Chapter 11: Trust for Separation
TRUST FOR SEPARATION
BUT you are about to be married. For you surely the “real living” seems to be around the corner, and it is natural and right that you should anticipate that wonderful day which will begin a whole new kind of life for you. Yet you, too, as much as a single woman who had no visible prospects, have to live the life of faith. You understand the calling of your sexuality, to be a woman in fellowship with all other women and all men. You are not a woman only in relation to Walt. If this were so, of course, single women would be deprived of the meaning of their sexuality. Their happiness and fulfillment would lie in sublimation to the point of denial of that which distinguishes them from men. This is not the truth of Scripture. Scripture teaches that the distinctions established by creation are each a part of the Design, each necessary and irreplaceable. I know no better word than called. It is an astounding thing to know ourselves individually called. A call comes to us as women, but it comes to us as individual women also, and it is as individual women that we must answer.
There have been long weeks of separation from Walt when you did things you wanted achingly for him to share. His graduation came on a day when it was impossible for you to be present and you had to miss it. His ordination to the ministry took place while you were in England. He began his preaching without you, and those experiences can never be recovered or relived.
I remember how it was. Your father (not my fiancé yet) made the three-week voyage by sea from San Pedro, California, to Ecuador, stopping at fascinating ports along the way from which he sent me fascinating letters. He began his study of Spanish in Quito without me. He made his first trip to the jungle where he was later to work. He had his first opportunity to do medical work, his first crack at an unwritten language —all of these were things I myself longed to do, and longed desperately to do with him. “Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living,” he wrote to me, and those words have helped me very often since. We accept and thank God for what is given, not allowing the not-given to spoil it.
This is the call. This is the order of our lives. There is nothing haphazard about them. We can commit them to God, and accept them from Him. This is part of what Walt meant by “Ma’am, I’m a Calvinist!”