Several years ago, I was standing in a mall parking lot with a pastor friend. We just couldn’t stop talking even though the sun was setting and our mall purposes had long wrapped up. We just kept chatting and he said something to me that stuck with me profoundly. He had recently returned from a youth conference where he challenged graduated high school seniors poised to enter the “real world” if they had considered how their faith would be impacted if they never found a spouse, if they could never have kids. In the American Church broadly, we’re often taught that the true destiny of a Christian is to raise a Godly family. To be perfectly and emphatically clear, raising a Godly family is a wonderful gift that we need Godly people to receive the call of. However, marriage and/or parenting are not the only Godly missional calls.
Some people are called to be single. Sometimes this singleness is purposeful – to avoid certain sins or to be freed to dedicate an overabundance of one’s life to God and God’s Kingdom. Other times, this singleness is without a discernible purpose. Sometimes, God never shows the full hand. Similarly, sometimes God calls people to not have children so that they may invest more fully in the Kingdom or so that they may invest more in niblings, neighborhood kids, and foster families. Other times, a couple struggles with infertility for no discernible reason. Despite their want and their devotion to God, the womb never opens.
In general, I’ve noticed the American church getting better and better at highlighting the purpose, pain, and inevitability that some people will never get married and/or will never have children. I’m grateful for this bold rebuttal of Christian Nationalism when I see it. I also acknowledge that all churches have not made it there yet, and the wounding of a seemingly disinterested God piles on wounds already fresh and bleeding.
After this conversation, I started thinking about other marriage mythologies we’ve held in the American Christian consciousness, namely, that God promises us a good marriage full of passion and fairytale romance. In a similar way to how some people are called to such marriages, others are called to more functional marriages. Indeed, when I started reading through the Bible, I noticed many marriages of passion and love (such as Abraham and Sarah, or Mary and Joseph) while I also noticed marriages like Leah and Jacob, in which Leah longs for passion and love from her husband, emotions she seemingly never receives when she declares in Genesis 29:35 that the God who has consistently ignored her cries is still worthy of her praise.
Or, there’s the marriage between Gomer, a sex-worker, and Hosea, a Godly prophet. Hosea was asked to enter this marriage as a tangible testament to God’s love for God’s people despite their idolatry, illustrated in the Bible often through the use of sexual sin. Likely not a fun experience for Hosea, who continually had to choose God’s will for his life even at the deep cost of sustaining affairs and sexual sin.
This is not to say that I think God condones abusive marriages, or prefers abuse to divorce, another marriage myth we in the Church have often gotten wrong.
However, it’s possible to be in a perfectly functional marriage that simply lacks the desire or romance we often feel we’re entitled to from the media and stories that surround us. What do we do in the moments where our marriages feel dispassionate? Or when the sex we’ve saved ourselves for has been complicated by our spouse’s history of sexual sin or sexual abuse? What if getting up in the middle of the night to swaddle our newborn makes us tired and irritable? Is God still good in a fulfilled promise that feels difficult rather than delightful?
My latest book, a collection of poems, tackles these themes of being promised your whole life a beautiful, storybook marriage, and what happens when God calls you into something different. It details the struggle you feel staying faithful to a marriage or calling God has clearly brought you to that is lonely instead of satiating.
Are we willing to believe God is with us and for us even when the things God has for us are unpleasant or contrary to our deepest desires? I think I am, but sometimes, holding onto God means letting go of our expectations for a happy earthly life. Sometimes, holding onto God means carrying a bloodied cross. It’s painful, isolating, demanding, lonely, hurtful, and human. I want to choose God, but sometimes in the journey of choosing the cross, I begin to be tricked into thinking I’ve regretted that choice.
My new book Weak Eyes is my answer to all of this. Yes, God is still good. Yes, I will continually choose God’s promise and call for my life, even though it is lonely and hard and dark and full of suffering, often lobbed by the very person or people who claim to love me most. I know, like Leah, I wasn’t promised an easy life. I know, like Leah, it’s going to feel like God has handcuffed me to something I would never choose for myself. It’s going to feel sometimes like I’ve ended up somewhere rather than been called there. The Christian life is hard and I don’t like it. And I don’t have to like it to still love God or to still believe that God is good.
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota, sells poetry art here, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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