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September 23, 2006
Lauren W. on Singleness. This post goes out to my single friends that I have failed in talking to much lately. Call me, friends. I miss you.
This, I think, is what happens next. First all your friends get married, and then they all start having babies. Hannah and three friends from college, too. I will become a regular at Baby Gap.
Sometimes, when I am praying with Hannah, I look down and catch the glint of her wedding band, and get consumed by jealousy. When this happens, I take a shower or go for a walk and try to think, calmly, about what exactly I'm jealous of. The obvious things: sex, and waking up next to someone every morning and, on the days that I forget that sometimes married people are lonely too, I feel jealous of the companionship, of the togetherness, of the intimacy. And I am jealous because, in getting married, and then again in having kids, my friends become adults, while I am stuck living like a college student, going on occasional dates to random New York restaurants, and writing a dissertation that, eventually, three people might read.
But I look at Hannah and I am also jealous because I believe that marriage is a school of sanctification. Sanctification doesn't require an affair--there is plenty of sanctification in the faithful, ordinary daily grind of lots of marriages, of Randi's, and Jeff and Amy's. But I have seen clearly the holy work done in Hannah and Jim's home this year. Being stuck with each other, being forced to stumble through her treachery and his heartbreak, has made them better spouses and better Christians. I have watched their marriage and I have seen that God has been who He said He would be. "He will be like a refinder's fire or a launderer's soap. He wil sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver." He has used their marriage as soap.
I praise God for his soapiness, and then I get so jealous that I think I might literally start to see green. It is the old question, the pathetic question: Why them, Lord? Why them and not me?
....Later,...I get it. I get that Hannah's pregnancy is my own school of sanctification. God is sanctifying Jom and Hannarh through marriage and parenthood, but He is not just blessing them and leaving me out in the unblessed cold. He is using my ridiculous jealousy and my endless self-pity to sanctify me.
I will forget that, of course, at Hannah's baby shower. Sitting through that baby shower, I will forget about the sanctification and only remember the pain. But then I will come home, and I will pray, and I will remember. I will remember that God does not cause our suffering, but He uses it. I will remember that He is using that baby shower to somehow form me into the person He wants me to be.
Winner, Lauren. Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002. Pp. 278-81.
| By The Newest Worker | 05:27 PM
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