Unity in the church at THIS cost?
"I have even found myself thinking how my Christian faith and the need to exclusively meet a Christian man has hindered me and left me at times really lonely!How very sad that I have been thinking this way and I wonder whether if I wasn't a Christian then I may well have got married by now and had children (something I always wanted dearly). Sometimes it feels like there is something really wrong with the church. I feel so sad at the number of good Christian women who have remained single because of the lack of available men in the church. It is also really unhelpful when people judge or don't seem to understand how painful it can sometimes be."
posted by Captain Sensible at 3:32 AM
3 Comments:
My mind is plagued with similar thoughts (or maybe they are the same thoughts, expressed in a different way); that is, how can I be motivated to live the Christian life and be excited about being a Christian when it is such a lonely and sad life? Aren't we supposed to find some sort of joy in our life in spite of our suffering?
It doesn't necessarily change my mind about being a Christian but it changes how I FEEL by being a Christian.
And all this because we serve THE God of all creation, the God that commanded us to be fruitful and multiply, the God that desires Godly children, the God that holds marriage in such high esteem that it is used as an illustration of the love between the Lord and His people, the God that inspired a whole book about the joys of romantic love and included it in the Holy Bible, the God that created us as sexual beings to "cleave" to a spouse in a miracle of oneness?
Is it really possible, that of all the religious and atheist groupings in our society, Christian women are now most likely to be unmarried and barren?
Can we believe that there are Christian writers and speakers, that actually advise "advocating singleness" to young girls, so that they don't grow up with expectations of marriage and a family of their own that are likely to be unmet?
Or recommend living with other women and cats in a kind of pseudo-family unit, or even (thanks, Carolyn McCulley!) proposing that grown women of 40 become au pairs to families in the church so that they don't have to live on their own?
And all this is supposed to be "God's will"?
Does anyone actually believe that any more?
Could we get back to traditional Christian teaching please?
The "gift of singleness" was an embarrassing, flash-in-the-pan, theology.
It's over already.
Now we can return to really being "pro-marriage" and "pro-family" and start dealing with the problem of a) the lack of men in the church, and b) encouraging the men that are in the church to find a wife.
Simple as.
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