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English to Chinese: Talk Down General field: Social Sciences Detailed field: Religion
Source text - English Talk Down
Ross Clark
Preparing for singleness when
you'd much rather
be preparing for marriage
When an aeroplane pilot is stricken and a passenger with little or no flying experience has to take the controls and be 'talked down' by those in the control tower, the experience is terrifying for all concerned.
Talk down' is symbolic of every situation in which we have no choice but to do what everything in us would rather not do. It is a good picture of what is involved in coming to terms with being single when you would much rather be married. One's expectations of life and God must be 'talked down', if one is to accept the single life.
Go to any Christian bookshop and you will find a mass of books on the big issue, the life-changing decision of getting married, and how you should prepare for it. But books on the single life are much harder to come by.
For many, the process of coming to terms with being single is ferociously difficult, yet there is little help to be found in the Church. Pastors spend much time helping faltering marriages. Helping a faltering single is a lesser priority. Why? Shouldn't we be thinking of how we prepare some people for the single life, especially when their own natural inclinations lie in other directions?
Not every Christian single makes it - too many of the older singles drop out of our churches, and/or marry unbelievers. We need to ask what the churches can do to help Christian singles, because the problem of unreasonable and unrealised expectations which many singles struggle with has its roots in the churches' own teaching.
The Glittering Prize
What messages are we giving our teenagers and singles?
Gather a group of fourteen year-olds from any church scene and make them our reference group. Put them in one place, and the conversation will eventually turn to relationships and romance. Given the age, immaturity, and emotional state of the people concerned, that is hardly surprising. But what's a youth leader to do?
The Biblical standard - no sex outside of marriage - is absolutely clear, and youth leaders work hard to teach it. Generally, they will say something like, "trust God, and he will have his best for you. Save yourself for marriage, it's your loss if you don't. God blesses those who trust him." Or, "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart".1 Somewhat out of context, Jer 29:11 will get a look-in.
Dating, at any age, is often described as "not really God's will. Instead, trust him to bring you his choice for you." Or - and without any Biblical justification - "God already has someone for you, if you just trust in him". A variant on this is, "Yield your rights and God will have just the right person for you".
When the issue of sexuality is confronted, dire warnings are given to anyone who would threaten to cross the line, generally raising the obvious threats of STDs and pregnancy. Later on, the concern shifts to Christians who 'live in sin', and all sorts of horror stories will be trotted out about what happens to the Christians who do so.
And so a very powerful expectation is created concerning marriage: it is made to appear the 'glittering prize', God's blessing for doing the right thing, particularly in facing off sexual temptation. The teaching that obedience will inevitably be accompanied by the appropriate blessing - generally, a good marriage, family and status amongst the people of God - further cements this judgment. That this becomes part of the "success fantasy" foisted on people (the term is Tony Campolo's) is not even realised.
The issue of status is an important one. A wedding band may not be a ring of power, la J.R.R. Tolkien, but it certainly has status or mana, as most churches' attitudes to most singles will show. Indeed, how often do we see single people in the leadership of our churches? And what sort of message does that transmit?
Worse is the attitude that singles are oddball, fuelled by the unpleasant fact that 'needy' people are much more likely to be, and remain, single. Faced with a reputation like that, who wants to be single and lonely for the rest of their days? Especially if at that time one is facing the usual adolescent uncertainties about life and whether "I'm lovable enough" - the syndrome so neatly illustrated in the film Muriel's Wedding.
Once teenagers hit their twenties, and some do succeed in finding life-partners, there is a subtle shift in the emphases of the teaching and counselling. Instead of "God will have someone for you", it becomes, "you may have to wait". People's very real concerns that they might be left out totally are ignored, and not always politely.
In time this 'comes out in the wash' for the majority of people. By the time the group of teenagers we started with has hit their thirties, three-quarters will be married; though many will have compromised their faith to do so. Of the remainder, we may reasonably assume that some will want to be single, and others will have accepted being single . . . and still others will be left grieving and wondering where they went so wrong to be left out of 'God's best'. It is this latter group which concerns us; many of them are left with an image of God which is mean-spirited and grim, further complicated by self-blame for where they have ended up.
What's it like to be single in a world full of couples? Deuteronomy 34 paints the picture of Moses looking at the Promised Land from Mt Nebo, a land he could see but which he knew he could never enter. It has a haunting parallel to the situation faced by many Christian singles, made worse because of the expectations given to them through most of their lives to that point.
It's made worse when churches talk about appreciating the ministry of singles: what they really mean is, "we have lots of petty little jobs which aren't being done and need doing. You guys have time on your hands, so we'll get you to do it!"
How can those unrealised expectations be healed and what can the Church do to help?
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