing: Nowhere in Scripture is marriage promised for everyone. That means some of us will be single for all of our adult lives. 

And any real look around our churches today would reveal that. There are significant numbers of single adults sitting in our church pews on Sundays. 

Some sources put the number of single adults in our church on a Sunday as high as 50%. Now, that number does include divorced & widowed singles, but a number that high does mean there are a significant portion of adults of all ages who have never married in our churches.

To view singleness as a life stage to be passed through is actually as hurtful as seeing it as a disease to be cured. It's as painful as seeing singleness as a problem to be solved. It still devalues the individual & leaves them feeling as if they haven't arrived at some arbitrary marker of maturity expected for them.

If I were to rewrite what I read, I would say something like this:

Singleness is not a disease to be cured, or a problem to be solved, or a life stage to get through. Singleness is a fact of life for some people, that God uses for His purposes & His glory, regardless of whether it is short-term, long-term, or something a person returns to at a later point in life.

Space for Quiet

 Do you ever make space for quiet in your life?

I started wondering this as I sat outside a coffee shop (where I have been spending a lot of time the last few months).

When I arrived, there was a loud truck cleaning out the grease trap of a nearby restaurant. The noise of the truck was all you could hear for a while.

When the truck finished & drove away, I was struck by the quiet that descended & the things it had drowned out.

The chirping of the bird hopping across the sidewalk, looking for crumbs dropped by customers.

The laughter in the conversations around me.

The leaves of the trees rustling in the gentle breeze.

The little things you only notice when it gets quiet.

This made me start to wonder about our spiritual lives & hearing what God might be saying to us.

We say we want to hear God's voice. but we have so much noise going on in our lives that it becomes easy to miss His voice. There isn't a moment when we actually slow down enough, where we turn off the noise to hear.

Even if our noise is good things, it can interfere with hearing God's voice if we don't ever turn it off.

Do you make space for quiet in your life?

What Does Contentment Really Look Like?

A quote I read in a book recently, made me think. 

"If we . . . ask God for contentment, we should cancel our membership with speed dating pool, stop spending every waking minute on myperfectmatch.com, and trust that God will provide everything we need to minister Him (2 Corinthians 9:8). If we aren't ready to do these things, we should be honest with ourselves and tell God the truth: 'Dear God, please make me happy being single until I can fix my singleness'." (Alisha Plummer, "Confessions of a Christian Spinster")

When I read those words, they didn't sit right with me. While I could agree with a part of them, I immediately felt they took things too far.

The chapter of the book this quote is from is about contentment. About not allowing a desire for marriage to rob us of the life we have right now.

And there's truth to it all. If we're so focused on getting married, as singles, then we're going to miss out on the things God has for us right now. We need to be seeking contentment with our lives - even if we never get married.

But, I don't think that contentment in our lives as singles means we can't do anything to pursue things we desire. 

Contentment as a single doesn't mean I stop putting myself in places where I could meet someone to marry - whether in person or online - waiting for God to somehow provide me with someone to marry when there's nothing in my life that would give me a chance to meet someone.

Contentment actually means that I don't let me desire for marriage control me. It doesn't consume all of my thoughts & energy.

Contentment, for all of us, whether single or married, is about having your desires in the proper place, not about removing them altogether. 

We can be content with things in our lives & still have hope for something to be different in the future.

We can be content & still have desires for specific things - even be working towards those desires. Whether those are hopes & desires for marriage, or children, or a house, or a new job in a specific field.

When those desires are submitted to God, we are living in contentment. We choose to surrender our desires, by telling God what they are. We're honest about them. And then we choose to trust God that whatever happens is part of His will & He will use it for His purposes.

Sometimes You Actually Need a Person

 Can we please stop equating Jesus being with us always as a reason to never feel lonely?

When we do this, we're basically saying that loneliness is a sin.

But, a study of Scripture shows that feeling lonely is not a sin. The things we choose to do as a result of feeling lonely may be sinful, but feeling lonely itself is not.

Yes, it's true that God is always with us wherever we are (Hebrews 13:5; Psalm 139). And that can be a great source of comfort & encouragement.

But, my study of Scripture makes it pretty clear that we are meant to live this life in relationship with other people. We need people around us, journeying with us (Hebrews 10:24-25).

We need to know we're not alone.

Also, often when we're feeling lonely, what we need is to have another in our physical space. That's what changes things.

It's not that we've forgotten God is with us in those moments. It's that we need the presence of a person who cares about us. This isn't wrong. It's how we were created.

We need to become people who respond to the loneliness of others by showing up & being with people. By making space for people, not by shaming them for their feelings with a reminder that God is with them, that doesn't acknowledge what's really going on.