I realized yesterday that I have been accidentally studying Song of Solomon for the last few weeks. I REALLY didn’t mean to.

First, Anne had me working on a bunch of Song of Solomon commentaries, books, and articles that Mike had used in some of his research. I’m still in the middle of a large bin full of them. (This project may never end. My only hope is that a higher-priority project will put this one on pause for a time.)

Because of what I am doing, I’ve had to read, skim, and even type large portions of the text of these resources. While I have not sat down with the intent of taking in any whole book or article, I have certainly absorbed a lot of what has been before my eyes this entire time.

Despite the wide variety of opinions and angles that these authors have taken on these texts, it is somehow all working together in my mind and really impacting me (in a variety of ways).

At first, I was slightly annoyed. Helping a friend plan her wedding (which I am actually delighted to do) and spending more than 30 hours each week staring at the Song of Solomon did not seem like ideal tasks for someone who was walking through very painful boy-related things. (Lest everyone jump to conclusions, these very painful boy-related things are not about Richard. No… please don’t try to figure out the private details of my and other people’s lives at this moment.) But God has certainly used the project to move my heart, on numerous occasions. Sometimes (read, often-times) this started from the place of intense pain and then moved into deep heart-impact. (Like I’ve mentioned before, God really knows how to use our pain.)

(Just a quick side note, this task has had its painfully awkward moments as well. Honestly, I’m not too squeamish around sex-talk… something that abounds in writings about the Song of Solomon. I won’t get into details about the one book, but I thought the thing was going to kill me. It should have been labeled with serious “Stay away!” warnings for single women. That’s all I have to say.)

And then we have the prayer room.

I did decide, a few weeks ago, to start going to Cassie Campbell’s worship with the word on my night off. I did it for the sake of my heart… and it has really paid off. She is currently doing Song of Solomon. This would be my one intentional step in the direction of Song of Solomon.

However, I have also accidentally stumbled across a lot of this book while watching the prayer room webstream. Just in the last few days, both non-NightWatch sets that I randomly chose to watch from the webstream ended up being Song of Solomon worship with the word sets. (These are from teams that I don’t usually see/hear.)

All of these prayer room sets, (Cassie’s and the two other teams’) have made me cry. A lot. And I have encountered the Lord pretty profoundly.

I don’t think I’ve ever accidentally studied a book before. In all truth, though, I am pretty sure it didn’t just happen. SOMEONE was being pretty intentional about pursuing my heart with all of this.

I had the honor of attending David and Kristen’s wedding on Friday.

Few weddings have impacted me as deeply as this one. Part of the impact is too personal to write about here. But there was one moment in particular that I really want to make note of.

Usually, at weddings, I watch the groom as his bride is coming down the aisle. I just love to see his expression–the ridiculously huge grin or the flood of tears.

I’ve known David for 5 years (a long time in IHOP time) and he is one of my absolute favorite people. So you would ESPECIALLY expect that I would be watching him watch Kristen come down the aisle towards him.

But I hardly even glanced at David in that moment. I did… I glanced. But there was something else that stole my attention.

Kristen was so indescribably beautiful. I couldn’t stop watching her… I couldn’t stop looking at her as she moved towards David.

On an elementary level, her dress and her hair were perfect. But I don’t think that was even it.

I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t even really know what it was. But it was absolutely beautiful… whatever it was that I saw.

She was herself… perhaps more remarkably and beautifully herself than I have ever seen. Though surely nervous, she seemed to be ultimately at peace. She seemed whole-hearted and resolved.

She was stunning, walking down the aisle with her father… step by step getting closer to the biggest leap of her life.

I am so grateful to have witnessed that moment of beauty.

“I wonder if two people who are ‘only children’ can get married.”

My roommate was pondering out loud tonight. Obviously, this isn’t a question of the possibility of such a match, but of the compatibility. (This was provoked by the idea of the oldest child frequently marrying the … whatever child… and the like. They always tend leave the only child out of those first-middle-last observations. Sigh… always forgotten and alone.)

Little did she know, this was something I had thought a lot about. You can be sure, however, that she soon knew of my extensive contemplations concerning the matter.

I am an only child. This random life question has a lot of potential significance for my life.

When I was in high school, I was dating an only child. We were both pretty young and pretty immature, so the question of marriage never got too serious, but the question of marriage did come up, on occasion.

(For the record, he was the one to do all of the mentioning. Though… I did consider showing up in a wedding dress at his place of employment one day. Perhaps becauseit wouldn’t have ruffled him too much, we decided to use the dress to elicit an amusing response from my father, instead. Hehe… I will never forget the look on his face. He was not amused. Not amused at all.)

Anyway… when such a topic comes up (and you have my personality type), you definitely think about the practicality of such a life-shaping decision.

The first, and most notable, thing to ever occur to me, in regards to the marriage of an only child to an only child, was the matter of children.

If you and your spouse share the status of “only child”, there is likely to be a great deal of pressure on you to produce grandchildren. No one else is going to do it. Your parents are waiting on you, and you alone, to bring that new life into the family. They can be excited about other family members having children… but you are the only one who can give them grandchildren… their own grandchildren.

Throw together the pressure coming from your parents and the pressure coming from your spouse’s parents and you have one baby-craving family.

In addition to the great likelihood of that little external pressure to the marriage, consider the odd situation of your children. Can you imagine not having a single aunt or uncle? And no cousins? What an odd experience that would be at family reunions! Actually… what would even be the point of a family “reunion”, unless it were a larger extension of the family?

And you… you would have no nieces and nephews… as you (and your spouse) have no siblings to bear them.

OK, so not all parents are eager to be grandparents. And not all people really enjoy family reunions or are particularly concerned about having extended family.

As foreign as the idea of having siblings may be to me, I definitely want to marry a man who has them. Maybe even lots of them. I like the idea of having family. Especially now that my immediate family has been recently reduced by one third (the loss of my mother in our family of three).

Of course, when I say “definitely want”, it is only a matter of preference. I am certainly not going to refuse to marry a man solely on the basis of his sibling situation. Sigh… and I should hope that this would not disqualify me from marriage either.

Which brings me to another “hmmm… I wonder” question of marriage. I have no siblings. I have one living parent. The man who marries me isn’t gaining much in the category of in-laws. Will that reality be difficult for him? (Given the great abundance of jokes and shared sighs concerning in-laws, I suppose one may see it as an odd blessing.)

Whether or not the issue of having a mother-in-law really registers as significant to the man… he will surely feel the impact of it in one way or another. He will find himself stuck in the situation of walking through my grief with me.

I’m already mourning the fact that my mother will not be at my wedding or meet my children. These two realities come back to me again and again. But I know that they will strike at me even more deeply as the events unfold.

Who wants to be planning a wedding and watch his fiance suddenly break down in tears (again) because her mother cannot be consulted or will not be present at the event? Who wants to encounter those moments of frustration when his pregnant wife has a question about what is happening or soon to happen and she cannot call her mom? Who wants to witness that moment when his wife’s happiness is suddenly filled with a shadow of grief at what is lost? Who wants those guaranteed elements of sadness in some of life’s most joyous events?

Who thinks about these things? (Surely I am not alone.)

And why is it that marriage and children are among the first things that occur to you when you lose a parent prior to those events? I KNOW that I am not alone in that experience. And how is it that her absence at those two events can be so painful to me so many times? Especially when marriage does not even appear to be anywhere on the horizon, as of yet.

Well… the future will happen as the future happens. I am sad that my mother will not be present for much of it. But… I can at least take comfort in the fact that she will be around for the greatest events of my future. She’ll be there when Jesus comes back. She be there when He fully establishes His kingdom and makes every wrong right… ON THE EARTH. She’ll be there when there is no more sorrow or sickness or pain. She’ll be there when righteousness rules.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Those are not my words. “intj ready for marriage” is a recent search that somehow brought an inquiring individual to my blog. I have to admit that I am quite puzzled. I’m not so much thrown off by the fact that these words led someone here. I am, after all, an INTJ. And I have a whole category on marriage an celibacy.

But… seriously… what would lead a person to enter those words into a search engine?

Was it an INTJ who was ready for marriage that made the search? Was it, say, an ENFP who was looking for an INTJ to marry? (According to David Kiersey… that’s the ideal match. Sure, David, sure. I personally think that extroverts can be overwhelming and scarey. Some of them.) Was it an INTJ trying to get google to tell him whether he was ready for marriage or not? Perhaps he asked Jeeves? Was it someone who was about to propose to an INTJ and wanted to feel out the odds of getting a favorable response?

I don’t get it.

(For the record, I am an INTJ… but I’m like a whole relationship away from being “ready for marriage”… as marriage tends to involve marrying another person. Minor detail.)

And, at last, we have arrived at my third reason for choosing marriage over celibacy. (If you have not read the first two parts of this “series”, I recommend starting there. The first two posts can be found here and here.)

(Please note that this decision was not made without a great deal of consideration. I have a lot of respect for those who choose celibacy. But if we are completely honest about it… I would choose marriage. And these are my reasons.)

Throughout the Bible, God describes His relationship to us through the image of marriage. …

Because he walked it out in his own marriage to a prostitute, Hosea has a unique understanding of God’s heart toward His harlot bride, Israel. He has shared in God’s emotions in a way that the rest of us may be able to faintly imagine, but cannot come close to grasping outside of the fellowship that Hosea had with this experience in the heart of God. His was an imperfect identification with how God felt, but it surely opened up his understanding in a profound way.

Umm… in case there is any confusion, that last paragraph was in no way intended to indicate that I want an experience like Hosea’s. In fact… I’m not even sure why I started with that. It just kind of came out when I started typing.

The point is, when you experience something first-hand, you understand it a great deal more. Understanding God as a loving Father is significantly harder if you have never met your earthly father or if your own father’s brokenness has left you with a wounded image of fatherhood. Understanding God as brother is more difficult if you are an only child and don’t really have a concept for what a brother is (in a relational sense). Understanding God as mother (it’s OK, people… just breathe; we don’t have to be scared of feminine images of God) is again difficult if you have had no experience of a true mother. To someone like David or Jonathan who experienced such a beautiful and intimate friendship, the idea of God as friend is much more significant than it is to those who have only known superficial and highly conditional friendships.

Undoubtedly, our experience of these things is broken and imperfect. No one is a father, brother, mother, friend, or spouse in the way that God is. Each of the people in our lives are broken and our relationships with them are marred by scars and wounds. But there are glimpses that we can still find through these imperfect reflections. The fuzzy images lead us closer to an understanding of who God is, what He feels,  and who we are to Him. And we slowly begin to discern, in what we see, the things that are a part of the true reflection and the things that are a part of the distortion.

So… in marriage, we gain a greater understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Bridegroom and the Church to be the Bride. Apart from marriage, we can read about it. We can form great concepts and ideas about it. We can observe other marriages and cognitively wrap our minds around it. But there is something completely different about experiential knowledge which we can take in and know more intuitively.

So, through my husband, I want to more fully understand Jesus as Bridegroom. Both through the positive experiences of the marriage that are a good reflection and through the longing that I feel and lack that I experience through his imperfections and the reality that he falls short of Jesus’ glory as Bridegroom.

I am not saying, by any means, that those who are embracing a celibate lifestyle can know nothing of this.  But I think that they do not encounter these realities as intimately as those who are married have the opportunity to encounter them. Likewise, there are things that they experience more fully than those who are married truly can.

The Bridal Paradigm is something that fascinates and moves me. And I want to get as close to the imperfect mirror as I can in trying to see God through His reflection in an earthly marriage. My understanding of God and the church could not be modeled exactly off of my marriage… but I may find greater comprehension through it.

So…. thus ended my three-part explanation of why I, personally, would choose marriage over celibacy were I given the option of God giving me the grace for either.

There are plenty of other reasons. Most of them considerably less significant. But those are my top three. 

I would love to hear some of your thoughts on this. Given the same question, what would your answer be, and why? Is there anything that I have said in these three posts that struck you as particularly odd? Seriously… I am really curious to hear your perspectives on this.

This is a continuation of the topic that I began yesterday (i.e. earlier today). Welcome to reason number two (by it’s order in being discussed, not necessarily by ranking) of why I would choose marriage over celibacy.

Allen Hood often speaks of marriage as the great sanctifier. One of my favorite messages that he gave was his discussion of growing through mistreatment. In this, he addressed the myth of enduring mistreatment with your spouse by your side to support you. He pointed to the reality that you will most likely endure mistreatment from your spouse far more than you will from any other person. They know your buttons, and they push them skillfully.

I am not an advocate of tormenting ourselves or pursuing pain for pain’s sake, but something in me longs for the painful refining fire of marriage.

I once had the delusion that I needed to attain to this certain level of perfection before I was ready for marriage. While I do believe that a reasonable degree of maturity is certainly a good idea before you dive into this HUGE, life-changing commitment, no one’s wedding vows are stated from the place of absolute perfection. No one. That means you… and your spouse.

I want to learn to love. I want to learn to love well. And this relationship that places you in sometimes uncomfortable proximity to this one who may frequently hurt and mistreat you is an excellent place to learn to love. A relationship where you are committed not to back out and you have to press through the challenges together. I really want to wholeheartedly give myself to choosing love and choosing to serve and prefer another in that way.

You can call it the part of me that loves a challenge. You can call it my desire to be more like Him and to continually grow. Whatever it is… I long for the challenges of marriage and the growth that they can produce.

The following discussion was provoked by Henri Nouwen’s Clowning In Rome. I strongly recommend reading this book… and re-reading it. I am so glad that I picked it back up again.

When I read the book in FITN (ages ago), I was also given a series of questions to reflect on as I read. One of them really stuck with me:

“If God would give you the grace for either celibacy or marriage, which would you choose and why?”

So… God is going to give you everything you need to walk out marriage or celibacy. You would have the strength you needed to persevere through the challenges of either. Which do you choose?

… 

In the last three years, the reasons for my answer have changed a great deal (the effects of maturing and all that), but the answer itself is still the same. I would choose marriage.

In order to spend a bit of time on each of my top three reasons, I am only going to talk about one of them tonight. So, first on my list of reasons why I would choose marriage…

Children

I am convinced that one of the greatest blessings of being a woman is the opportunity to have children. (Not that I don’t waver on this conviction about once every 28 days or so.) Both men and women are incredibly blessed in this, but the beauty of carrying the child within you for nine months is beyond my comprehension.

When I was younger, I wasn’t so sure about the whole parenting thing. I wanted 0.5 children. Preferably none, but maybe one. I was terrified of children. Why would I want to endure the incredible pain of giving birth to one and then be faced with the horror of being a bad parent?

In the last two years, however, this has drastically changed.

I think that working in a maternity clothing store had a lot to do with that. Seeing those women every day did something to me… continually encountering the beauty of pregnancy. I also spent a lot of time reading maternity books and magazines during slow hours in the store. And now I am watching the incredible and beautiful Jessica and Sarah become mothers.

My desire to be a mother is growing exponentially. It’s so strong within me that it’s almost absurd. I never would have guessed that I would end up here… wanting this so much. But I guess God awakens dreams in His own timing. In any case… this one is definitely growing. And pregnancy is certainly not an element of the celibate lifestyle.

On a more personal note, I’m not sure if I ever told my mom how much this had changed. I think she knew. I think she saw it. I know it came up in various ways, but I don’t think that it was ever explicitly discussed… my dramatic change of heart.

I also mourn the loss of my mother in this area specifically. She will not meet her grandchildren and be there to enjoy them as they are growing. She will not be by my side, encouraging me and counseling me as I walk through my first pregnancy. It hurts. It hurts a lot. And it is among the things that are most frequently on my mind when I am missing my mom and most intensely feeling the pain of this loss.

However… as a good friend told me the day my mother died… these (huge moments in life like my children and my wedding, etc.) are still good and beautiful things and there is still joy to be found in them. She will not be present for these events, but by her influence and impact on my life, she will be a part of them.

So… there you have it. I would choose marriage over celibacy because I really want to be a mother, and that doesn’t really fit into the whole celibacy picture too well.