Chapter 9: Single Life —a Gift
SINGLE LIFE —A GIFT
WHAT we are is a gift, and, like other gifts, chosen by the Giver alone. We are not presented with an array of options: What would you like to be? How tall? What color? What temperament would you prefer? Which parents would you choose as forebears?
So you are a woman, chosen from the foundation of the world, given to parents who had asked for a son (and only God knows how often and how profoundly I have thanked Him that that ignorant prayer was denied). And before you were twenty you had given your heart to the man who is to be your husband, so you have not really known what it is to be a single woman. You have not been asked to struggle with that question. Relatively few women have to, for most women marry. And of those who marry, 90 percent do so before the age of twenty-one, which means that they have not known what it is to be a single woman in the world. They have probably lived with and been provided for by their parents most of their lives. Many have been in college until the time of their marriage, as you will have been, and hence have had their time mapped out for them. No major decisions will ever have been entirely up to them.
I have told you a little of my own perplexity about this issue when I was a college student, for I believed God was calling me to be a missionary and quite possibly a single one. I wanted to be a missionary, but I did not want to be a single one. It seemed that I was to go to Africa, and the only man I had any interest in was on his way to South America, the one place I had been quite certain I would never go.
There came a day, only a week before I graduated, when that man and I had a talk about marriage and the directions in which God seemed to be leading us, and I remember his telling me then that St. Paul regarded single life as a gift. Well, I thought wryly, St. Paul did have some bizarre ideas and was certainly not to be taken too seriously in his view on marriage. What did he know about marriage? He was single because he liked being single and I was suspicious of a man like that. (It has since occurred to me that we have no evidence that Paul had never been married.)
But having now spent more than forty-one years single, I have learned that it is indeed a gift. Not one I would choose. Not one many women would choose. But we do not choose gifts, remember? We are given them by a divine Giver who knows the end from the beginning, and wants above all else to give us the gift of Himself. It is within the sphere of the circumstances He chooses for us —single, married, widowed —that we receive Him. It is there and nowhere else that He makes Himself known to us. It is there we are allowed to serve Him.
In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul says it is best for each man to have his own wife and for each woman to have her own husband, “because of the temptation to immorality.” Then he says almost immediately, “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”
For the next five years after my graduation, until I married him, that young man and I waited on God, prayed, searched the Scriptures, corresponded, and, on very widely spaced occasions, were able to talk about these matters. Was Paul setting the single life above marriage? It had certainly seemed so. He spoke of the weakness which could not resist temptation and of the hindrances to service for God which marriage would inevitably bring. He reminded the Corinthians of the “impending distress” which would make it unwise for a person to seek to change his marital status in any way. He said that the man who marries his betrothed does well, but the man who refrains from marriage does better. A widow, in Paul’s judgment, is happier if she does not remarry, and he thought that he had the Spirit of God in this.
No wonder we were confused, and no wonder that a man of your father’s determination should ponder long and earnestly the apparent contradictions in this hard chapter. He longed for the “better” and “happier” way. He was determined to prove God’s strength and grace sufficient to overcome the ordinary weakness of a man’s flesh. He knew his own great attraction for women. He was determined also to serve the Lord without entanglements. But the time came when marriage was for him a clear command, and he knew then that it was a gift, given by the same Giver who gives to some the special gift of being single. “Let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him,” Paul wrote.
To a young man who was vacillating on the question of marriage Martin Luther wrote:
“Chastity is not in our power, as little as are God’s other wonders and graces. But we are all made for marriage as our bodies show and as the Scriptures state in Genesis 1. ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.’
“I fancy that human fear and timidity stand in your way. It is said that it takes a bold man to venture to take a wife. What you need above all else then, is to be encouraged, admonished, urged, incited, and made bold. Why should you delay, my dear and reverend sir, and continue to weigh the matter in your mind? It must, it should, and will happen in any case. Stop thinking about it and go to it right merrily. Your body demands it, God wills it, and drives you to it. There is nothing that you can do about it . . . It is best to comply with all our senses as soon as possible and give ourselves to God’s Word and work in whatever He wishes us to do.
“Let us not try to fly higher and be better than Abraham, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul and all the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, as well as many holy martyrs and bishops, all of whom knew that they were created by God as men, were not ashamed to be and be thought men, conducted themselves accordingly, and did not remain alone. Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being a man or being thought a man, or else he thinks that he can make himself better than God made him.”[4]