A Book, A Song, and Conquering My Spiritual Everest

Like many pivotal moments in my life, this one started with a book. When I was a young teenager, a book was released called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris. I never read it (hey look a book I haven’t read!), because I was skeptical of the idea behind the title. Why would I want to kiss dating goodbye if I had not even tried it yet? Nevertheless, this book and others like it became wildly popular among Christians my age at a time when we were laying the foundations of our concepts of dating and relationships. The ideas in that book and others like it wove themselves into the way Christians of my generation talked about and thought about dating, relationships, and marriage. This was true not only of the ideas we formed ourselves, but also in the way we were taught about these issues by our pastors, our youth leaders, and even our Christian schools.  And that is where my problem started

Rule #1: A guy who wears a fedora is going to be full of crap.
Fedoras = bad news. I wish I were joking, but I have experienced
this phenomenon on so many occasions it stopped being funny.

Dating, sex, modesty, and relationships were the topic of countless sermons, chapels, and camp revivals I attended. The content was pretty much always the same: Dating had one purpose - find a good Christian spouse and settle down ASAP. If you were a "good Christian" and followed God's plan, you would only ever be in one relationship and that would turn into marriage. You could - and should - meet your spouse without ever dating multiple people. Dating was setting yourself up for sin. The message was crystal clear and impossible to escape - if you live the "right way" and don't go looking for someone to date, the husband or wife of your dreams will fall in your lap, and you will be happily married with a kid on the way by age 25. This message was played over and over again, painting a picture of a life free of heartbreak and bad relationships. That may not be the message they meant to send, but it is the message I heard and the picture I internalized. I didn't really date in high school. I had no way of knowing how wrong that picture was. 

So this was the standard to which I held my life and against which my life - and my relationships – started falling horribly short almost immediately. The older I got, the worse I felt about being single. By the time I got to pharmacy school, there was a certain level of desperation to my life-view. Where was my godly husband? Where was my marriage? I'm almost 25, what did I do wrong? Did dating more than one guy in college totally derail my chances of ever finding happiness? Am I totally screwed now? I became angry with God, and my perpetual singleness became a roadblock in my spiritual journey. I felt betrayed by God, not realizing that those standards were put in place not by Him, but by well-meaning but misguided humans. This became my spiritual Mount Everest. I knew in my heart that somewhere along the way I had missed something important. So I began praying. I began thinking. And I began climbing.

You'll need to listen to this for the next paragraph to make

sense. God used this song to start a change in my heart.

God met me in my searching when I was driving to school one morning in November. A new song came on the radio: "6 foot 2" by Marie Miller. As I listened to the words of that song, God spoke to me about my relationship with relationships. How many times had I prayed a prayer just like that? How many times had I told God "not my will but yours" the turned around and asked for the exact timing and looks of the person I wanted to marry? As I cried in my car, I realized how tawdry those words sounded when said aloud. And I realized that the way my generation of Christians was taught about relationships was fundamentally flawed. We were taught that being a good Christian meant God would bless you with a godly spouse - it was part of the deal. We were taught to expect to receive a relationship as a direct result of having a good enough walk with God. But God said to me that day in the car, “I never promised those things. There is so much more to your walk with Me than this! I can give you so much more!”

As I look back now, I see so many opportunities that were lost by the people who taught us. Never once did anyone ever talk about relationships going wrong, unless you were dating someone who wasn't Christian enough, then anything that went wrong was obviously your own fault for dating a heathen. No youth pastor told us that sometimes relationships fall apart for no reason.  No chapel speaker told us that nice Christian girls and guys can break your heart just the same as any nonbeliver. Not once did a camp preacher talk about how to handle a painful breakup in a godly way.  It was never mentioned that maybe, just maybe, God's will for your life might not include a happy marriage. Anyone whose relationship didn't work out was clearly not following God's will.  A good relationship failing was definitely never part of God's plan.

Even today, the singles ministry at my church focuses quite often on these exact things, and we are in our 20s and 30s. The last two semester-long Wednesday night Bible studies have been on relationships, sex, and preparing for marriage. The next series is on relationships, too. It is rare that anyone speaks of the possibility of our lives not progressing to a married state. It's always "when," not "if" we get married. 

What if, instead of countless sermons on the “don’ts” – don’t wear this, don’t do that, don’t go to these places – we were taught more about the foundations of our faith? What if, instead of focusing on making us godly spouses, they spent more time teaching us to serve God regardless of our relationship status? I thank God that there were places where I was taught these things as a teenager, even if they were in the minority.  My discipleship group leader, Karen, was, and still is, instrumental in laying down the solid foundations of my faith that have withstood so much fear and doubt. She spent her time teaching us girls to become strong women of faith, a life-saving counterpoint to the many voices that put the emphasis on our relationships alone. My discipleship group deserves its own blog post. It was that important to the trajectory of my life and my faith.

Instead of reading superficial books about dating,
we studied C. S. Lewis, we dug deep into the book of James.
We asked hard questions and looked for answers in scripture.

In the car that November morning, I finally understood that I had been misled. That the standard that had been set for us, the “I kissed dating goodbye generation”, was not just unrealistic, but not truly biblical.  We see both good and bad marriages in Scripture. Marriage is often used as a metaphor in the Bible, but it is not spoken of as a promise. Christians are never promised a smooth transition from single to relationship to marriage. God promises us joy in Him, fulfillment in Him, redemption in Him. He does not promise an earthly wedding day.

I am not broken or a lost cause because I am 25 and single. I am not "off the path" because I dated guys and it didn't work out failed spectacularly. God's purpose for my life - for all our lives- is far greater than just placing us all in "good" relationships. Even though some of my dating adventures were probably not what God willed for me, He still used those people and those relationships to teach me, to strengthen my faith, and to show me His love. God has a plan for every one of His children. His plan is bigger than who I will or won't marry someday. And if my relationships don't work out, that's normal. That's ok. And having an ex (or five) does not make my faith inferior.

Sometimes you look back and wonder how on earth
you thought that would work. That's ok. Learning
what a bad relationship looks like from the within is
a very VERY important life lesson. 

Some lucky few will marry the first person they date and live happily ever after. Others will marry the first person they date and get divorced a few years later. Some will eventually find their person, some will not. There will always be break-ups, disastrous relationships, and ill-advised flings. We live in a fallen world - perfection is impossible. But there will always, always be God in the midst of those moments, whether we feel it or not.

With the weight of years of unrealistic expectations lifted off my shoulders and my soul, I find that the grudge I was holding against God for "keeping me single" is ebbing away.  And as He continues to pick away at all those well-intentioned but misleading teachings that are lodged in my heart, I can finally say that, for the first time in a long time, I am able to learn to trust God with all of my future. I will rejoice in the freedom I have found in Him. My prayer is that someone, somewhere, will read this and realize that their relationship status does not define their Christian walk. That God will use my story to repair a person's faith in Him. I pray that God will use my experience to speak truth into other people's lives.