Two Encouraging Words for Singles

The number of blog posts written to singles is overwhelming right now. I used to read them as they popped up in my social media streams, but after awhile I began to grow tired of them. Although I'm sure they were well-intentioned and able to encourage some, they began to feel like the same song on repeat. Some seemed to heap guilt on singles, urging them to take action. Others retaliated against the idea that maturity only comes through marriage. And some stood on the sidelines calling for a contentment that will finally silence all of the worry and anxious toil.


I do think we can gain wisdom from these blogs.  I do think we can find truths there that we still need to grow into. But I want to take a slightly different approach and share two of the most encouraging words I have encountered as a single person. This post may be a bit more personal, but I am sharing some of the words that have stilled my heart in paralyzing anxiety and fear of the unknown.  I hope it can bring you some Christ-centered sanity in seasons that feel like chaos.

1. The point of dating is to gain clarity.  

I got this one from John Piper. His words gave me a sense of freedom, because suddenly I could see how dating is meant to be simultaneously serious and transient. You start a relationship with a certain amount of uncertainty, but its success only depends on whether you discover if marriage is God's plan (or not) for you. With these lines in place, a break-up (something we all fear) is not a sign that the relationship was a failure. It may still be heart-breaking to end a relationship, but if the end result was realizing marriage is not a good fit for the two of you, the relationship was still successful. 

2. God will give you the life circumstance that most glorifies Him.  

One night during a small group meeting, we were all discussing how we can understand the gospel better. "I know one way," one young mother spoke up. "Get married and have children. God will teach you a lot about Himself through that." For reasons entirely out of her control, my heart sank. I felt robbed of something I emotionally desired along with the thought that I was also missing out on a deeper knowledge of God. In the midst of these troubling thoughts, the Spirit reminded me that God gives me everything I need to glorify Him. He provides all of the temporary circumstancial elements needed. And He alone knows what those are. One day it may be marriage. But right now it is singleness, because that is what He has given me.  


I don't know who you are or what season you are facing in life. I hope you find some courage here to take the risks of dating, or trust God with patterns of diligence despite a lack of prospects, or to consider how you can glorify God with whatever tools He has placed in your hands. We can know that He will care for us as a good Father through it all.

There is one kindergartner at my school who seems especially shocked by her mortality. The smallest hairline scratch is a marvel to her, as if getting hurt at all is an unnatural thing. She tumbles around with the twenty-something other children every day on the structure, climbing and skidding and yelling around. But the tiniest friction set against her near-translucent skin is a subject for scrutiny in her eyes. When something isn't fully functioning, she furrows her brow and trudges over to a teacher. She lifts a small finger, cradled in the other hand, and begins to describe her emergency. Her voice is stricken with surprise and a kind of offense at the way of the world.

The temptation of the grown-up is to brush aside the child's sensitivity, to pat her on the head and tell her to go back and play. But perhaps there is something to her sense of dissatisfaction with a world of stubbed toes, paper cuts, monkey bar blisters, and hangnails. Maybe we become numbed to the small evidences of fracture in our world that play out in our relationships, in our homes, in our cities. Perhaps we become resolved to some of the sorrows and begin to imagine they were intended to be there in the first place. Perhaps it takes someone so full of the vision of Heaven to remind us that sin is a foreign thing we should never become comfortable with.

Hitting the Spot

   (Drawing by Julianna Kunstler) 

I have never been much of a sports fan. There was only one year when I felt excitement over a game. My mother, the daughter of a football player, grew up rooting for teams and taking part in cheer. At some point she began watching basketball on tv with my brother and I. We began to yell at the square screen, calling out players by name, waving pom poms in our team's royal purple. Our living room became the stadium seating where we watched men move with an agility our bodies could never achieve. 

I'm not sure what happened that year. I'm not sure why I began to feel an enthusiasm that dissipated so soon after.

Every day after lunch I spend two hours overseeing recess for third, fourth, and fifth graders. I pace the blacktop for two hours, making sure balls hit walls and hoops rather than bodies, and mediating when anger flares up. One day a PE teacher stuck around the blacktop with the kids, dribbling and shooting hoops. A few boys were shooting with him, in awe at the way his target seemed to draw the ball in like a magnet. He began to model and explain, correcting when their efforts continued to veer to one side like a twisted grocery cart wheel. Suddenly, every failed release of the ball became the tension of the story, and the coach's effortless ability to consistently make it through the net felt like he had learned the resolution of it all. When he made a shot, everything happened the way it was meant to. He had learned the secret. He could meet the standard, and watching it happen again and again gave you the satisfaction of hitting the spot.

I began to get a glimpse of the beauty of sports that day. There is a pleasure in applying yourself to a form and pattern, and learning how to emulate it with precision. I think this is a good gift from God. But without throwing away or diminishing the goodness of this gift, I've also begun to feel the ways my sinful heart can turn small standards into ultimate Standards. We all fall short of the glory of God, and we all try to fulfill the glory of lesser things.

In the midst of a busy schedule, it's tempting for me to reduce my life to meeting concrete standards of success. Jesus said not to worry about what we wear or eat, but sometimes it feels easier to worry about what I'm going to eat next week than how I can spend more time in devotions before work. Eating Whole 30 is easier to complete than killing sin. We lower the Standard required for us when we blow up the rules required for small things.

There's an unhealthy satisfaction in biting off something small enough to chew for the sake of feeling in control of something. There are two common ways we try to achieve sovereignty in our lives: we either climb up ladders or try to shrink the world down to a size that makes us stand tall over it. I am one who shrinks down the world, but perhaps you are the ladder-climbing kind. Either way, both ladders and worlds collapse on us eventually. We are shown to be declawed and noodle-limbed, branches that can indeed do nothing apart from the Vine. His glory is far greater than the flowers of the fields. We can be weak, throwing balls that refuse to be centered, and walk in a way that pleases God. His law is higher than any we can create, but His sacrifice is also more complete than any we could afford.

   
     

Even with the curse
Holding creation as it groans
Still the river sparkles
Still the wind stirs up
Hands of a million leaves
Giving another standing ovation
To the One
Who was
And is
And is to come
Repeating the refrain
That all was once not like this and
All will once be not like this
Again

Top 8 Reads of 2015

I'm not very good/experienced at writing book reviews, but I would like to post a list with some of my favorite reads of the year. In lieu of writing short reviews (and pretending like I'm more of an authority on the subject than I am), I'm including a quote or so from each book that have stuck with me.

1. Wordsmithy by Douglas Wilson

Interesting people are interested people. Interesting writers are interested writers...As a writer, you should want to be interesting. The way to do this is by being interested.

Read like someone who can afford to forget most of what you read. It does not matter because you are still going to be shaped by it.

Real life duties should be preferred over real life tourism. Taking care of your preschoolers or being deployed with the Seventh Fleet is far to be preferred over purchasing a backpack and heading off to find America, or even worse, yourself...This kind of life experience is not distracting you from your appointed task of writing. It is, rather, the roundabout blessing of giving you something to say.

2.  Rejoicing in Lament by J. Todd Billings

In giving this kind of testimony of God's providence, we should not rush in and victoriously shout "This is God's will!" in a way that suggests that this calamity was what God intended at the foundations of creation. The Triune God is King, but Christ's kingdom is not yet uncontested. On the other hand, one is not left with the impotent response of saying, "God understands your pain, but couldn't do anything about it." With the psalmist, this approach thanks God for blessing, and also puts the lack of blessing at the door of the Almighty. Suffering and calamity are still under the rule of God, the sovereign King. The sufferer is not subject simply to whims of "chance," yet on the other hand God is not capricious or the author of evil. Instead the sufferer is in the hands of a good and powerful God. 

3. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

She had come into her beauty.

I wanted, as I would say to myself, to be in her presence, as if her presence were a fragrance, or a light that was within her and shone around her.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out--perhaps a little at a time.

The brief, laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.

4. Letters to an American Lady by C.S. Lewis

One never has been "independent". Always, in some mode or other, one has lived on others, economically, intellectually, spiritually. Who, after all, is less independent than someone with "a private income"--every penny of which has been earned by the skill and labour of others? Poverty merely reveals the helpless dependence which has all the time been our real condition. We are members of one another whether we choose to recognize the fact or not.

5. Creation Regained by Albert Wolters 

Earthly creation preceding the events recorded in Genesis 3 is like a healthy newborn child. In every respect it can be pronounced "very good"; but  this does not mean that change is not required. There is something seriously wrong if the baby remains in  its infancy: it is meant to grow, develop, mature into adulthood. Suppose now that while the child is still an infant it contracts a serious chronic disease for which there is no known cure, and that it grows up an invalid, the disease wasting its body away. It is clear that there are two clearly distinguishable process going on its body as it approaches adolescence: one is the process of maturation and growth, which continues in spite of sickness and which is natural, normal, and good; the other is the progress of the disease, which distorts and impairs the healthy functioning of the body...There are weaknesses to every analogy...Nevertheless, it can serve to make a significant point: the ravages of sin do not annihilate the normative creational development of civilization, but rather are parasitical upon it...the Lord does not forsake the work of his hands. In faithfulness he upholds his creation order.

6. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community by Wendell Berry

The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous. 

...if you are dependent on people who do not know you, who control the value of your necessities, you are not free, and you are not safe.

But there is a higher, juster love of which the sign is the meeting of the eyes.

She is speaking joyfully and fearfully of the self's suddenly irresistible wish to be given away. And this is an unconditional giving, on which, she knows, time and mortality will impose their inescapable conditions; she will have remembered the marriage ceremony with its warnings of difficulty, poverty, sickness, and death. There is no "safe" about this. This love has no place to happen except in this world, where it cannot be made safe.

7. Being Human by Ronald MacAulay

The confusion here arises from forgetting the distinction between true knowledge and exhaustive knowledge, true language and exhaustive language. In saying we can know or say certain things about God, we do not claim that we have said everything about God which can be said, or that we know all that can be known. This is true not only of our knowledge of God but even of our knowledge of other people or of the material world. Though incomplete, our knowledge of God is accurate because he has made himself known to us in the Bible and there described himself for us.

The great value God gives to the body is best shown by the physical resurrection. We will be physical for eternity...We long...not to be "unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life." Paul longs not for a less physical experience but for a better physical experience--one unmarred by sickness and decay.

8. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Of course the children's eyes turned to follow the lion; but the sight they saw was so wonderful that they soon forgot about him. Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing around him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. *

(My favorite part of this book was the whole scene where Aslan brings all of the animals who had been turned into statues to life. It is a wonderful picture of the ressurection.)

I love to watch
the wonder of a child
discovering the real world
full of flesh and blood
feather and fur
twig and leaf
right and wrong
good and bad

I love to watch
her fascination
as a ladybug's feet
brush over her hand
her adoring fingers
out to nurture and provide
nearly decapitating the thing

And I love to watch
his bubbly reverence
when a robin stops and
stares right back

Then there is the clumsiness
of maneuvering a small body
around sharp corners
and other moving things
every movement a journey
full of toils and snares

It is not long before the shock
of  injustice
and the way the body bleeds
begins to sink in
--even a paper cut
calls for the magic of a kiss and gauze

And far too many encounter
the deepest kinds of wounds
far too early
in their moving breathing lives

These are the wounds only heaven can heal
and I pray
to the Maker of the Sparrows
on behalf of the little ones
so fresh to the good creation
so fresh to the fallen world

All is Given

There are two basic approaches to life--one in which the world is a world of scarcity, given to us by the skinflint god, and the other in which the world is a world of endless possibilities, bestowed on us by a loving Father.

--Douglas Wilson

The older I get (which is not very old at this moment) the more I recognize how wrong my assumptions are about adulthood. I have a a hard time shaking off the feeling that my bootstraps must be given a hardy lift and I must become a lady of self-sustaining strength. Childhood is understood as a time of receiving and completely relying upon others. It's allowed and expected. But when the hour strikes twelve, then all must be labored for, all must be earned. Open hands are put to the plow. 

I think there's something to be said of the goodness of work. To work with your own hands and earn your own bread is a good thing. But in the process it's so easy to forget that every dollar you receive in exchange for your labor is still something given. It is manna from heaven supplied through the "mask" of your neighbor. 

I recently watched the new Cinderella movie. In a scene near the end, Cinderella's step mother exposes her own bitter view of the world. "Nothing is given," she snaps. In her eyes, all will be taken if she cannot snatch it all back, no matter what means she must use to do it. "Love is free," Cinderella interjects. And of course, she is right. Who can earn love? Who can earn relationship? Is the love of the Father not a gift we can simply humbly receive? Can we really make anything effective on our own? Can we really cause any seed we plant to bear fruit? 

All is given. All is of grace. The world we live in is one of abundance because we have a generous Father. We don't deserve or earn one drop of His good gifts. But He is a good God.