271: a selection of 15 unhelpful things people say to singles

I recently asked a group of Christian singles for unhelpful things people say to make us feel better in our singleness. I got some doozies! 

Birthday flowers from a student's mom

1) If you stop looking, it will come to you.

This doesn't even make sense. First, we don't use this logic for anything else we want in life, like a job. Second, it's not Biblical (just clear your mind of all thoughts and what you most desire will magically appear). Third, if I'm not looking, then why would I say "yes" to a coffee date?

2) Maybe God is waiting for you to ____ first. / Once you become content, then God will bring a spouse to you. / God will bring you someone when you're ready for marriage.

Marriage isn't a bargaining chip! Marriage isn't something you earn. One person insightfully noted that the idea that we're not married/dating because we're not ready "gives the unhealthy and damaging notion that singles are defective by default." Also, were you ready when you got married?

3) Don't be so picky. / Perfect doesn't exist.

Please tell me what it is I'm too picky about because I don't know what it could be. I don't want to be picky--maybe you could teach me what you mean--but I also want to marry someone I WANT to be married to. The world is full of people who SHOULD have been more picky. 

4) I don't understand why you aren't attracted to so and so or so and so.

I don't either (or maybe I do!), but you can't force yourself to be attracted to someone. That doesn't sound like a good basis for a happy marriage.

5) Maybe it's because of your physical touch boundaries. / How do you expect to get married if you dress modestly?

Y'all, if this is the issue, we've got bigger problems than delayed marriage.

6) Be less able to do manly things and men will like you more. / I think you might be too put together.

I've never personally been accused of either of these, but it seems unfair to ask someone to hover in a state of incapability or weakness years on end in order to catch a man.

7) Have you tried online dating?

Yes, I have. Have you? It's not all it's cracked up to be.

8) Get out and meet more guys.

This was said to a girl who meets Christian guys all the time--know your audience!

9) You're trying too hard. / You need to flirt more. 

Just. can't. win.

10) Have you ever prayed about it?

Yes, actually. :)

11) I'm jealous of all the free time you have. / You're so lucky you can do whatever you want without worrying about a husband/kids.

I WANTED the hard sanctification of marriage and kids. Your life would have been my first choice. It was GOD who gave me this life. So, please don't make me feel guilty for having the potentially "easier" life, because you have no idea how many years it's taken to be okay with God choosing a LACK of what everyone else experiences to sanctify me.

One lady added, "That's the thing though, it's not easier. It's different...different challenges, different joys, different heartaches."

Also, you don't have to downplay your married life to make us feel better. Aren't you grateful for your husband and kids?

12) Singles are naturally selfish. They can't help it since they don't have a spouse or kids.

This was a quote from a speaker. God help us all.

13) ...when you are asked to babysit, dogsit, etc. BECAUSE you are single.

It's not that we mind helping, but you aren't doing us a particular "favor" by asking us to help. Just because we are unmarried doesn't make us the perfect candidate for jobs that have been traditionally teenager jobs.

As two commenters put it, "Contrary to popular opinion, not every single woman is dying to hold babies and listen to four small children scream simultaneously," and there is the false assumption "that babysitting someone else's kids will make me less sad about not having my own kids."

14) One day someone will want you.  / I'm so proud that you're content with having no one.

Someone needs to repent of their insensitivity. Also, with the second statement, do you know me, my journey, my current desires? If not, then shush.

15) God has someone special for you. It's just a matter of trusting and waiting.

A good marriage partner is NOT a guarantee -- fake news! To me, this is the worst of the well-intentioned statements. It's saying something about God that isn't true, and it gives false hope.

~*~

Maybe this selection of things said to singles will help us all evaluate the platitudes we dish out whenever we are trying to soothe wounds or mend any situations we have no control over. I hope to do another post on HELPFUL things people say!

270: purpose of my singleness

I've been through a lot of life change since my last post. Or, rather, maybe it hasn't been much change as much as much change of hope. Since the last post, I both got engaged and got un-engaged. Then I spent my short two month summer break busily going hither and thither and yon to keep myself from spiraling with the reality that what I had unconsciously been setting my hopes on was now...nonexistent.

Now I'm continuing the process begun years ago--wrestling with the possible reality of never getting married.

I am not discarding hope. Hope for marriage and family and to be a homeschool mom is so ingrained into the fiber of who I am that it is going to take either a complete metamorphosis or a knife to cut that expectation away from me.

Last week I had a good week. I fought every day to remind myself that my life has purpose, and that I am (generally) happy with my life, and it's okay to not have the life scenario I wanted (who does?). But by the end of the week I realized that it had been a good week because I had fought constantly to uphold those truths.

And then, I became too tired to fight I guess and plummeted back to earth where I have to fight again to scrape myself up.

The reality is we have to mourn, and as any counselor will tell you, grieving doesn't end, it comes in waves, it just changes. The other day I saw my hair (yes, my hair) in a far-away mirror, and I had to wrestle with the grief that no one will ever (permanently) admire my hair. That my hair is worthless beyond being part of what makes me feminine to the world. All those who have not gone through long-prolonged singleness may not realize even the little things that we have to mourn that are meaningful losses to us.

Every one has a different reason why singleness is so hard for them or why a future marriage is so important to them. For me, it's been mostly purpose. If I were married, I'd have a built-in purpose in life, I've thought. Recently I asked a question in the Facebook singles group I'm part of (PtL to know we're not alone!!). "What is one purpose you can see God has for your current singleness, one way He is using you?" I typed. I had already thought of a few ways before asking the question, but I lay back on my bed and decided to ask God the same question.

The answer was unexpected.

He took me right back to one of my life verses:

"You are My witnesses," says the LORD, 

And My servant whom I have chosen, 

That you may know and believe Me, 

And understand that I am He. (Isaiah 43:10) 

He is using my singleness to increase my knowing of Him. He is using my singleness to know Him and believe Him.

"[T]o be a witness to God is, above all, to know, believe, and understand Him. All that He asks us to do is but means to this end. He will go to any lengths to teach us, and His manipulation of the movements of men...is never accidental. Those movements may be incidental to the one thing toward which He goads us: the recognition of Christ."--Elisabeth Elliot, The Savage My Kinsman

If He is using my singleness so that I can know Him, who am I to argue? If He is using my singleness specifically for His eternal weight of glory, if He specifically has me here because He wants me to believe Him more through this circumstance and this is His pick for how that knowing and believing occur, then that is amazing. Painful in the loss, but amazing.

I was reminded of my other life verse, earlier in my late teens and 20s:

Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ (Phil. 3:8)

I'll be honest: I don't want to count all things loss. Listening to a friend talk about child-raising today knowing I may NEVER experience what she is talking about, knowing I am still in the SAME life stage and lack of experience that I was 20 years ago, is a LOSS that I did not choose (besides saying no to relationships for non-flippant reasons).

But, if that loss is for the EXCELLENCE of the knowledge of my Lord, that is something I can remind myself of as I fight for stability and happiness. This loss is not just loss. It is in exchange for knowing the excellent eternal Lord and growing in faith and believing.

The desire for what I have always wanted does not go away. The mourning does not disappear even as I look around and really enjoy the life I have. The fight continues on for stability. But, He has given me an amazing group of both friends in the same life stage and friends who are not who lift up my hands so the battle can go on. Whatever is going on in your life--and we all have something--keep fighting, keep wrestling, keep holding on, not letting go until He blesses you, even if you continue with a limp (Gen. 32:26).

269: the security

I look out over my kids (students) as they take their science standardized test. It is a moment of silence and calm in an otherwise hectic career. Having just taken some moments myself to reconnect spiritually via the last several day's devotionals in God is on the Cross (Dietrich Bonhoeffer), I am ready to  not just see the frustration of trying to educate willful and sometimes ignorant human beings, but now to catch a glimpse of the potential of each individual life that is sitting in these desks before me. Every person here is so unique, with their own interests, looks, desires--futures.

I pray, Lord--may they know You.

Why?

I mean, because that is the way of salvation, obviously. To have their sins covered, washed away, so they do not have to bear the punishment for their own sin.

But also--

That they can have the security that comes with knowing God.

With God, I am never alone.

With God, I have an all-powerful loving Father willing to work on my behalf.

Perhaps most impactful for me in my singleness, with God I have a reason for living, for every moment of my day. I live for a kingdom not of this world. I may not do it well. I may not live it fully. But I have an eternal purpose outside of my temporal circumstances. I do not find meaning only in loving a husband, in showing the world that God's design of marriage is good, in being sanctified as my selfishness is put to the test in living with a man to whom I've pledged my life, body, and heart. That's what we as singles want so badly. But--

Glory be! My life has MEANING and PURPOSE apart from my circumstances. Apart from any and every circumstance. Not just that *I* have value, but that my little life living at home with my parents, teaching at a country school, visiting with my friends, trying to hear God's voice through His Word and prayer--THAT life has meaning and purpose because the whole point of life is not either to endure xyz situations that seem to be the most spiritual OR to be blessed with xyz dreams, but rather in whatever we do, in word or deed, to live all for the glory of God.

Does it sound trite? Yes. But has it the power to change my perspective from despair over a wasted life because I'm not married to hope that God is still God? Yes.

And with that, I can hold my desire for companionship and intimacy and maternal satisfaction and separate it from the value of this single life that keeps slipping by with each birthday that makes me older. I can still want, I can still "need," all those physical things, but I don't have to feel subpar or under my married peers.

And that's simply from knowing the Lord.

So yes, I want my kids to know that they have value, no matter what family situations or future situations they face, simply because they are part of the kingdom of God. They have a Father to whom they are eternally connected, who directs the path of their lives, and who is with them every second, and wants their hearts.

268: between the realms + friendship

I was crying at the dramatic end of a show tonight (what can I say--
I'm tired!), and I found myself thinking of the guy I'm dating (boyfriend? can I use that word?).

It was another reminder that I am entering a season different than the one I've known.

A married friend once told me that getting married to her husband felt very natural. And, although I'm not even engaged, I can see what she means. I feel very much still myself. I actually like that. I don't wake up with dread in the pit of my stomach, like I have in the past. I don't have to wonder day by day if the guy I'm dating will change or if something will be revealed that will shake my world. His consistency is what I value. And in that consistency, I can trust and, yes, relax (now that I've gotten through the most trying stage--another story for another post).

But, back to feeling natural. I still feel very much like me. I haven't become someone else. I don't feel like I've attained something monumental by virtue of dating for 10 months. It's just...natural.

But I know that I am nearing the zenith of all the dreams of my singlehood. And not only mine, but the desires of all my single friends.

I know that if I were to marry, they would feel like they have been left behind. That they would feel alone, with unanswered prayers, and no companionship--or some combination thereof. Because that's how I feel so many times. Have felt?

See, that's where it gets weird. I'm like, oh, I so understand. But, then I go and think of my boyfriend instead of thinking of some mythical future guy or thinking about how it's just God and me, and it smacks me in the face that there IS a difference between single and not-single. It's frankly hard to reconcile the two--the friend I want to be because I'm single (ie. in the same season of life), and the friend I'll be despite not being single (in a different season of life). I feel the same. But I won't be the same. I won't be the same, but I wish I could be the same, and still not be single.

And the other problem is that God has brought me amazing settledness in the last few years of being in my 30s. Maybe even contentedness, if one can still strongly desire and still be content. But I don't know if that's because I've had sequential infatuations the last few years that have kept me from feeling all the pang of loneliness, or if it's that I've forgotten after almost two years of having my guy on my radar, or if it's just truly that I've felt more settled. (A friend in her 30s once told me that this decade was better than the 20s because you're more settled, and it's proven true. Now she's about to turn 40, so we'll see how that turns out.) So, sometimes I can't currently relate to my single friends who are in the thick of the desperate loneliness. Because I haven't felt that as much now as I used to.

More thoughts--

Part of me is like, once I'm married, I can hang out with all these married couples. My friend circle may expand.

Part of me is like I am still hanging on to my current friends! Don't you dare think I'm different just because I'm married!

Part of me thinks if I didn't make a point of hanging out with married couples when I was single--if they didn't include me, and I didn't make a point to try to be included--then it would be hypocrisy to join in the crowd now as if my status has changed my--or their--value.

*sigh* So many thoughts.

Meanwhile, I live betwixt the realms.

267: Letting Go of the Unknown

I wrote the following a week or so ago and sent the draft to a small chat group. Someone strongly encouraged me to publish it because she resonated with the concept and wanted to share it with her readers. So here are my thoughts from then, with a couple edits.

The journey from singleness to union is not what I would have expected. I would have thought that once you "arrive" at having found the one and fallen in love, that all former memories would pale in comparison. They'd practically disappear.

But, like a friend once told me, saying yes to one thing means saying no to another.

As someone who holds on to memories and clings to journals as mementos of who I have been, I find myself betwixt mourning what will never be again and embracing the fulfillment of all my hopes.

The other day I was thinking about how fun some past camping trips have been. But you know what was scintillating about some of those trips with other young people? Heading out of your tent to head to the campground bathroom in the early morning, knowing that few people have had the privilege of seeing you with sleepy eyes and messy hair, but feeling awfully scandalous (scandalously delighted) if the guy you have a crush on sees you. Or coming back from the shower with your hair wet and him seeing you. It's that hint of what you've always wanted--marriage with someone permanent--but it's like the whiff of chocolate chip cookies. You don't get the cookies, but the whiff excites you. But in marriage it seems like I'll get all the cookies. It seems like the teasing of the senses will be absent. I'll have someone who already sees me in my disheveled morning state every day, without the enticement from a chance meeting while camping.

Meet-ups too have lost their glow. The best part of meet-ups is the thrill of when someone you like makes eye contact, or talks with you, or when you serendipitously on-purpose find yourself sitting next to them or in their vicinity. But with marriage, you literally never experience the thrill of a slight acknowledgement from your crush ever again. Those 30 seconds of eye contact that you experienced at 17 years old that you STILL remember because it was so life momentous? In marriage, you don't experience the wondering what may happen: Will he contact you? What does this text mean? Could he like you back? The solidity of reality takes away the wisp of non-reality.

All we've wanted as women is certainty and a love of our own. But all we've known is uncertainty and the hope for something more. I feel a little bit of loss letting go of the hope in exchange for the reality. Hope projects fantasy on an un-actual future. Reality incorporates two people's current emotions, abilities, and mass and volume states, to create something that is very concrete and less ethereal than the hope that has kept me warm every day as a single.

I think I may need a rest-in-peace moment for all I've had...or haven't had.

266: not quite my covid-19 life

God's crinkly nature

When it comes to world events, I admit, I tend to be an ostrich. Perhaps not burying my head in the sand, but just not taking any effort to read the articles, watch the news videos, etc. (Dorcas Lane would call it "my one weakness," but alas, it's not.) So, while the world was stocking up on toilet paper and complaining about the hoarders and theorizing about whether the corona virus is overblown, deadly, or part of a conspiracy, I was very focused on my own little world. I was listening to a book about the Donner Party and reading absolutely GRISTLY ways that people tortured other people. I had to stop reading.

I'd been thinking about evil a lot lately, about persecution, about torture, namely. What is the corona virus compared to the imaginations of a human being completely given over to hate and wickedness? And the thing is, the Holocaust wasn't that long ago.

A friend mentioned, almost in passing, the church of Smyrna. So I looked up the passage in Revelation 2. Verse 10 stopped and held me.

"Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer."

Do not fear. Don't do it.

Not because everything will be fine. Just because we live in a sanitary world of flushing toilets, soap at every sink, and non-stop laundry facilities does not guarantee us a continuance of our cushy lives. How can people live with the threat of terror? How did the women pioneers crossing the plains and the Rockies find the courage to continue on when they knew they could be captured and scalped? How do people in Africa live life when the threat of guerrilla fighters overtaking their village is a possibility? How do pastors in China relax when they could be imprisoned yet again--and I won't even recount the torture I have heard of in third-world prisons.

Do not fear.

Not because God will protect me from it. The verse explicitly says that the believers in Smyrna were about to suffer.

But, do not fear.

Scripture says it over and over and over again. Do not fear. I am with you. Do not fear. I will provide for you. Do not fear--I see every sparrow that falls, and are you not of more value than many sparrows? Do not fear, highly favored one. Do not fear, I am with you wherever you go. Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. Fear God. He neither faints nor grows weary. He never slumbers or sleeps. He is a consuming fire, and He WILL see justice is meted out on the wicked. He is jealous for you. He has secured You as His child with the very blood of His Son. A mother may forget her newborn baby, but God will NOT forget you. You are His bride. You are His future. Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

So, stop fearing. It is a directive. It is not conditional on circumstances. Just stop. And trust Him for the grace in that moment, whenever, if ever, that moment comes. But for this moment, right now, do not fear. Do not fear.

What is the victory that overcomes the world? Our faith. Not faith in the seen, but faith in the unseen. And not faith that all will be well. Not blind faith. Have faith in Yahweh God Almighty, who is and who was and who is to come, and in His Son Jesus Christ, who is coming on the clouds, and every eye will see Him.

He's got us. And we have Him.

255: ONE ONE!

My great-niece texted me the other day. It was a video, followed by the words, "He won't stop saying that."

The video was of my 3 yr. old great-nephew bouncing on the couch singing, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1."

After babysitting him the last three days, I can testify that he does sing it multiple times a day.

The thing is, up until Wednesday, all he could say was 1:1. Then suddenly, the song I had been drilling into him for months clicked, and now he's so proud of himself as he unintelligibly sings the first verse of Holy Writ.

It absolutely made my day.

I am surprised that teaching a child about the Lord must happen so intentionally. Is it because there is something off about how I live my life that the gospel cannot be absorbed naturally? Is it because I see him so seldom? Or maybe it is for this reason that Deuteronomy 6:7 says explicitly "You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up." It *must* be intentional. It must be in your face, as a sign on your hand, frontlets between your eyes, written on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates.

And as it intentionally comes out of the adult's mouth, the truth is re-examined and re-imprinted on the adult's heart: "beware lest you forget the LORD" (Deut. 6:12).

In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen, talking about God's heart in the Luke 15 parables, says, "God not only offers forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing, but wants to lift up these gifts as a source of joy for all who witness them. .  . . God does not want to keep his joy to himself. He wants everyone to share in it. . . . God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy" (ch. 9).

So, even as my great-nephew drives his family crazy singing his memory verse over and over again, I rejoice that one little seed has been planted. May it, and the seeds following it, bring forth a harvest some day.