Post written by guest writer Rebecca Robinson. A beautiful description on the joy of singleness!
All His Biddings are Joys
Singleness is not one of life's trials; it's not a cross to be borne. In it there is no suffering, no evil, no grief. It is not like when the man you've been married to for 20 years abandons you and your children to scurry into dark corners with sloppy wanton women. It's not like suddenly losing your child and being forced to bury them into the cold earth, with the brilliance of their life still ringing in your unbelieving retinas like a light snuffed out.
I don't mean to minimize that truth, "each heart knows it's own bitterness," and I certainly have struggled all my life with feelings of resentment and self loathing in relation to being alone. But that's quite my point- I spent YEARS behaving in my heart and mind as though I were without something I deserved; as though I were suffering a loss. It caused me to slink into bad relationships several times, out of thirst and lack of trust. What a waste of precious time!
Elisabeth Elliot wrote, "If you are single today, the portion assigned to you for today is singleness. It is God’s gift. Singleness ought not to be viewed as a problem, nor marriage as a right. God in his wisdom and love grants either as a gift."
To be a single person who sulks about being alone and is desperate to get married is like being a child desperate to grow up because he wants to stay up as late as he feels like it and be able to buy chocolate milk whenever he wants, having no idea in his smallness just exactly what he's asking for. You'll grow up one day and realize that with all those privileges come an entire world of battle and responsibility you never imagined.
I recently realized the very sweet gift of being single. It is like sipping a cup of hot coffee early in the morning as the sky blinks it's half closed sunshining eye at you from between pink clouds. It is beautiful because it is brief, fleeting, quiet. Just you. Just the Holy Spirit. Stillness.
This is what that single season should be like. If you are constantly caterwauling about being single, or even worse, constantly reassuring everyone around you how VERY content you are (thou doth protest too much, methinks), you have become like the man who rejects the good he is given because it is not the good he had expected. You have misunderstood marriage and you have misplaced Christ as the center.
My life's ambition is to be a mother and wife- it's a beautiful adventure I long for the way some long to travel the world someday. But I am not a mother or a wife, not yet, and it is His bidding that makes it so.
All His biddings are joys.
This is an excellent post and thank you for writing it, Rebecca! I was single until the age of 33 and got married just over 4 months ago. I can honestly say that the majority of my singleness was spent reveling in it rather than bemoaning it and I do not regret a single moment! I look back fondly on the gift of those days. I now have the gift of marriage and though it contains many wonderful things that I have no desire to give us, it also has a whole host of responsibilities that I never had before. It truly does mean a life of complete sacrifice for another person in a way that singleness did now. That is not a complaint, but just a fact and one to be embraced with joy in the same way that singleness ought to be embraced with joy.
ReplyDeleteThanks again! I hope other single ladies will read it and take heed!
BTW, I LOVE that quote by Elisabeth Elliot. She has long been an inspiration to me!