Refusing to be 'Singled' Out

How Should the Church Treat Singles?

“Another one bites the dust” is the relationship theme song I resonate with lately. I can barely go a month without one of my friends telling me they are dating or engaged. I have been in—or behind the scenes of—quite a few weddings in the last year or two. This is not the first round of this life-season for me. It happened a couple of years after high school, again after my higher education terms, and now that many friends are approaching their late twenties and thirties. There have been quite a few seasons of babies among my friends, too. It is a constant ebb and flow.

None of this is surprising—it is the rhythm of life. It feels new and exciting and surreal when it happens to you or your closest friends, but it sounds pretty normal to everyone else. What might sound abnormal to some is that I am pleased for my friends, but I don’t want to be in their shoes. Oh, I have twinges of unfulfilled hopes when I watch the father-daughter dance at weddings. I am human, I want someone to go through life with—to care about and to be vulnerable with. Sappy songs make me sad every now and then. Sometimes I feel at loose ends, like I should have someone to share something with, but they aren’t there. The longing to be loved is natural, put in our hearts by Divine Love himself.

More often than not, however, I am thankful to be single. Singleness is not synonymous with loneliness. This truth often seems to evade people—especially church people. They ask some strange questions at times, and snarky me replies in my head (well-taught-me answers with much more tact). The one I hear most often rings hollow to me, “About the time I became content with my singleness, I met my spouse.” Strange, I think to myself, I’ve been contentedly, cheerfully, single for many years and ‘Poof!’ I have no husband. Thanks for sharing without caring to enquire whether or not I enjoy being single. Every now and then someone will tell me (none-too-subtly) they would like me to meet their son, though no one has ever followed through on helping such a meeting to take place. Now, I’m not opposed to getting married, it simply isn’t my calling at this point—I am quite satisfied with all that I have and am called to right now.

Words upon words have been written about relationships—both the dating kind and all others (as if those are the only two categories there are). I have heard plenty of married people tell me they wished they had enjoyed their single years while they had them. Many a single friend has told me of their ache to be married. That pain is real, I understand. Usually, I choose not to add my voice to those conversations, as they have been had many times already by people who are wiser than I am.

Rather, I choose to opine about feeling like someone who grew a third head on the spot, or like the Invisible Man at various church gatherings. How should the church treat singles? For starters, it would help not to be pitied or unseen. Singleness isn’t a disease. It would also be great if people wouldn’t ask all those frustrating questions—”Have you tried online dating?”—as if I were dying to get married, or am unaware of how to meet people of the opposite sex. If you are so concerned, invite a few unmarried men and women over for dinner so they can spend time together comfortably. It would be a relief not to be “singled” out—either made an outcast or lumped into groups of other single people. What I am trying to say is that it would be helpful if singles were treated simply as human beings, not as ‘singles’. We are persons, not slices of Kraft cheese.

Churches that don’t have a singles’ group receive my mental applause. The ones that have small groups of mixed ages are hailed with gratitude. How will I ever learn what marriage is if I don’t see it lived out in front of me (in others besides my parents)? Peer groups often feel like the blind leading the blind. I need folks who are older and wiser than I am speaking into my life, telling me their stories, sharing their wisdom and what God is teaching them through Scripture. I have friends in their forties, fifties, and sixties with whom I love spending a long evening—to hear and to share about life and Godliness. I probably need more of these friends. These are the friends who share their homes, their meals, their thoughts on literature and society—the friends who open the Word of God to me.

We are all human beings first. Yes, we are male or female. Married or unmarried. Old or young. Gifted in this or gifted in that. Dichotomies aside, however, we are all in need of Love, of Beauty, of being made Holy as God is Holy. We all need Truth to anchor our lives. We need our family and friends. We need to give and to receive—graciously, humbly. We need stillness and the sounds of life. We need time alone and time in fellowship. We all need Jesus.

Why focus on the things that divide us? Perhaps that is the reason I don’t like being labelled “single”—or “female” or “white” or whatever other label people try to stick on each other. It is not an us-against-them sort of life. Life that truly is life is lived together—and that is much harder than separating off into our little factions or comfortable autonomy, isn’t it?

Being Italian for a Day

Today I stepped back in time and took life at a slower pace. For nearly seven hours I was given the gift of being Italian. 

It all began about a year ago when our (then) new accountant kept telling those of us in the office about "tomato day". She and her husband would go to the fields and pick bushels of tomatoes. They would save them for a week to make sure they were really ripe. Then began the process of turning those tomatoes into a year's worth of pasta sauce. Many a time I have sampled minestrone, Italian vegetable soup, and so forth imbued in the goodness of this homemade sauce. Today I was given the opportunity to join in the labour of the fruits.

Three of us from the village arrived at Sue and Blake's house around nine in the morning. We petted the dog, washed our hands, met some family, and jumped in to the fray. Soon we were slicing onions in great big quarter chunks and learning how to peel garlic by shaking it inside two metal bowls (this actually works, you should try it). I also encountered a wooden spoon longer than my leg, which is impressive, because my legs are the longest part of me. When all was said, sliced, and done, we had four bushels of tomatoes, six onions, two bulbs of garlic, and two large containers of basil simmering over the camp stove in a collective eighty quarts. If you have never seen a twenty quart pot, you may not realise how massive it is compared to whatever normal persons use for cooking. However, the twenty quart pot was significantly dwarfed by the sixty quart pot and the spoon the size of Reepicheep's coracle paddle. Perhaps a photo will help illustrate my point:

See, doesn't the twenty quart pot look like your everyday sort of soup pot? Unless you normally feed an army, however, that pot was by no means everyday-ish. 

We stirred and squashed tomatoes for a few hours. We ate lunch. We petted Verona some more. Finally, the tomatoes began to boil into a rich red, aromatic fervour. We washed our hands, set up the press, gathered pots and buckets, and formed an assembly-line. Blake said "go!" and we began. Amanda poured the boiling hot tomato mixture into the wide funnel, I pressed it down with the plunger, and Sue cleared the skins and debris as they filled the flat "catcher". Those skins and onions and basil leaves went back into the press's funnel—we wanted all that flavour! Then they were removed to the rubbish. Various splatterings and eruptions left us with orangey splotches on our arms, feet, jeans, and shirts. Blake kept bringing pots and pans to catch the juices and thick sauce. We filled four different containers with that crimson, delicious-smelling sauce. Then back into those huge pots it went for an hour to boil out any bacteria. 

We stirred continuously to prevent burning the sauce. We set up the table with jar after jar—over sixty of them. Blake boiled the lids to ensure a good seal. Sue took soundings with the thermometer—we had to hit 180º. We let the sauce "percolate" there for about half an hour. Out came the silver funnel for filling small mouth jars. Out came ladles and glass measuring cups with pour spouts. Next came the empty boxes to put the finished jars in for safe-keeping. Over came the neighbour girl to help wipe around the jar tops to make sure they sealed well. All was set... Then Blake said, "Go!" and we were in full swing. Clear jar after clear jar was filled with hot, pungent, tomato sauce. Red jar after red jar was passed to me to put in the empty boxes. In a matter of minutes sixty-two empty jars were full and sitting in their cardboard casings on the counter.

The dishes were washed and drip-drying; the delightful "pop!" of the seals was beginning; and four tired persons were grinning at the success of the day. We had made legitimate Sicilian tomato sauce with a recipe and process passed down from Blake's grandparents. We had been swashed in hot red juices and remained standing. We had picked up nearly all the parts and pieces... And it wasn't even four o'clock yet.

It felt good to stir hot sauce on a cool Autumn day. It was rewarding to slow down and make the year's supply of sauce, rather than buying that processed stuff from the grocery. I was reminded of all those times growing up when my mother, sisters, and I cut, cooked, mashed,  pressed, and strained apples for applesauce. I remember crisp days, sweet smells, and very tired arms from hand cranking that machine. But the satisfaction at the end of the day in making one's own food with one's own produce and labours was just the same. There is something to be said for making things rather than buying them.

There is a sweet satisfaction a a job well-done. There is camaraderie, fellowship, and working together in the process. You get to know stories you might never have heard were you not using an oar to paddle red sauce over open flames. You learn more about your friends and family, your skills and others', by working together. And you have to take life slowly when you're watching a sixty quart pot of tomatoes boiling. I'm glad I was allowed to be Italian for the day.

~ Johanna

If God is with us, why are we lonely?

"Our two little granddaughters have a sense of community which many adults have lost; people have developed less a sense of community than a loneliness which they attempt to assuage by being with other people constantly, and on a superficial level only... The loneliness, the namelessness of cocktail-party relationships surround us. We meet, but even when we kiss we do not touch. We avoid the responsibility of community."   

       ~ Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season
(pg 182, emphasis mine)

There is a steady song of rain on the eaves, the dimpling of ever-widening puddles in the yard by so many hundreds of thousands of droplets. For me, the grey skies and the heavy rain are a comfort, a friend inviting me to listen to their story, a warm mug of tea in hand. For many, though, the slashing rain and slate-coloured sky are dull and dreary. The dark of night is not a quieting friend, a place to be still and ponder, but an unwelcome enemy: loneliness. 

Loneliness and Christmas go hand-in-hand in our confused culture. Stress, blow-ups, and annual arguments are many persons' only Christmas traditions. If you are honest, you probably find loneliness and stress normal rather than shocking. Our lives do not match up to "Christmas: Hollywood style." When 26 December rolls around, we still live in a draughty house, the scroll-work on the bannister still comes off in our hand, and we are still working at the Bailey Building and Loan Company rather than travelling to Tahiti or going to college. 

Perhaps It's A Wonderful Life, more than any other Christmas film, shows what does make 26 December different, in spite of life circumstances remaining the same: community. George Bailey is given a new perspective to see that the people in his life love him, are willing to give their money --and still more, their prayers-- for him because he is part of their community. George has given his time, his own money, his hopes, his dreams, his whole life to the people of Bedford Falls. At his hour of need his neighbours do not leave him high and dry, they give out of their meagre store. Not only is his community built of those neighbours, there is also a heavenly community that he is part of, too. 

Though 'community' is a buzzword, particularly in churches, our culture knows little of it. That is why loneliness is more familiar to us than community. That is why we can sit at a long table of friends and feel completely isolated. Community is not 'being with other people constantly' - it is being with other people. It is being silent with them or crying with them when loss comes. It is walking with them through the burned out rubble of their home, or the shattered pieces of their marriage. It is feeling awkward and useless when you do not know what to say about a friend's difficult situation, but hugging them anyway. It is making the most of the time you have with a friend who is moving away, seeking to sweeten the loss before it comes. It is giving the shirt off your back, the food out of your fridge, the money out of your bank account to serve another. It is opening your home for dinner, conversation, laughter, hugs, and tears. It is reading together. It is sitting on the floor, huddled by the heater in the arctic cold of winter, just talking. It is receiving help and encouragement whilst climbing a mountain, and turning around to give your hand to that same friend when the rocks at the top are too hard to climb alone. 

That is community, is it not? Not letting someone climb alone. It is instead walking alongside others, being encouraged by those ahead to come "Further up, and further in." It is repeating that cry to your companions, and to those on the path behind you. Community is being responsible for one another - even when it means paying someone else's debt, or bearing their sorrow, or sharing their sweaty, infected smell. And it means receiving love, healing, help, and grace, too. It goes back and forth, constantly.

At the time of year when we remember that Jesus Himself left the community of Heaven to wear our smudge and share our smell, how can we feel alone? Yet we often do. 'The-day-after-Christmas' of our whole life feels devoid of real community, we do not even know where to look for such a thing. All we see is a black gulf of loneliness that never seems to change, no matter how many parties we attend, or evenings a week that we are busy. I speak as one who cannot give easy answers to loneliness. I spent many years as a child and young adult without close friends. I found myself feeling alone at a crowded table recently. But those are moments I have also found that the LORD has not left me. He whispers, sometimes shouts, to me in those moments that I am loved with an everlasting love. And I feel spoiled... Because I often find myself laughing until I cry over games with my adopted 'roommates'. Or laughing with my work friends and neighbours at a gingerbread shack that will not stay together, in spite of much 'gluing' with icing. I find myself blinking back tears of humility at how much I am loved and included by so many others.

You are not alone.

God is with us, Himself...and as He is revealed in His saints. Blesséd, blesséd, blesséd be He!

~ Johanna