I don’t believe the church offers anything that can fill that void on a Friday night. It can’t make up for sleeping alone, hearing the floor creak and knowing you are all alone. It can’t fill the empty space on the other side of the bed. It can’t erase that sigh upon entering a dark, empty home night after night because you could only avoid the place for so long as you buried yourself in office work. It can’t provide a date for those events designed for couples. It won’t send you flowers on Valentine’s Day or fill the emptiness on Mother’s Day. It doesn’t make up for watching nieces and nephews open presents on Christmas morning instead of your own children. It won’t make up for the countless microwave meals eaten alone. It doesn’t help as you earn wealth and wonder who will inherit it. It doesn’t remove that lump in your throat with each passing birthday. It cannot make up for waking up alone for days, weeks, months, years, and decades. There’s just no adequate substitute for a husband and family.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] never felt such compassion for single women as when I first read those words. Maken is brutally honest in Chapter Eight of Getting Serious About Getting Married. She makes it perfectly clear that not only did she mourn the loss she felt at remaining husbandless throughout her twenties, she did so alone. Why alone? Because the church’s teachings on singleness heaped a good deal of guilt on her for being discontent. Jesus is all you need, they told her. A husband cannot meet all your needs. Only God can fulfill you.
We speak these words in our Newlyweds Ministry quite often. And though there is a ring of truth in it, there is also a lie in it when the words are spoken to singles. Though a relationship with God can be and should be very fulfilling, a relationship with God was never intended to meet the need for a husband.
I’ll say it again: Though Jesus is depicted in Scripture as the bridegroom of the Church, I do not think we should take it to mean that He is the bridegroom of any individual person.
Is God the defender and protector of the needy, including widows and orphans? Absolutely. But He isn’t anybody’s husband.
Maken points us back to Genesis, which, incidentally, is usually the direction Jesus Himself pointed whenever He taught on marriage. In the very beginning, in the perfect Garden of Eden, God declared one part of His creation to be “not good.” It was not good for man to be alone.
One must remember that Man had intimacy with God at this point. He walked with God in the Garden. He was apparently able to communicate with God verbally. And yet Man was said to be alone, and this was “not good.” And how did God solve this problem? God created Woman to be Man’s wife.
Are there folks out there with the “gift of celibacy?” Absolutely. However, it cannot be ignored that man’s original situation was “not good” without woman. And woman never existed without being a wife. It would seem to be integral to woman’s nature to be a wife.
Now, just like anything else that is not right in the world, God can and does offer a whole host of comfort. Maken’s point is not to crush singles, but rather to give them permission to express their unhappiness with their situation, their yearning for more. After all, if one is not able, for whatever reason, to live out God’s design for one’s life {here in the form of having and being a spouse}, one must be sad about it much in the way that one grieves over premature death or infertility. It is the sadness that comes from sensing that all is not right with the world after all, that things are not as they should be.
Essentially, it is okay to be sad. Not to mope or sow seeds of bitterness, but just to express the grief. Maken implies that the church should be offering comfort, sympathy and assistance rather than trite platitudes about contentment. I’m inclined to agree with her.
As Maken puts it, if singleness is a gift, most singles want the gift receipt.
7 Comments
The above articles are very helpful. I can very much relate to Maken as I too was told that Jesus is enough …
Now I’m 55, still single, and have been through a lot of pain re this issue. I’ve been through much isolation, and have had to take quite drastic measures to get away from people who would see me in a category not for me at all. But I sense that positive changes are on their way. I don’t expect everyone to understand this but God is very much being a husband to me, though not in the place of a man, but comforting me and doing wonderful things, and preparing me for marriage.
What else I can say to offer some comfort is that sometimes the long wait really is worth it. We can want and want, and yearn, and believe me, I have done all that, but it seems more now that if we allow God to prepare us, and accept His will, whatever it is, then that will be the best thing for us. If I had married years ago it could have been disastrous, but now I’m in a completely differently place, and am able now to prepare, to help make it work, because I believe marriage involves effort and continued commitment.
And I am so very grateful for what Jesus is doing. His being husband is right, in the biblical way, and I’d never have it any other way now. I’m so grateful for all He has taught me. And he can do the same for you – He’s got no favourites.
The safest place for a woman’s heart is hidden in the Lord, and a man has to go there to find it. I know what its like to give my heart away to a man and have it returned broken. I wish I was more careful with it, but I was so lonely and wanting companionship that I inadvertently became careless with my heart. The pain I feel now won’t let me do that again. And through this experience, God has personally showed me that He can love me the way that I always longed to be love. I realized that I had been searching for something that I already had with the Lord.
Please pass that along to potential employers in New Jersey! 😉
Of course, what do I know? I’m “just a secretary”. 😉
You underestimate yourself. Last time I checked, you had a master’s degree and taught some college!!
I don’t at the moment have concrete ideas, but my gut reaction is that this all has to do with one’s attitude. Career or no career, I suppose one can give off an attitude of apathy toward marriage or toward yielding to God’s will. Or, one can decide in her own heart that she only wants to follow her own agenda. Clearly, this is not what God wants from any of us. Of course, what do I know? I’m “just a secretary”. 😉
I definitely agree with you that we should not be wasting time no matter where we are in life. And really my point in previous post was that Maken wasn’t adequately preparing her readers to face the stigmas, not that it was absolutely, 100% wrong to become a doctor. These are areas for wisdom, in my opinion, not for a laundry list of “Thou shalt nots.”
I do, however, have some ideas about how to solve these problems, but I think I will delay sharing them until after I have read the entire book. I believe Maken offers her own solutions near the end of the book, and I think I will mix my ideas in with hers in a future post.
With that said, do YOU have any ideas? 🙂 I would love to hear them…
I agree that it makes sense to prepare oneself to be a wife, assuming that it is God’s design. However, if I were single, I think I would feel uncomfortable assuming that I would get married (since not everyone does). I would probably feel compelled to move forward with the time and talents God had given me, with an openness to giving it up when a husband came along. Otherwise, I could “waste” a lot of good years and opportunity to help others while waiting for something to happen that may never happen. I see, though, that this is sort of a “catch-22” because, as you said, marrying men might overlook a woman who they thought was merely “career driven.” Perhaps there is a way for a single woman to pursue a career without being “career driven”????