I Celebrate You, Single!

What do I use to mark my anniversary? I realised recently that it’s been nearly 20 years of being single. Actually, more than that but I figure 2002 was a good starting point.

How do I celebrate 20 years of my life that, according to the world’s definition, is full of un-events?

UN-married. Child-LESS.

Married couples be posting beautiful markers like photos of trips and dinners and fun with kids together at 5, 10, 15 year anniversaries, accompanied by writing about how much they appreciate the fun, the mess, the ups and downs, the support, of their beautiful husband or wife, and how hard and how rewarding it’s all been.

And 99% of people will relate and celebrate. Tick! You’ve stayed married. You’ve gone through labour, kid-raising, and the hard work of compromise in marriage.

How do I celebrate the things I’m proud of that I can’t even describe because there simply is no cultural narrative for them?

Mine is a world of non-events and non-celebration according to the world’s narrative.

There are only one or two types of cards that apply to me in the card section of the bookstore: the birthday card, and the sympathy card. Not the ‘congrats, you’re expecting’, card, or the ‘congrats it’s a girl’, or ‘congrats on your engagement’, or ‘congrats on your wedding’, and not ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ cards either.

Nope, I don’t have kids. Not a one. So I can’t celebrate perseverance through sleepless nights, messy mornings, loud dinners and kisses before bed.

Yet I am celebrated. God celebrates me. And if you’re single, I wanted to take time today to celebrate you too.

I won’t find a card that celebrates the depth and calibre of your heart, a card to celebrate your patience, a card to celebrate your celibacy, a card to celebrate your fierce brand of faith despite countless disappointments, or a card to celebrate each night alone (or 7,300 nights if it’s your 20th anniversary, like me) with none of the comforts of cuddles, or simply a hand-hold or kiss. Each of those moments of bravery, purity and tenacity are a priceless celebration in my eyes.

I celebrate hope in you.

I celebrate the beautiful times of closeness with God, the dawn prayers, the time to seek, play, times of reading and watching, times to have spontaneous fun in the world and coffees with people at short notice.

I celebrate that the extent of ‘freedom’ most people think you have doesn’t quite play out as they imagine it to be but you let them believe what they want and keep your joy.

I celebrate the massive investment you’ve made into the friendships you have, the time you’ve taken to deepen and navigate something with love even though friends are not covenanted to you and could go out of your life anytime.

It takes courage to invest in relationships where there is no vow, no oxytocin bonding kick, no kids, no reason for anyone to stick around.

When friendships fall apart, it takes untold courage to invest again, especially when these are your closest relationships.

It takes courage to invest your whole heart into your nephews and nieces when your own heart often aches and even screams that you would love a family of your own.

I celebrate your perseverance and choosing to keep your heart sweet even though you might feel invisible in the heart-wrenching struggle of running out of time to have a child. Although it seems socially acceptable to have empathy for couples who can’t conceive, it seems like no one wants to know about the grief that comes when you can’t conceive because you find yourself single, and you’re choosing to honour God with your sex life by not having sex outside marriage.

I celebrate that you’ve navigated for over a decade in boarding and flatting and living alone in small units from which you may be asked to leave at any point.

I celebrate that you choose to make God your home, and God your own family, and I celebrate that you have an understanding of this that goes deeper than most would even want to know.

I celebrate that you have carried your heart well, and have chosen to decorate in fairy lights and cushions, even if it’s just for a year or two before needing to move house yet again, when you haven’t had a space on earth that you could really call your own.

I celebrate that you choose to love ocean waves and walks and ferns and the sound of rain and cooking for yourself even when alone.

I celebrate that I haven’t gone crazy with the whirlwind of thoughts that sometimes come with the territory of long-term singleness: did I do something wrong, did I waste a decade, is this what God’s intention is for me or did I miss the boat, is there something I’m just not understanding, did I hear from God right?

I celebrate that I also haven’t gone crazy with the lack of resources and understanding of single people – the presumption that our lists are too long and our efforts too thin, the idea that if I’m unmarried it’s totally my own choice, or that all single people are simply in a holding cell of ‘working on themselves’ until God brings someone along, and being told that I’ll never understand love properly because I’ve never had a child.

I celebrate perseverance and joy in Jesus. He is my source of closeness and grace. He is my one. He is the guy who whispers the things He loves about me just loud enough for me to hear, in a crowd or alone. He’s my romance. He is the one who reveals to me that He’s made me to be so many spectacular things.

He brings the butterflies along my path, and He brings the help when I or my car break down, He is the support at my back. He’s the one who understands this journey more than anyone because He made me, and He was single too. I’m so glad I started walking with Him all those years ago.

I celebrate and I am celebrated when I remember that it’s Him, and why I chose 2002 as my starting point: I started walking with Him at that point, so HE is my upcoming 20-year anniversary.

Photo credit: Rowan Kyle on unsplash

‘Discernment’ vs Fear: Tuning in to God among the Noise

We’re living in a time where fear is so often mistaken for having some kind of Godly ‘discernment’. God knows, I’ve made that mistake myself in the past.

Do we know the time and season we’re living in today? Knowing this was a matter of life and death (spiritually and physically) for the Jews before they were besieged by Babylon.

A bunch of people in their community believed that if they submitted to the government (the Babylonian Empire), it would kill them. This bunch were so consumed by fear bred by past experiences and the rumours of others that they became paranoid to the point that they didn’t listen to the lone prophet who was trying to save them.

They became convinced that the government was so hell-bent on killing them that they thought Jeremiah was leading them into a trap by telling them to surrender to Babylon. This bunch listened to false prophets who gave messages that were distorted by their own unrestored souls. The false prophets seemed to make more sense from a humanistic point of view – run from the Babylonian government, or fight everything they do, and peace and victory will be yours.

That bunch looked at history and thought – how can it possibly go well for us if we surrender to these officials? They could see everything that was wrong with the government and allowed that to dictate their response. They remembered previous times and seasons where God had given them victory over despotic nations, and they thought God would do this again.

They were listening to history, listening to circumstances, listening to previous prophecies, and listening to their forefathers’ advice which they didn’t realise was now outdated.

They thought they were being discerning and wise and protecting themselves from the anti-God spirit of Babylon when actually they were engaging in the lowest most immature level of discernment possible: detecting evil in people, and responding by fear and complete separation from those people.

They failed to see the current time and season that God had ordained. They failed to hear His word for today. God was actually saying – yes, this government has done many terrible things – but God’s instruction was ‘If you surrender to the officers of the king of Babylon, your life will be spared and this city will not be burned down; you and your family will live.’ (Jeremiah 38.17. Emphasis added).

God also told the people ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce[.…] Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper’. (Jeremiah 29.5-7) Hmmm. How counterintuitive.

You mean God was asking them to surrender and submit to and PRAY for the prosperity of an evil empire that was violently beseiging the city and taking everyone captive, in chains, to a foreign land? Why was He not telling them to fight Babylon tooth and nail? To stand up for their religious freedoms and their right to live in their own way, in their own land, their right to be surrounded by their own people?

The Babylonian siege against Jerusalem was actually a gift from God. The Jews had become so ensnared by fear over the years that God felt to give them a command that, if followed, would break fear off them and would melt away their ongoing stiff-necked submission issues.

Do you trust me? God was saying. Do you trust that even if you are surrendering to Babylon, surrounded by an ungodly and foreign people, ruled by legislation that is determined by a dictator with a long history of mass murder, in a land not your own, as an ethnic minority and a religious minority, that I will still take care of you?

Do you not trust that you can still be pure and clean even when living among unclean? Do you dare to trust that I will even give you influence in this foreign land by being inside it, and that you will bear witness of my glory to a King who doesn’t yet know me?

Or do you not trust me and would you rather go by your own broken intuition, and in your desire to protect yourself as far away as possible from perceived danger, fight Babylon in your own strength and die, or run away back to Egypt in your own attempt to save yourself, and die?

Those who were so afraid of death and harm, and so stubbornly opposed to submitting to anyone, including God, that they allowed that to dictate their reaction to Babylon ended up dying anyway. The thing they feared came upon them because they didn’t know the time and season that God was leading them through.

Those who stayed in Babylon to fight were killed. Those who went to Egypt to flee were killed. Those who heard the voice of the Lord for ‘today’ surrendered to Babylon and lived, and fear was broken off their lives.

God’s own people didn’t recognise the opportunity to break fear off their lives and rebuild trust in Him. They didn’t realise they had an opportunity to learn how to build and plant in a place that was far from their preferred location.

The bunch who rejected Jeremiah didn’t realise that submitting to a government that was foreign to their way of life did not mean they would spiritually or physically die. They didn’t realise that the government had no power to kill them because God had ordained a season where His protection overrode government brutality.

They didn’t realise that submitting to government was a gift. They didn’t realise that the definitions of ‘submit’ and ‘surrender’ did not mean giving up their worship of God. They didn’t realise that ‘surrender’ to the government did not mean that they were being disloyal to God or becoming prey to some big bogeyman of a demonic stronghold.

They could still surrender to the Babylonian officers without giving up their belief, and without giving up their prosperity and without giving up a single ounce of their God-given authority or purity. It just meant changing some aspects of where and how they lived for a time.

Some people are comparing themselves to Daniel and his 3 amigos in Babylon at this time – but when we understand the context of why they were in Babylon in the first place – because they actually surrendered to Babylon – the comparison is not a viable reason to shaft everything about any government (this is not about New Zealand only and I’m not saying that Jacinda is evil; we don’t fight against flesh and blood).

I believe now is an opportunity for us as the church to have fear and submission issues broken off us. It seems like some Christians are in two camps: those who are so afraid of the government and afraid that submitting to government means disaster for Christianity or humankind. And those in another camp who are so afraid of the virus that they are behaving as if we, as Christians, have no authority over sickness and disease at all. The two camps have one thing in common: fear.

Do we, as Christians, really want to become known in this era as the people group, the subculture, the religion, that was afraid during a pandemic?

I don’t speak for anyone else, just me, in pondering these things. I’ve been thinking about the books of Daniel and Jeremiah for quite a while and will share more on Daniel and his amigos later because there is so much richness there. I’d highly recommend reading these books (not just the one verse we like to quote from Jeremiah or the one story we like to pull from Daniel – about the fire – but read the whole book).

Is it possible that government ‘restrictions’ around the world are actually genuine (imperfect, yes) attempts to protect us from a virus and reduce the number of us that die from it? Yes. Is it possible that restrictions from a worldly government are an opportunity to learn new things that God has in mind for us to learn? Yes. Is it possible that if we engage and submit to government (without compromising our walk with Jesus) that we will be given influence with the kings of this world (who do not yet know Him) that we’ve not experienced before in our generation? Yes.

I’d love to be one of those who seeks to be ‘in the council of the Lord’ to find the Lord’s word for today, as mentioned in Jeremiah, and Hebrews, not just one who rushes to believe the loudest Christian voices or the most-sent Youtube videos.

Photo cred: Aldino Hartan Putra on Unsplash