[Here's a couple of reflections I jotted down earlier in the week about singleness.  Figured I'd get this out there before I leave on my honeymoon tomorrow!]

As of this Saturday I’m going to be a married man, and a big part of me still can’t believe I get to say that.  Many people have gone through long periods of singleness in their lives, but I’ve so often felt like the singlest of singles.  Seriously: I went through all my college life without going on a single date, and then a couple more years after college.  I had almost an entire decade between dates.  The first one I went on in my twenties was right before I turned 27.  Adding salt to the wound is the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic.  I’m the guy who likes to buy flowers, write notes, open the car door, etc.  So my many, many dateless Friday nights belonged not to a single who felt he wanted to serve the Lord as a single man for the rest of his life.  No, I often spent those evenings with a heart that was aching to be with someone.

Though girlfriends in my life have been few and far between, I’d always held out an intense optimism that I’d meet my soul mate one day.  I’ve been convinced so many times that I’d found “the One”, only to end up heartbroken and frustrated.  Typically my love went unrequited.  Still I held out hope that “the One” was still to come (or that the one who broke my heart would realize her mistake). But when I hit my mid-twenties and had no prospects at all, I began to be doubtful for the first time in my life that I’d ever marry.  I felt in my heart that God had built me for marriage, but I struggled to recognize that with the fact that girls just didn’t seem to notice me in the way I wanted to be noticed.

Singleness had long felt like an unwanted part of my identity.  I was sick of hearing sermons on dating.  I was sick of hearing preachers talk about finding a wife as if it was as easy as going to pick up something from the store.  I was very cynical when preachers (married preachers) would encourage singles to live up their singleness and embrace it as a gift from God.  ”Good advice,” I thought, “from the guy who’s going to go home and sleep next to the woman he loves tonight.”  It felt like a beggar-turned-millionaire telling beggars how awesome the beggar life is and then flying off in his private jet.

So it’s with utter humility and weirdness that I get to be that guy now.  There’s probably a million reflections concerning singleness I could come up with given enough time, but for now here’s two…

Reflection #1: Circumstances Don’t Change Idols.

It took me a long time to realize it, but my desire for a wife had straight up become an idol.  There was a long period of time that I felt like life wasn’t worth getting excited about if I was going to do it as a single guy.  By way of reminder, wanting a spouse is a good desire.  What’s bad is when it becomes a need.

All I wanted when I was single was someone to love and hold.  And it hurt to not have it.  So when Krystal came into my life, that want went away, right?  Not even close.  On the surface it looked like I just wanted to be married.  But deep in my heart I was suffering from approval idolatry.  I needed the affirmation and acceptance that I believed a wife would offer.  When I didn’t get that, I lamented that I was unloveable and that no woman would ever want to marry me.  Yet when I got a woman who loves me and wanted to marry me, that didn’t solve the problem.  See, I still crave that affirmation like crazy.  The context just looks different.  In singleness, that unmet need for affirmation resulted in an inner voice telling me that I’d die alone.  In dating and engagement, whenever I upset Krystal or hurt her in any way, that inner voice tells me that she’s disappointed in me and is having second thoughts about whether or not she wants to be with me.  And when I upset her in marriage, I imagine that voice will tell me that she’s wondering if she feels like she made a mistake in marrying me.  ”Yeah she said she wanted to be with me forever, but she didn’t have all the info on me.  She didn’t know how rotten I was, and now she’s having buyer’s remorse.”

I wish I’d known earlier that having a woman in my life doesn’t magically cure my loneliness.  In one sense I did know it.  I’d heard it a million times before from preachers that a spouse ultimately couldn’t satisfy, only Jesus could.   But deep down I always assumed the people saying that could only say it because they didn’t desire to be married as much as I did.  They didn’t know how deeply my desire ran, I thought.  But now I realize that I am fighting the same battle in my heart when I fail Krystal as I did on all those lonely Friday nights as a single with no prospects.

Reflection #2: Know What God Has Promised You.

This is a big one.  You may have a strong prompting from the Holy Spirit that you’re supposed to be married.  You may even have a strong prompting of the person you’re supposed to be married to.  But it’s one thing to feel led by the Spirit and another to trust in a promise from God.  When all is said and done, God has not promised you a spouse.  When I first confessed that out loud it was pretty hard to accept.  But as I repeated it over and over it became a great comfort to me.

We’re all like the Israelites in the wilderness after Egypt.  They didn’t trust God to provide for them.  So they complained.  More specifically, they grumbled because they didn’t trust that God was good.  My grumbling in singleness was a grumbling against God’s goodness.  It was a declaration that “I am single, and I shouldn’t be.  God hasn’t given me what he should.”  To add sin to sin, I’d mask my frustration by trying to make it look religious.  I wasn’t “grumbling”, I just “had a deep desire from God to be married.”

I wish I’d seen that there is a distinction between being burdened and grumbling.  For example it’s one thing for a believer to have a burden to go minister to a certain people group overseas or go plant a church in a certain city.  It’s another thing to want to go do those things because you’re grumbling about how materialistic and uncool your ministry opportunities are in your current locale.  (Dallas hipster reformed Christians like me struggle with this a lot, ‘cuz I mean…Dallas.)  I believe God has always put a desire for marriage into my heart.  I believe he built me for it.  But I wish I had owned that and then just trusted him to do something about it rather than feel like I should help him out because his timing wasn’t good. (Should’ve studied the life of Abraham more closely.)

Before Krystal and I started dating, God began to flood me with comfort when I began to simply accept that he wasn’t out to screw me over.  It did wonders for me to simply focus on what he had promised me.  For instance, he had promised to be good to me. (Romans 8:28)  God is in the process of spiraling everything in your life toward your good and his glory, and if that doesn’t comfort you, the problem isn’t in the truth but in your definition of “good.”  I started trusting his promise rather than my feelings, and the result was comfort.  Additionally (and especially with regard to singleness), I banked on his promise in Psalm 84:11- “For the LORD is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor.  No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”  God’s not a withholding God.  He wasn’t holding out on me in the blessings department because I was single.  I realized that I was no less blessed than my married friends.  He doesn’t always bless in the same way, but he’s in the business of lavishing blessing upon every single one of his children.  This is a very clear Biblical truth (see Ephesians 1:3 and 2 Peter 1:3-4) that I could either choose to trust or not.

A late-March entry about Valentine’s Day? Believe it. Depending on whether you’re on the “half-pipe is complete” end of the spectrum or the “half-pipe is only half awesome” end, I’m either a month late or 11 months early. Let’s go latter! Below I’ve included an entry from my journal from a month ago about some of my meditations on being a single Christian man on the day Saint Valentine was beheaded. I’ve gone ahead and included some “month after” commentary after doing some more reflection on this subject lately.

2/14/09

“I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.”

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

Valentine’s Day. And God is GOOD. More and more, he is faithfully bringing me to a place where the above passage is not just a lofty ideal to aspire to but an inward reality to be enjoyed. I feel like I’m no longer having to convince myself that I’m happy in my singleness. I just feel more content. But in no way is my desire marriage depleted. It’s still there. But I didn’t care being single today. I credit this to becoming increasingly dependent on God’s promise to be good to me (Romans 8:28). By focusing on the promised end (all things working together for good), I rest and let God decide how he wants to do this. God has and will continue to lavish his goodness upon. If he can be most good (and most glorified) by keeping me single forever, I will gladly accept. If he will be most good by partnering me with a wife, then that’s what he will do. It is liberating to belive God when he promises to be good. This inherently crushes dissatisfaction. For if we are in despair over singleness, we’re essentially trusting in our own definition of “good” and not God’s. Our primary good is the knowledge of God by which we are saved (John 17:3), which he pours out on us (Ephesians 1:3, 2 Peter 1:3).

The Christian is to be preoccupied with that which will carry over into eternity. The institute of marriage as we know it will be a casualty of the consummated Kingdom. Thus, a preoccupation with marriage in and of itself is foolish at best and idolatrous at worst. Preoccupied with eternity, the Christian should pursue marriage as a means of producing more fruit, more treasures, and more glory to God (Galatians 5:22-23, Matthew 6:19-21, Ephesians 1:6,12,14)*. My attitude about marriage should be governed by the realization that people won’t marry in the new earth. This realization forces a Christocentric recontextualization of marriage itself.

In all of this, I’m learning to see the world more in relation to Christ. And because it’s not necessary to be married in order to serve and meditate on him, I’m growing more content in my circumstances.

“Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!”

-2 Corinthians 9:15

(end entry)

The working definition of wisdom I’ve been living off of for the past few months is this: Wisdom is seeing the end state of all things and living in light of that in the temporal (or something to that effect). So when Jesus says that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30), how should that affect how I live now? How much control should the desire for marriage have in my heart as a temporal institution?

I find myself becoming far more confrontational with myself in the fight against sin. What I mean is that I’ve often tried to convince myself I was satisfied in singleness. I read passages like 1 Corinthians 7, and Song of Solomon 2:7, and would feign some excitement: “Yeah, Lord. Awesome. I’ll be single for you if you call me to!” But if God were to physically appear to me and tell me he wanted me to remain single for his cause, I would have broken down. Pride is unmercifully relentless, and cunningly subtle. I have discovered in my heart at times the attempt to appear to be content in my singleness in the elusive hope that God will look at my contentment and decide that because now that I’m content in him alone, I’m finally ready to get married. That’s anything but contentment. It’s a charade. So when I say that I’m becoming more confrontational, I mean that I’m asking myself harder questions. “I’m content in my singleness.” Am I? Really? What are the evidences of this? If God were to confirm in my life that he wanted me to remain single, how would I really react? How do I live as a single man?

I’ve come to believe that this issue of Christian singleness is much more serious than I’ve treated it in the past. Sermons addressed to young singles are centered around the theme of waiting. They’re patience-driven. This is fine, but it leaves one kind-of big aspect unaddressed. To instruct singles to wait well is to presuppose that they will one day get married. But no one has that assurance. There’s a great scene early on in the show “Lost” in which the survivors of a plane crash are about a week into their time on the island, and they’ve been waiting eagerly for rescue to come at any moment. Their leader Jack then makes an awesome leader-speech in which he starts out saying “It’s been six days… and we’re all still waiting. Waiting for someone to come. Well, what if they don’t? We have to stop waiting. We need to start figuring things out.”

The problem many Christian singles face isn’t patience. It’s idolatry. Impatience is merely the symptom. I’ve too long treated the symptom, trying to become more patient without looking deeper into my heart and seeing the problem there, the idol I’ve made of getting married one day. I’m still waiting. Waiting for a wife to come. Well, what if she doesn’t? I have to stop waiting, and start figuring things out. I’ve long planned (albeit vaguely) my future ministry and plans on the assumption that I’ll be married then. But what if I’m not? A man is more than his marital status. Such a status is temporal. God’s kingdom is eternal. We teach our children that “true love waits” when the Bible doesn’t give anyone the assurance that there’s anything romantic to wait for in the first place. We must be weary of promising earthly blessings when God has not.

As I stated in the journal entry, I’m a weird paradoxical spot when it comes to marriage. My desire for it is perhaps stronger than ever, yet I’m more content than ever in my singleness. There’s a fine line between desire and need, and by God’s grace alone I’m slowly but surely leaving one of those sides. But that’s a daily fight. It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve realized that I’ve been harboring an idol in this area. God calls us to be truly satisfied in him. And only when we do this, when we relinquish all control and let God decide how he wants to be good to us will we be truly satisfied in our marriages, in our singleness, in our jobs, and friendships. If our treasure is here, it can be threatened, leaving us vulnerable to fear and hate when that threat comes. But if our greatest treasure isn’t here, then nothing here can threaten us. May we all learn to find deeper satisfaction in God alone, not what he can give us. God’s greatest gift to man is himself, and nothing can ever top that.

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*At the risk of purging this thought of its full implications, it is fruitful to your walk and wonderfully glorifying to God to be bathed in sexual satisfaction in the God-given context of marriage.