Thirty, Flirty and Thriving

I turned 29 yesterday. One more year till 30. My 26-year-old coworker asked me, “How does it feel?” Am I allowed to say how it feels? I answered with a joke, but my heart’s first answer whispered, “Sad. I thought I’d be married by now.”

Looking back, I remembered freaking out when I turned 25 and realized I would be in my upper twenties when I got married. Now, two ex-boyfriends later, and staring at the end of this decade, it’s nearly guaranteed I’ll be in my thirties before I marry.

My singleness represents something everyone faces at some point: the death of a dream. What do we do when life hurts?

I work at a Christian non-profit organization, and as I was sitting in on our Monday morning devotional time, the same coworker was leading that morning’s talk. It was a week before his wedding, and he gushed on how faithful God was to provide a wife, and how thankful he felt. His words pricked like a knife at my tender heart still smarting from a break-up two months earlier. Was God not faithful to me? I looked over at my other two single coworkers, women in their thirties and forties who also had never married. They were walking the same journey of badger-like tenacity, fighting to believe God was good. If my coworker’s upcoming marriage was evidence of God’s faithfulness, what did that say about us single people? Were we forsaken by God?

As I teetered on the edge of bitterness, these words popped in my mind:

“But others were sawn in two…”

The words came before I could even finish cringing from my coworker’s message. That phrase. I knew it was from Hebrews 11, so I flipped open my Bible to that chapter and quickly skimmed it while the devotional continued around me.

Hebrews 11, the famous faith chapter, goes over biblical heroes of old. Near the end of the chapter, the author runs out of room to keep listing these saints’ lives in detail, and he says simply,

For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. – Hebrews 11:32-34 ESV

Wow. God really came through for them. But then seemingly in the same breath, the author’s descriptions take on a darker tone:

Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. – Heb. 11:35-37 ESV

What happened? Both the good and the bad were the result of their faith. The ones sawn in two, I’m sure, hoped that God would miraculously rescue them. He didn’t. Did that mean God was less faithful? No. He had different plans for each person.

I think in our theology of suffering, we can go a few different ways.

Option one: We can say God was faithful to my coworker, but I don’t have a husband, so he’s not faithful to me. This puts God in charge, but judges his faithfulness based on our life circumstances.

Option two: We can say God is always faithful, so in order not to blame God for the bad, I won’t credit him with the good. This attitude assumes that God has a laissez faire attitude towards the world. He was a good God that created the world, set it in motion, and then took his hands off. Good things and bad things just happen. This lets God stay faithful regardless of our life circumstances, but it puts us in charge.

The trouble is, from Hebrews 11 we can see that God is in control and that our life isn’t at the mercy of chance or our own cleverness. Over and over, God intervenes and rescues us. He supernaturally steps in even after we botched everything up.

So there has to be option three: recognizing that God is absolutely in control, but his faithfulness looks different for different people.

Can you imagine what it was like for that person who was sawn in two? (Not that you’d want to, but bear with me.) Imagine being stretched out on the table, the blade touches your stomach, and as the first layer of flesh rips off, you realize this really is happening, and it’s the end of your life. I imagine it would go black soon after, and you’d stand before Jesus, hearing his “Well done, good and faithful servant.” But before that moment, the moment where you’re lying there and you hear them sharpening the blade, what do you think of God?

I imagine you might think of the stories from the Bible—a miraculous rescue from the fiery furnace, David conquering Goliath, Peter delivered from jail—and pray to God that he does the same for you. But he doesn’t. For that one person in Hebrews 11, they didn’t get the rescue. They didn’t get the miracle.

Was God still faithful? Was he still in control?

We have got to believe that God is one hundred percent in control, but that our life circumstances are in no way a reflection of his lack of faithfulness. And this is where truth requires a little lapse in logic, because logic says if the bad things don’t prove God is bad, then the good things don’t prove God is good. But they do. Every good thing is the direct result of God’s faithfulness. We credit God with the good and trust him through the bad, knowing his nature is good, even if the present circumstances say otherwise.

For both me and my coworker, God was one hundred percent faithful. He just has different plans. If God wants to rescue my coworker but at the same time let my heart be sawn in two, that’s okay. He is still just as faithful to me as he is to him. Just in a different way.