Chapter 10: One Day at a Time
ONE DAY AT A TIME
A COUPLE of years ago I was talking to a group of students about the single life and remarked that I considered myself, as a widow, a thousand times better off than a woman who had never been married. A girl in the group challenged this statement. Why in the world did I think I was better off? Well, quite simply, I answered, because I thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Why? she wanted to know again. I admitted that this was purely a matter of opinion, and if in her opinion she was better off than I, far be it from me to attempt to change her mind.
Recently I met for the first time a woman who told me she is single by choice. I have met other women who had chances to marry men they did not want to marry but who would still have liked to marry the “right” one. The lady I met recently was the first to tell me she had chosen the single life.
To the rude questions often asked single ladies, one of my acquaintances answers that she is “single for a perfectly good reason that isn’t public property.”
One lady in her sixties still declares that she does not have what Paul calls the gift of single life. She has lived these sixty years without it, for God has assured her, she assures me, that He has a husband for her somewhere. She has only to wait for him to appear. She may be right that God has a husband for her. I think she’s wrong in saying she hasn’t the gift of single life. She has had it all her life. God may yet give her the gift of marriage, for many of His gifts may be given for only a part of a lifetime. I know of three Christians who had for a short time the gift of healing other people and then it was withdrawn. Why should He not give single life for most of a lifetime and then give marriage? Or may He not give marriage and then, sometimes early in life, widowhood?
The truth is that none of us knows the will of God for his life. I say for his life —for the promise is “as thou goest step by step I will open up the way before thee.” He gives us enough light for today, enough strength for one day at a time, enough manna, our “daily” bread. And the life of faith is a journey from Point A to Point B, from Point B to Point C, as the people of Israel “set out and encamped in Oboth. And they set out from Oboth and encamped at Iyeabarim, in the wilderness. . . . From there they set out and encamped on the other side of the Arnon . . . and from there they continued to Beer . . . and from the wilderness they went on to Mattanah, and from Mattanah to Nahaliel, and from Nahaliel to Bamoth, and from Bamot to the valley lying in the region of Moab.”
So far as we know, nothing happened in these places. Oboth, Iyeabarim, Arnon, Beer, Mattanah, Nahaliel, Bamoth mean nothing to us. That immense crowd just kept moving. They traveled and they stopped and they made camp and packed up again and traveled some more and made another camp. They complained. There were so many complaints that even Moses, who was a very meek man, could hardly stand the sight of these whom God had called him to lead. But all the time God was with them, leading them, protecting them, hearing their cries, goading and guiding them, knowing where they were going and what His purposes were for them and He never left them.
It is not difficult when you read the whole story of God’s deliverance of Israel to see how each separate incident fits into a pattern for good. We have perspective that those miserable wanderers didn’t have. But it should help us to trust their God. The stages of their journey, dull and eventless as most of them were, were each a necessary part of the movement toward the fulfillment of the promise.
Single life may be only a stage of a life’s journey, but even a stage is a gift. God may replace it with another gift, but the receiver accepts His gifts with thanksgiving. This gift for this day. The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived —not always looked forward to as though the “real” living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.