As I've mentioned before here at WHC being a single adult in the church can be tough. The most obvious reason for that is of course, the loneliness. I don't mean a "I have nothing to do this Friday night" lonely...its not a day to day lonely...Its like your life feels like coming home to an empty house. Which sounds REALLY depressing. I've got plenty of friends and family. And they are great at keeping me company but I lack that teammate we all crave. A witness to my life...
I'm going to stop all that before we all turn on our favorite Dashboard song and sit in the dark crying into a pillow. Loneliness is not what I wanted to write about today. Loneliness and being single is obvious. Thus boring.
The thing that has been burning through my brain today and for quite sometime now is how being a single adult in the church forces upon you a perpetual, and (in my case) unwanted adolescence.
The church is all about progression. Its one of its fundamental teachings and the reason why we are here on this Earth in the first place. We should always be moving forward, learning, growing. But I (as far as my point is concerned) am stalled. In the eternal progression of things...I am a teenager. And have you ever met a teenager? Or been one? It kinda sucks.
My point is most easily illustrated by comparing myself to my married peers. Lets start with the most petty things and work our way into the more serious ones.
FHE is a perfect example. Hey married readers, when was the last time you felt obligated on a Monday night to go and play human foosball in a church gym with similarly situated adults? Never? Maybe in college? I did a few weeks ago. And I really feel too old for it. Is it ok that I'm over activities like this? I don't want to get in a water balloon fight with a group of grown men and women. My married peers don't have to. Why do I?
Then there's the stuff. When you get married people give you a lot of nice stuff. Its like they're saying "You're getting married, which means you're growing up, which means you need grown up stuff." And you get nice things. You go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and register for exactly the stuff you want and people buy it for you. I can't afford that stuff by myself and I can't think of an excuse that would make people buy it for me...so here I am at 25 living like a college student still. I'm the same age as some of my married friends but yet not grown up enough to have nice stuff. To be fair, I have more money now than I did in college but because of my living situation (I share a condo with 4 single girls) I don't have the room to buy the nice things that my adult self wants to have. Told you I was going to get petty.
But the most glaring way I'm stuck in this adolescence is that most adult of adult activities is off limits to me. I won't get explicit for the sake of the sensitive souls out there (and because I recently learned that my youngest sister follows me. Hey Mary!) but literally in this way I'm asked to live the same exact way that was laid out for me as a 14 year old in the For Strength of Youth Pamphlet. I remember a seminary teacher pointing out the oddity of the practice of being a nun or a monk in the Catholic church. How God created us so that we could be together and have families. And what a perversion of His plan celibacy was. But here I sit as abstinate as Fraulein Maria (wow I didn't even realize it but that metaphor really works for me...I spend my day trying to reign in kids who don't respect me and I'm in close contact with attractive men with status and weath who are chasing an un-catchable woman).
Anyway, my point is I would give the whole contents of a Bed Bath and Beyond to not be excluded from that part of God's plan for me. (This of course includes the chance to be a mother naturally). I don't think God wants us to miss out on these important human experiences. So what's going on?
Maybe this is my (generation's) "pioneer trial". I don't have to walk across frozen Middle America and bury children in shallow, frozen, unmarked graves along the way but my faith is being tested by how well I can endure the feeling that I will never get to grow up, move forward, or progress.
Really though, at the end of the day, being single is a pretty cushy trial. Who wants to ski Park City with me on Saturday?
After some hard work the "hydra in a bad floral print" look is achieved.
Have a good week everyone!