Hope for the 30-year-old Single

I was privileged to watch two stories unfold this month. The first was fraught with pain and impatient anguish; the second was ripe with joy and celebration. Both stories center on marriage and singleness, from opposing, yet related perspectives.

Story 1 - A dear friend of ours recently turned 30. Personally, I barely remember turning 30, because at the time I had a child, a job, and far too much on my frazzled mind. But for this dear friend, 30 felt like a death sentence, a foreboding drumbeat that underscored the end of youth and the death of dreams. Rather than serving as a day of gratitude and celebration for the gift of life, it was a day of mournful reflection on the haunting scars left by unwanted loneliness, a sobering confrontation with life’s ever-emptying hourglass, which represents the diminishment of possibilities.

Without trying, my wife and I have made a habit of eating quiet meals with, consoling, and praying for such singles, both men and women, who come to us seeking a brief respite from the constant pressure to find a mate. But we minister to such souls from a different universe. After all, we’re happily married (most days, right honey?!), with two beautiful children. So we can only comfort from afar, as it were, with empathy that sees and senses the pain, but isn’t able to identify with it in the fullest sense.

This dear friend celebrated her birthday not with candles, but tears. Not with songs and celebration, but sighs and solitude. We were honored that she was willing to share part of this day with us, pain and all, because it was after all her birthday. And her sorrow shouldn’t cause her to avoid giving voice to her reality with people she trusts, if indeed comfort can be found in doing so. So we celebrated, if one can call it that, the birthday of this dear friend, even as she grappled with the lurking sense that this milestone was nothing more than a sad reminder of unfulfilled dreams.

Story 2– I stood at the altar before a sparkling couple, presiding over their wedding ceremony. Their families and friends looked on with broad grins and tear streaked faces, overjoyed and overcome by the fulfillment of so many hopes and prayers.

There was something especially sweet about these nuptials, because of the road that lay behind this couple, now in their forties. They had prayed, waited, hoped, and dreamed for a person to whom they might pledge their lives, but for some reason, they’d been forced to wait and wonder if something was wrong. Did they miss an opportunity at some point along the way, an irreversible mistake that had doomed them to everlasting isolation? Or did they simply lack the ability to initiate and sustain a meaningful relationship, even with the “right person”? And of course, there were all of the Holidays and family gatherings in which they had to answer those annoying questions, like “Are you married yet?” or my personal favorite, “Why don’t you just settle down and have a family?”. Over the years they’d each been to dozens of weddings to watch their relatives, former classmates, and friends launch into a new life with their beloved; They’d sent congratulatory cards to those friends after their first, and then their second and third children were born. They’d even watched some of those friends throw away their relationships through tragic decisions, and asked themselves, "How could God allow someone them to waste a marriage, while I would do anything to pour my heart into my own marriage vows."

So as this beaming couple stood, facing one another, clutching the other’s hands, their eyes told a lifelong story that was being climactically fulfilled before us all, as they uttered the words that had previously been confined to their dreams: “I take you to be my wife… to be my husband, from this day forward, in sickness and health, in good and bad times, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part.” Never have I seen such solemn words spoken with such ecstatic joy.


As I reflected on these two stories unfolding in different corners of my life, I almost went there. But I didn’t. I almost reasoned that our 30-year-old friend, and the countless others in her shoes, should take heart, because they still have a few good years left to find their match. I almost said that the 40-something couple is a cause for them to hope, in that such singles still have time to find ‘the one.’

I suppose there’s truth to the ‘never too late’ mindset that we often use to comfort anxious singles. But I don’t think that singles who dream of marriage need to hear that as much as they need a different reminder. I think, most of all, they need to be reminded that God has a plan for their lives, which is not shaken or delayed by singleness. They are 100% of a person, His person, complete in Christ regardless of their marital status. They have value in this life and the next, and they are an important piece of God’s plan to make this world a better place.

I'm not making this stuff up. God promises. In fact, the Bible talks about the future of the world as a great Marriage, an everlasting Wedding Feast in which God joins with His poeple forever. Even human marriages pale in comparison with this Great Union, and at their best only point toward it as the ultimate expression of where God is taking the world. This means that both singles and married couples serve as powerful reminders of the now/not yet reality of God's Kingdom, their marital relationships (or lack their of) shining a radient shaft of light toward the day in which God completes His plans for the world. God will one day join Himself to us, in a way that we cannot yet fathom. In the meantime, we sense the world's cosmic yearning in the aching hearts of singles who want but have no spouse beside them, and we get a foretaste of Kingdom come through spouses who both make and keep their marriage vows.

So singles should see the happy couples around them not just as a sign that hope remains for their marital aspirations (true as that may be), but as the pronouncement that hope remains for the world, which they're a part of! Faithful marriages show all of us not what humans can ultimately become on our own, but what we'll all have someday with God. Faithful, healthy marriages give us confidence that God is good, that God’s promises can and will be kept, and that God never delays the most important things to anyone—forgiveness, mercy, healing, and hope through the Cross of his Son.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! Luke 11:11-13