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