Why Self-Discovery isn't Enough for Your Single Life

In Sunday's sermon I mentioned that the dominant narrative around the purpose of singleness is self-discovery. People think of singleness as a time to discover their sexuality, personality, and preferences. This in turn helps them to pick a partner they are compatible with, which in turn will help them to stay married. I also mentioned that I think this is inadequate for 3 reasons (but I only told you one of those reasons). So here are all three reasons I think the self-discovery narrative is inadequate.

[Just a quick note that the sermon itself makes clear that I do not believe the purpose of singleness is marriage-preparation, but this post engages that cultural idea directly, thus is concerned with that one aspect of singleness.]

First, the absolute worst way to prepare to spend the rest of your life confined in a small space with another sinner you have vowed never to leave is to spend a decade focusing on yourself. The exact opposite is true; the best way to prepare for marriage is to spend your life in an others-focused way, considering their wants, needs, and desires as more significant than your own. Self-discovery is a good thing, it's just a wholly inadequate way to prepare you for the kind of radically other-focused existence that marriage requires.

Second, I reject that knowing yourself translates to your ability to pick a healthy partner. The logic goes that when you know yourself you are able to pick someone who is "right" for you, but I don't think you can know another person well enough to make that kind of decision with any sort of accuracy. Knowing yourself may increase your odds of picking a healthy partner, but I maintain that marriage partner picking is fundamentally a crap-shoot. 

Finally, I reject that picking a mate with whom you are compatible will lead to a healthy marriage. I believe that compatibility is a myth that we tell ourselves to buttress our increasingly selfish notions that we will find someone who will not require us to change. So if we can find the "perfectly compatible" person then marriage will require nothing of us but to just be ourselves. Sound too good to be true? It is. 

Marriage requires you to change, it requires you to be radically other-focused, and it requires you to adjust to the fact that you picked the wrong person because eventually we are all the wrong person. The success of your marriage might be beyond your control if your spouse decides to leave, but so far as it depends on you, marriage succeeds to the degree that you spend your singleness learning commitment to difficult ideals, faithfulness in little things, self-sacrifice, and self-knowledge (to the degree that self-knowledge pushes you to change and grow). Self-discovery is a good thing, it just can't deliver everything it promises in our modern age of singleness.

Trusting God Through Grief

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

 The 3 wise men weren't there when Jesus was born. 

In my mind, there they are gifts in hand with the shepherds, and angels, and Mary and Joseph, and the animals. And of course that's how I picture it because that's literally every nativity scene that's ever been created. But the Bible records that they came 2 years after Jesus was born (Matthew 2:16). And when they visited Joseph and Mary and gave their gifts they went home another way because they were "warned in a dream not to return to Herod."

When Herod (who was the current king over the Jews) heard that there was a future king of the Jews born in Bethlehem he did what any king would do who is rational and completely a-moral. He killed every child 2 years old and under to make sure that no one would ever displace him or his sons from the throne.

I'm thinking about those families without baby boys. Which parents woke to the horror of losing their boy? Which families lost two sons in the same day? Who lived with lifelong guilt over having only baby girls, or a 3 year old boy? Who wondered,-although they knew they shouldn't even care-if their 2 year old daughter would be able to find a husband years from now?

And I'm thinking about God, who knew that sending his Son into the world would be not only costly for the Son and the Father, but costly for those families as well. The blessing that came out of Bethlehem certainly didn't feel like a blessing to those families, certainly not initially. Did the town of Bethlehem make this connection between the coming of Jesus and the genocide of their children (at the hand of Herod) later when Jesus began to minister? Did this make faith difficult for them?

Now two thousand years removed we can say, that is a sure tragedy but look what came out of it. Surely the salvation of people from every nation, the kingship of Jesus, the establishing of the church, was worth the cost. But oh what faith it takes to believe in the love of the Father when you are experiencing the stone of grief hung round your neck.

God often allows more than we think he should. But our faith rests in this promise: God's work ultimately does overcome the heinousness of sin, the sting of death, and the work of Satan in our world. The work of God in our lifetime may cause Satan to crack his whip in defiance. We may feel the sting of Satan, Sin, and Death most acutely in this world. But take heart, He has overcome the world.

"Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning."
Psalm 30:5