Why Marriage Sermons Usually Turn Me Off

I'll let you in on a little secret that you might not already know.  The majority of the world is married.  It is true, and it didn't used to bother me at all.  I was the girl that was going to college to get a degree, and travel the world, sharing God's love.  I didn't actually care too much about getting married.  I mean if I am perfectly honest, I think that I thought it would just happen, that one day I would just look up and my prince would be riding in on a white stallion, and beckon me to come do missions with him, or whatever was my current life goal at that time.  I definitely had crushes throughout high school and college, but nothing that was profound enough to turn my heart away from what I felt called to do.  Then, I turned 30, and I no longer felt like I could just be nonchalant about marriage.  I had to focus on it.  That's all the church talked about, that's all people my age talked about.  My friends were definitely starting to get married by this point, and I felt the pressure of needing to be married. 

So I started really seriously dating at this point, and not making the best of choices.  I wasn't really sticking to the values that I had held onto when I was younger.  Even in my late 20's, I was set on holding tight to certain values that as soon as I hit 30, it was like I just gave up.  Along with that I felt like the church and my family kind of gave up on me too.  Maybe it was my life overseas, maybe it was that I was opinionated, maybe it was that I didn't fit the perfect mold of what a woman should look like.  But for whatever reason, I wasn't married, and there weren't any real prospects either. 

That's when I started noticing this trend in the church.  Sermons about marriage.  Ugh.  Or sermons that only mentioned married people.  It is very few churches that I have found that include the single population when they are preaching.  I even went to a women's conference not too long ago where one of the speakers that I highly admire, said something like "one day when my babies get married."  It just struck me super hard, because what if they don't?  Right?  We as a culture, especially as a Christian culture have created this place where singles are seen as less than. You can say it isn't true, but it is.  If you think about the way that you treat singles, it is to put them aside, and give them all the things that the "families" can't do.  So, it doesn't really surprise me that every time a sermon would be about marriage, or even remotely relate to it in some way I closed myself off.  Not because I didn't one day want to be married, because that is a desire that is deep inside of me, and probably won't ever leave.  No, I closed myself off because it was easier than opening myself up to the hurt and pain of feeling the hole, or feeling less than that those sermons usually left me with. 

This past Sunday for the first time in my life I heard a sermon about marriage and what can kill a marriage and it penetrated my heart.  It made me examine who I am as a woman, a future (hopefully) wife, and mother, and I honestly learned so much from it.  I can't say that I will use everything from it, but it didn't make me cringe, it didn't make me feel like I should have skipped out on church that Sunday.  It made me understand that I want that even more.  The hard times, the sacrificial love, the devotion to someone outside of myself.  Those are all things that I want.  But you know what it made me realize even more?  It made me realize that our culture's idea of marriage is so messed up.  Oh, I am sure that I have heard it before, but for some reason this time, it really hit me.  First of all coming from a home of divorced parents.  I know exactly what it feels like to have your family change your senior year of high school.  I know what it looks like to understand that things don't always work out.  I understand what it means to know God's grace. 

So, for the first time in my life I listened intently.  I grasped the words, and I understood how God uses marriage, even broken ones to show us sacrificial and undeniable love.  I think that we oftentimes just get caught up in the wants and needs of ourselves that we forget about the people around us.  We look at the greener grass on the other side and we wish that we could be there experiencing that, not really caring about how hard or long the journey might be.  I am not sure that there is too much more that I learned from the sermon, other than to know that God made marriage.  There was a time in my life when I thought that it didn't matter.  I thought that if God truly wanted marriage to be something that we did, then shouldn't He make it possible for everyone? 

Here's the thing though.  I have learned things in my 36 years of singleness that I could have never learned if I had married right out of high school or college.  I have seen places, and met people.  That doesn't make me less than, and that also doesn't mean that I am supposed to be single forever.  What it does mean though is that I have to take what God has taught me, and continue to use it to be molded into someone that is able to love without holding back.  To be able to put a husband first.  Sermons about marriage don't have to show me what I am missing, they can lead me to who I need to be, so that one day I will be able to love with everything I have, and learn things that I wasn't able to learn being single.