You Can’t Hide

Change is everywhere these days. Jeremy & Rachel tied the big knot on Saturday and no sooner had they walked down that aisle than someone shifted to the topic of who’s next (yes, that someone was probably me). Speculations ensued about a number of our Omaha friends and their single status and the alleviating of it, as if it were Jud’s back pain and wedding vows Aspercreme or perhaps a morphine drip.

Of course everyone knows that marriage is a lot of work and that it takes lots of effort to, um, make a thing go right, but somehow this escapes the conversation. We just sort of naturally assume that everybody wants to get married, that anyone who is single would be happier if the issue of who to spend all of his/her Sunday afternoons with was settled and put up on a shelf. I think it is because we love to-do lists and checking the items off one at a time. Jud, Check. Sam, Check. Jeremy, Check. And then, when you get to the next name and you can’t check off the marriage box, you immediately run down the female list to see if there is someone over there who also needs a box marked off.

But then, as soon as all of those married boxes are checked, you just move to the next line. The row with the diapers and the no sleep and you start looking at all of those empty boxes needing check marks.

One of the kids at the wedding this weekend declared that she was going to marry a farmer so that she could have lots of animals (there were horses at the Amish farm where the rehearsal dinner was held). Although she later reconsidered the idea, do to the hard work required in farm life; she did not question the idea that marriage was something she was going to do. Of course, she’d get married! Of course, we’ll all have children! Of course, the sun will rise in the east! It’s a fantastic look at the world through some fairly naive glasses.

The truth is that you might not get married, even if you want to. It just might not happen and, shock of all shocks, you might not even want it to happen. Or, it might happen and you might hate it, but then what? These are for real options. The whole baby thing? Yeah, not really in just your hands, so you might want to just stop assuming that they are going to arrive. You might have to save for years and endure lots of heartache before you ever get a child. You might never hear someone call you Mommy, except that one neighbor kid who calls anyone in a skirt by that name, as if he is Every Child.

These are possibilities because you are not in control. No matter how much I’d like to pretend that I am so completely on top of all of this life stuff and I plan and I work and I try so hard, but I do not always get a choice. Sometimes God puts us into a place where the not having is all we will know and in that place we can scheme to crawl out or we can beat our fists against the Unfair and collapse in dependency. Standing in the middle of thing that we never wanted we can see the Thing that would never have been so clear otherwise.

I might not want to be in Texas. You might wish you had a ring on or off of your finger, a baby in your arms or for the one that’s there to just stop crying.

The discontent might be wrapping its fingers around your throat this very moment and I wish I could throw you a rope and get you out of that place — I’ll fix you up with one of my friends! I’ll check WebMD to make sure your doctor is giving you sound advice! I’ll figure out a way for you to move away! I’ll fix it! I’ll make it all wonderful! Or maybe fixing the thing that looks broken to you and to the crowd would be the worst thing that could happen to you. Maybe we all just need to embrace the cracks in our hearts for a minute and be content with the broken.