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Being Content
by Leigh DeVore
Are you ever going to get married?
Don’t you want to have a family? Are you too picky? What’s wrong with you?” These are just a few of the many questions that single men and women are frequently asked.
Having some of the same questions themselves—but with no answers—Christian singles may wonder if God is still in the business of bringing people together in marriage. If that describes you, then be encouraged—God is a matchmaker. He has a purpose for all single people and works above and beyond anything we could ever imagine—even when it comes to finding love.
The first hurdle that needs to be jumped—and cleared big-time—is the myth that singles are less valuable to God than married people. Singleness and marriage both should be viewed as seasons of life, tools God uses to build His character in each person.
One stage of life is not better than the other. Marriage is not attainable for only the exceptional, the well-qualified or the thoroughly-content-in-Jesus. Whether a person is single or married is not a description of his or her only identity.
Steve Prokopchak, a counselor for 20 years, believes it’s imperative that singles realize they are important to God.
“The great thing about singleness is, God has a plan for you. ... God has a plan in marriage; that’s wonderful. But still, before marriage, God has an individual plan for you and a mission for you.”
Michael Smalley, a family and marriage counselor and co-author with wife Amy of More Than a Match, says singles are “spectacular.”
“One of the biggest traps that a single will fall into,” Smalley says, “is that they will devalue themselves as a single, especially as a Christian, because [they think], I’m supposed to be married.
“But my biggest encouragement to singles is, if you can’t make a list of the top 10 things of why being single is incredible, then you probably will have a hard time being married. Because if you can’t be happy being single, you’ll never be happy being married.”
Smalley adds: “I think being single gives you some really unique opportunities to love people and to care for people and to minister and for the world to not be about you, and you can really plug into people and serve them a lot easier than a married person can.”
That’s not to imply that singles shouldn’t want to get married. They can and should pursue a mate.
Prokopchak encourages singles to wait “the right way.” That is: “Don’t get desperate. Get deliberate before the Lord.”
To be “deliberate,” he says, is to pursue wholeness and maturity in Christ. When two people come together who each have been pursuing God wholeheartedly, Prokopchak says, the result is a “Christ-centered relationship that is going to be ‘other-centered,’ not self-centered.”
In practice, he says, “wholeness and maturity” can range from learning how to make a bed to getting out of debt. “Pursuing maturity means it’s not all about ‘me,’” he explains. “Marriage is never about ‘me.’ Marriage is always about the other person.”
It’s also important, he says, to do the work of the kingdom while praying and waiting for God to bring a mate. He says that often when a person is pursuing God in the mission He has given him or her, a mate shows up.
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