What Advent Waiting Means for Singles by B. DeWitt
Article on Christianity Today (I have some thoughts below these excerpts):
(Link): What Advent Waiting Means for Singles by B. DeWitt
Excerpts:
Scripture is filled with stories of people who waited. Hannah waited for an unspecified number of years before having her son Samuel.
The Israelites waited 70 years in exile before being allowed to return to their homeland. The Jewish people waited hundreds of years for the promised Messiah.
…Some waiting, however, is indefinite.
In my own life, indefinite waiting has come in the form of singleness.
For years I’ve prayed to meet a godly man, not only because I desire the kind of love and companionship that marriage brings, but also because I’ve seen how good marriages can make each spouse better able to love, serve, and glorify God.
My single years have been a period of waiting without a clear end point, without any promise of a “yes” or even a definitive “no.”
At times, I’m filled with hope for the kind of man God may bring into my life and also for what God can do in and through my singleness, but there’s also a desperation mixed in with my hope that I wish I could be rid of.
In the midst of my relational uncertainty, I have read and reread the biblical story of Hannah…
…Stories like Mary’s and Hannah’s have known outcomes, but what happens to us—and to our faith—when ours do not?
When we ask and ask of the Lord, and seemingly receive silence in reply? Hannah’s statement, “Because I asked the Lord for him,” is difficult to read at times, when our hopes feel unfulfilled.
It’s here in the undefined waiting and wandering that Advent challenges us the most. This season reminds us that God has not promised us every little or big desire of our heart—instead, he promised us himself.
…However, we don’t wait knowing that everything will turn out the way we want it to on this earth, because God does not promise us healing, houses, or husbands. Advent is a painful and necessary reminder that in ways both big and small, all is not yet right in our world.
…Advent challenges us to live in this tension between hope and waiting, brokenness and healing, all the while trusting that God is not withholding gifts from us out of cruelty but out of a love we may not be able to understand on this side of heaven.
—(end article excerpts)—
Regarding this quote:
For years I’ve prayed to meet a godly man, not only because I desire the kind of love and companionship that marriage brings, but also because I’ve seen how good marriages can make each spouse better able to love, serve, and glorify God.
—(end excerpt)–
Rather than just “praying to meet a godly man,” why doesn’t the author use her own abilities to make marriage come to pass? Why doesn’t she try meeting single men in bars, or try dating sites, and so on?
And why does the man she marries have to be “godly” (as if to say “Christian”)? As I’ve pointed out many times on this blog, and even as Christianity Today has published in previous articles, the (Link): “dating scene is stacked against single, Christian women.”
That is, there is a gender imbalance: there are far more marrying age Christian women then there are men.
If you are a religious woman who wants to marry, you will have to stop abiding by the ‘Equally Yoked’ view, where you believe you can only marry another Christian. You will have to at least consider marrying a Non-Christian man if you want to get married.
Check out this link for more:
Related on This Blog:
(Link): I’m a Christian Married to an Atheist — Here’s How We Make It Work by S. Allen
(Link): Dear Abby: Can an atheist and a devout Christian make it work?
(Link): This Bride Found Love and Got Married At Age 93
(Link): 80 Year Old Bride Marries for First Time in Nursing Home
(Link): There is No Such Thing as a Gift of Singleness or Gift of Celibacy or A Calling To Either One
(Link): She Married a Christian Psychopath She Met Via a Dating Site
(Link): The Reason Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others by D. Brennan
