It's not as big of a deal when a friend gets engaged if you're not single.
I've probably mostly lied about being happy for friends that get engaged since I became single. Not totally lied, because I have always been happy for them. But to say that happiness wasn't undercut by at least a little jealousy would have been a total fallacy.
But I experienced what it's like to have a close friend get engaged and have it go FBO on this side of singleness, the less jealous side. I'm not so jealous. I'm about as happy. And it's more of a non-issue.
I'm sorry for all the jealousy, engaged and married friends. It was wrong and I was blinded to it by it.
It's really quite uncanny (although I don't know enough about the past to be certain) how obsessed our culture is with relationships. Even the most affirmed, well-liked single people will feel the sting of singleness in our culture because we look, so often, upon relationships as the ultimate form of interpersonal validation. It doesn't even seem to matter where we stand with God as it goes. Even the most devout Christians seem to look at the world through the lens of romantic relationships, and it just increases more and more as the years go by.
I'm not sure what sort of comment to make on that because I'm right in there in the mix of it all. "It is better not to marry" says Paul, but you wouldn't think that by looking around. And like I said...I'm right there in the middle of it all. Even though, by the time I finally ended my season of singleness, I had decided that desiring a girlfriend was getting me nowhere and to simply live life and let it come as it comes, it would be a lie to say that I don't think life is better on this side of that season. We just want to connect with others as deeply as we can, and that means romantic relationships and I'm not sure, within our culture, there's a way around that. Some misinformed 50 year old Christian would start talking about us as "post-moderns" like we're some kind of race that gets by on relational connection and needs to ween ourselves off of it and turn to Christ if they read that little synopsis there. I don't disagree that we love relational connection more than our predecessors, but I don't think it's wrong, I don't think it's unChristian, and I definitely resist the othering "post-moderns" does. Some of the people I respect most in my life say it though, like it's anything but reality. I'm resisting a rant on post-modernity now. I will say though, that we're in a cycle of desiring and probably brokenly trying to fill voids in our lives with people..and they're voids that people can only kind of fill some of the time. There's nothing new about that...it's just that we, as a culture, are finally turning to community, to others, instead of to ourselves to fill that hole...and ultimately, that is good. The truth will always be though, that it's a hole we can't fully fill with others, can't fully fill with anything in the world because nothing here is perfect and we're always already created to be filled with the love of God.
As is par for the course, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of "truth" and how it relates to and is related by notions of the post-modern. I've come up with one line of dialogue: the post-modernism might seem to shun traditional notions of truth, but I don't see that to be the case entirely. Post-modernism is, at its core, a realization that we're not going to find all of truth on our own, and just being honest about that very real fact. Maybe it's a flouting of truth, but ultimately, it's a flouting of the notion of truth in pursuit of the actually attainable notion of honesty.
Maybe that's more than one line.
At the end of the day, I don't think we really know what we haven't felt, what we haven't experienced. Even the most rationalist of Christians will admit that people aren't convinced to come to Christ by arguments...it's always about his drawing us. So, to that end, it all starts with experience. If you ask someone how they know God exists, no matter their long answer about manuscripts, the actual answer, the end answer, is almost always, maybe even always, based on a deep feeling they trust above all else. That's how it is for me. I'm just being honest. I don't put my faith in Christ, my trust in the Bible because there are so many agreeing manuscripts. It's because I've felt my life, my soul, my inner-being being nourished by its words, by encountering God.
Oftentimes, it seems to me, that Christians want less to show the world the love of Christ and so much more to prove a certain rightness. And that when the Gospel falls on deaf ears...when people who don't care about your rightness want to feel love and all you've got at the end is an argument that doesn't matter.
So do I throw all objectivity out the window? Most of it. That's heresy probably. But I don't see any validity in fallen man building anything upon the scriptures as we get them and the truth has always been that people look at scripture differently, person to person. That's a chink in the armor, no matter how we slice it. So I look at scripture as I look at scripture and I think it's as right a way to do it as I can. I know people disagree with me on things, but as far as I can tell, there are enough who agree with me that we can get together and try to change the world. Because I believe it says that's something we're to strive to do...through love.
-Zack
"You're wearing the scars that save"
-Kids in the Way
