Book Thoughts: The Significance of Singleness

I just finished reading book #14 of 2020 - The Significance of Singleness by Christina S. Hitchcock - which means I’m pretty much on track for reading 2 books each month.

This book. So good!

I would like to encourage - if you are a pastor or church leader, please read this book.
If you volunteer with youth or young adults, please read this book.
If you are a single Christian of any age, please read this book.

I live in Canada, and in my context, growing up in the 90s with a constant intake of Disney films and pop music, romance seemed not only inevitable, but also the pinnacle of what being human is made for.
It probably doesn’t help that i seem to have a naturally romantic bent to my being and a penchant for storytelling. … I fell in love for the first time in kindergarten, and wrote my first novel in high school.

But I don’t think I’m unusual.
I think we are groomed from the day we’re born to believe the best stories are love stories.
And that the only truly fulfilling love, the one that will complete you and make you feel whole, is romantic love.
As we gain distance from the idyllic sunny, nuclear family stories that we told and believed in the 90s, romantic love has spread to encompass just sex.

Sexual expression is seen as a mark of being an adult.
We make fun of people who are virgins past their early 20s, assuming that there must be something wrong with them, or that they belong to some oppressive thought that they must be freed from to know what it’s truly like to be fully human. Or perhaps they’re immature or are hiding some dark secret? (There’s NO WAY they’re actually a virgin!)

In this social setting - where we view soul mates as our saviours, and sex as an integral part of the human experience - Christianity, instead of standing strong, also caved and began sharing the same story except with one caveat - you must be married, and be married to someone of the opposite sex, to experience this height of humanity. No wonder we have nothing authoritative to say in the face of LGBT or polyamorous relationships.

Christina steps into this space and corrects the church.
This is not the foundations of our belief.
Christianity was founded and is built around a perfect human man who lived into his 30s.
The most perfect human. Perfectly whole. Perfectly holy. The image of God humanity was created to be. God himself come all the way to meet us where we are.
And yet he never married, never had sex.

After this celibacy, and life long singleness, was seen as a completely valid way for Christ followers to live.
Not because there isn’t something beautiful or unique in marriage, but because all of our desires are designed to point us back to God. We’ve all experienced the realization that the thing we longed for, the thing we assumed would finally make us fully happy, doesn’t. Every raise comes with our gaze on the next one. Each purchase only lasts so long. And each romantic relationship eventually lets us down.

As Christians we believe that this is because the fulfilment of our desires is found solely in God, and this will happen fully and perfectly in the age to come.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is our proof.
How much hope this can give us!!
We don’t need to keep striving.
I don’t need to convince a man to choose me. And I don’t have to fight to keep his attention.
Why? Because there is more to life than this.
My identity.
My hope.
My provisions.
My security.
Comes first and foremost through God, who through Jesus, has proven that he is faithful, trustworthy, and will not let me down. He is with us always. Even when others abandon us, or die, or simply can’t understand - God is there closer than our very hearts.

Into this context someone like David Bennett (a celibate, gay Christian) can say things like, “Our sexuality is not the whole point. Rather our sexuality points to something greater. … Don’t make this life the whole point. If I don’t get a sexual partner for 40 years of my life, so what!”

Honestly, I’ve written all these words, but Ed Shaw sums it up way more succinctly, and better than I have.

He said,

“I know there are many today who think that it is a great tragedy to die a virgin. But I hope I will. Because I know that I will not have lost out on anything too significant. Because the Bible teaches me that I will have missed only the brief foretaste that sex is meant to be of the eternal reality of the perfect union between Christ and His church that I will one day experience forever (Revelation 21:1-5). Any fleeting pleasure I’ve given up in the meantime will be more than worth it then.”

I hope I can catch this vision so deeply, so fully. I want to live by this story, not simply because it’s true, but because it’s better.

Marriage is this one flesh union meant to metaphor the union of Christ and the church in the age to come.
Singleness is also a metaphor of the same thing - by living in that promise now. Trusting him completely to care for our needs.

Someone I follow states the Christian belief around sex as - faithfulness in marriage (one man, one woman, for one life in a covenant relationship). Chastity in singleness.

I daily aim for this standard - chastity as a single person, which has led me to be let down by friends who claimed to believe the same thing as me. And also leads to me being a very boring bachelorette party invite - no first kiss or ‘how I lost my virginity’ stories here!

Often the traditional, Biblical sex ethic is seen as harmful - what about loneliness? What about suicide?

And these are topics that Christians should be deeply, deeply concerned about and be actively involved in righting. But the way to do it is not by loosening our standard so we can join culture in elevating sex and romance, but rather by telling the better fuller story of Christ.

Culture tells us that loneliness and hopelessness is solved by finding “my person”.
So of course when we can’t find that person, or when that person leaves us, or when it just doesn’t work out, or they pass away, or let us down, we feel like our lives are purposeless or worthless.

Church! Stop sharing in this story!
Our story is out of this world better!
Whether we get all we want in this life, or have to sacrifice everything - our hope is in a coming age when, not only will death no longer hold any power, but all of our deepest desires and longings will be fulfilled perfectly - exactly as we need and hope they will - in our union with Christ.
Our life purpose - our hope - our happiness/joy - does not rest on our ability to achieve or maintain a romantic or sexual relationship.
What a relief!

Anyway, enough blathering by me.
All of this was to say, please read this book so you can begin to see the purpose and hope that single Christians are pointing to in the very way they live.
And after catching the meaning, the vision, the story, jump in and be the “homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields” that Jesus promises to those who have to give these very things up to follow him.
Be the family of God - interconnected to one another through our relationship with Christ.
Be the church.