Seriously

“We have been told over and over that singleness a gift. But it’s the kind of gift that makes us cringe and smile politely while we desperately search for a gift receipt so we can return it.” - Debbie Maken

I love this book. It echoes so many thoughts I have had when thinking about marriage and singleness. Last year, I read an article by Paige Benton Brown called “Singled Out For Good.” Writes Brown,

“Accepting singleness, whether temporary or permanent, does not hinge on speculation about answers God has not given to our list of whys, but rather on celebration of the life he has given. I am not single because I am too spiritually unstable to possibly deserve a husband, nor because I am too spiritually mature to possibly need one. I am single because God is so abundantly good to me, because this is his best for me. It is a cosmic impossibility that anything could be better for me right now than being single. The psalmists confirm that I should not want, I shall not want, because no good thing will God withhold from me.”

At the time, this seemed like a solid argument. However, after reading Maken’s book, I am not so sure that God grants us all good things no matter how we live our lives. I am not talking about a works-righteousness theology. But I need to nail down a better idea of what marriage is. Is marriage a blessing that I cannot affect? There are plenty of blessings I have rejected so far in life. It is completely possible for me to reject the blessings of God, and for God to sovereignly allow me to suffer from my sin of disobedience. God has good and perfect ways for us to live our lives, but I constantly choose not to follow His ways, whether it be sleeping in for church, ignoring my family, or resisting His call on my life to be an RUF intern. I struggle to follow and choose the holy and good things God has for me every day. If marriage, then, is a similar blessing of God, if it is a biblical mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, if we are created male and female, intended for a union which reflects Christ’s glorious marriage to the church, are we not still capable as sinners to mess it all up like we do everything else?

Maken’s book says we are more than capable of messing up marriage the way God intends it – both our culture and the church have made it acceptable and sometimes even preferable to remain single. Maken provides ample biblical evidence to show that God actually intends the opposite, with few exceptions. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

“Calvin believed that one of the ‘[tricks] of Satan [to] dishonor marriage’ was to advance ‘the pestilential law of celibacy.’ In plain English, the belief that remaining single is legitimate and godly is a work of the devil. Read that again: Satan dishonors marriage by fooling us into believing that singleness is okay.
That sounds extreme, I know. But it makes sense. Why break up a home through divorce or wayward children if it is easier for Satan to convince singles that they have no biblical duty to pair up in the first place and that other arrangements are suitable substitutes?”

“How hard we search for an object usually shows its value. A missing shirt button might merit a glance at the floor. But when a wedding ring is involved, the whole room will be turned upside down. The generally aimless, thoughtless, and disorganized practice of dating to find a wife is closer to looking for the cheap button than the invaluable wedding ring. Because we as a culture no longer value marriage, dating is treated as casually as we ultimately treat our marriages. People do not date seriously because they do not value marriage seriously.”

“Every status in life (whether temporarily single, married early, married later in life, perpetually single) can be made to look like God’s will and therefore above question or examination. ‘God’s will’ becomes the blanket answer to any legitimate questioning of the way things are… Thinking culturally endorses a seductive, outcome-based theology: Whatever your outcome is – whether you are married or single – it must be God’s will. But God is not a puppet, and we should not treat him as such. We must not turn his sovereignty and his will into carte blanche approval for the choices we make. Doing so turns the doctrine of God’s sovereignty (his control in exercising his will) into a rubber-stamping machine that validates every situation in life, no matter how unbiblical or personally devastating.”

“Often single women are told that God has allowed singleness and that his knowledge and control over the situation should still any troubled heart. In a sense, singles are chastised for pondering why they are not married. I am afraid the analysis of the situation is not that simple. While cancer is regularly allowed into people’s lives, researchers still ask what causes and cures it. We don’t tell those with cancer, “It’s just God’s will for you to be sick right now; so you need to be content…” We do not fully know what causes cancer; if we would just open our eyes, we would know what causes the modern phenomenon of protracted singleness…Of course, marriage is still under God’s control. But he demands our thoughtful and timely participation in his will. While the farmer praises God for a bountiful crop, he must still plant, water, weed, and harvest. While God feeds the birds of the air as Jesus said, he doesn’t drop the worms into their nests. They have to go out and search for them. We must cooperate with God’s will for our lives rather than sitting idly by and complaining because God didn’t magically provide.”

“There was a time when people married and started families in their late teens and early twenties. That sounds awfully young to us today, but there was a time when children were raised so that their emotional and physical development coincided. As their sexuality began to develop, marriage was just around the corner. But in today’s culture of protracted adolescence, children are raised to remain adolescent, stay in school indefinitely, and live at home as ‘adult children,’ delaying marriage and adulthood… We are lying to adolescents if we tell them to save themselves for marriage when at the same time we are telling their older siblings stuck in protracted singleness that singleness and celibacy are the same thing. Any fifteen-year-old looking at the average twenty-five-year-old single will hardly be inspired to wait for marriage.

Probably my favorite quote:

“Let me be totally honest with you. Though I got married at age thirty-one, I really could have used a husband at sixteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-seven, twenty-nine, thirty. Especially at twenty-five – a year of numerous cold showers. Let’s be honest, being single doesn’t make you not want sex. Whoever said that age thirty-four is a woman’s sexual peak needs to be shot.”

Maken first began to question the idea of singleness based on her own personal feelings towards being single. She was tired of it. She was suffering from a desire to be married. As my delightful friend Anne has pointed out recently, just because something is distasteful, doesn’t make it unholy or ungodly. Suffering is a part of the christian life. The fact that some of us desire to be married and yet suffer in singleness, is not basis for much. Just because we desire something does not make it good. Except, points out Maken, when that desire has been created and instilled in us by the God of our salvation.