I know, I know. Another "faith" blog post, on a blog that is also supposed to be a place to share my creative writing! But I have been meaning for a long time to post an update on my blog about my commitment to being single. I blogged about it last March because I believed that my reasons for committing to being single could be helpful to other young women. Once again, I would like to share about this more personal thing with my readers, because I think that sharing the things we learn can benefit others too.
My six months ended on August 31, but by then I had already decided I was going to extend it until Christmas, and maybe even for the full year (until March.) I extended it because I saw how good it was to be focused on loving God alone and not looking to change anything, and I thought that there was a lot more good that "focusing on being single" could still do for me if I continued it further. To be honest, I was not living up to my idea of "single-heartedness" half the time and I wanted to keep working on it.
But then I read an article that made me rethink a couple of things.
First of all, let's throw a little bit of school into the mix here. I'm currently in teacher's college, and I have this one class called Schooling and Society where we have discussed such things as media influence and the difference between "education" and "schooling." We were looking at the problems with children and the media, particularly in one instance with Disney Princess movies. Now, I myself love Disney princesses and have never had any problem with them. They (and Barbie) never gave me a false idea of "beauty," nor do I think they ingrained an idea of white dominance in my young mind. As an adult, though, I do declare "shame on them for not having more cultural diversity in the media," but I have more of a problem with it in real-life Hollywood than in old Disney fairy tales. (And an even bigger problem in media, as we also discussed, is the sexualization of young people, particularly through music.)
But there was another problem with Disney and movies and media that came up other than racism, beauty, and sexuality. The idea that a girl's life should be about finding a man? The idea that you will find true love and live happily ever after? In the past, criticism of this frustrated me most of all, because I thought there was nothing wrong with looking forward to falling in love and getting married. But I also thought that this was the norm - that everyone who wanted to get married would probably get married, just like that! And I despised the attitude of modern feminism that a woman should be perfectly happy on her own because I believed that we are created for companionship and therefore somewhat incomplete on our own.
Throughout the past few years my understanding of this has changed. We may be created to desire companionship, but I'll tell you what we are really created for - to know, love, and serve God, in this world and in the next. To have a personal relationship with God. To strive to love in return the one who poured out His love for us on the Cross. When I read that article, which was about "not waiting," I realized something: that although I knew I had everything I could ever possibly want or need in God, I was still waiting. If I have God, though, don't I already have my "true love" and my "happily ever after"?
I still like Disney princesses. I still like romance and marriage. And I still despise certain aspects of modern feminism in which traditionalism, femininity, motherhood, the family, and female gender roles seem to be thrown out the window altogether. I believe that "happily ever after" in terms of human love can exist if you put God at the centre of your marriage and work towards a common goal (salvation, and the sanctification of your spouse), and if you understand that love is a choice, not a feeling.
BUT. I also believe that this world, perhaps because of culture, media, or tradition, has ingrained in the minds of young girls an idea that their entire happiness depends upon them finding a man, and this is SO FALSE. And the crazy thing is, we still keep believing to some degree that the goal of our life is to get married even when we know that the goal of our life is merely to live for God, no matter whether we get married or be single forever.
Wait... did you just say "single forever"??? Oh no please God not me! ...Is that your attitude? I think it's always been mine. I went from a subconscious attitude of "I need a guy to be happy" to "I'm happy with God alone (but please can you send me my future husband soon?)", which was a pretty delusional improvement.
So what's different now? Well, first of all I decided that putting a time limit on an attitude of the heart is total bull. I mean, "singlehood commitment?" What does that even mean? That when my time is up, I will stop focusing on being single? With my tongue I would have declared "of course not!" but deep inside there would probably have been a shift from "happy being single" to "why am I still single!??" That is why now, my commitment to being single is going to continue forever and ever - for happily ever after - unless God calls me to marriage. And does it matter if that never happens? No, because whether or not I want to get married someday (which I do), the goal of my life is simply to know, love, and serve God every moment in this life and the next. I have everything I could ever possibly want or need, and the joy in my heart that comes from this is insurmountable.
Now don't get me wrong. Like I said, I do want to get married. Being attracted to guys and wishing for a male companion in life is natural, as is dreaming of a wedding I suppose. Also, I do intend to stick to my commitment from before to an extent, only because I think it will help me focus on single-heartedness better right now. But singleness doesn't end when the calendar says so, it will end when God says so. As long as I'm still single, which could be all my life for all I know, single-heartedness should be the attitude of my heart. What does that mean? It means that ultimately, I'm happy to say, my life is complete already. With Him, I am never alone.
The thing that knocked me in the head about that article was that even though we ("we" being, for the most part, single Christian women) know we have everything in God, we seem to still be waiting for something. We expect it, as though our lives are incomplete without it, even after we have claimed over and over that God's love is more than enough, that we have all we need and shall desire nothing more. It's crazy how even all the Christian resources out there for young single women seem to encourage an attitude of waiting! But what are we waiting for? Why should we wait? Like I said before, it's like we're culturally programmed to expect "true love" to necessarily happen. But since it doesn't always, and when it does it isn't "like the movies," it's an awful good thing we have a perfect, unconditionally-loving, always-present Lord and Saviour to fulfill us!
There is also a second article I would like to share, which gives great practical advice on how to be "single-hearted" or "emotionally pure." For me, this idea of being "emotionally pure" is really helpful for living and appreciating life during this "waiting time" - which, attitudinally, isn't going to be a "waiting" time for me anymore! The only waiting I want to do is waiting for the day I get to see my true Bridegroom in all His glory in my true Home in Heaven. If God does call me to marriage, which I won't deny that I'm very hopeful of, my husband will be my helpmate in reaching my goal, not the goal itself!
And just to be clear, I'm not saying that I'm going to be good at "not waiting" thing. The possibly-media-influenced idea of necessarily finding true love, and whatever natural attraction and desires and whatnot I have, means I'm still going to find myself waiting anyway. But at least God has given me some insight into where He is calling me to be right now. And for once, a feminist attitude is actually appealing to me! When once I couldn't stand it when a story lacked some satisfactory romance, now I'm actually prepared to knock the entirety of one of my love stories out of one of my own novels! Because who says every heroine has to have a helpmate? Especially when it does nothing for the story but add the "necessary romance" to it!
So here at last are those articles! One on why I don't wait anymore and the other on how to be emotionally pure. Thank God for wise people who write blogs and inspire random little childes over here like me.
Postscript! I wrote this blog post a while ago and saved it as a draft and kept it unpublished for a while, apprehensive to publish it. But to properly achieve what I set out to do with this blog in the "faith" portion - to be a witness - I have to be vulnerable.... and part of the reason I didn't want to publish it was because it was scary to boldly claim that I wasn't going to "wait" anymore, when my hope for marriage is still strongly there. But God is abundant and patient and He has been gently dragging me in the right direction. And now I have found another article along the same lines, so I can conveniently tack it onto the end here: Single and Not Waiting.
Also... Happy Monday!!
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