(Photo by Selma Komisky)

Hey Singles, Don’t Wait To Live Life To The Full

By Jasmin Patterson

Whether you’re watching a sitcom on Netflix or listening to a pastor joke during a sermon on relationships, you might have noticed the messaging around the topic of relationships in both the Church and the culture sometimes isn’t great. We’re subconsciously taught to see singleness as something we’re stuck in, waiting anxiously and idly until we can finally get to the part of our lives where we get married or at least start dating someone. Then, we can really start living.

Thankfully, God doesn’t view singleness that way and He invites us to partner with Him in our single season. What does it look like to partner with God in singleness? Partnership with God in singleness looks like living the life God gave you to the full.

In Genesis 1-2, we see God’s design for the world and humanity (including His design for marriage) begin to unfold. When I look at the creation story, I see humans doing four main things: living in relationship with God, living in relationship with others, enjoying God’s gifts in life, partnering with God in His work in the world. You could break those categories down this way: God, community, recreation, mission. All of these are aspects of the life God has blessed us with. Through them, we find purpose and joy and experience God’s goodness in every season of life. They make our lives full, or rich.

Spoiler alert: You don’t have to wait until you’re in a romantic relationship to fully enjoy or invest in any of those areas. So why do we act like our entire lives are on hold until we get married when there’s so much abundance of life God has for us even before we’re married? (No shade to marriage, by the way. Marriage is beautiful.) Why do we treat our single season as something to be loathed and escaped instead of something to be loved and lived?

Fellow singles, God has given us life to live right now. Not one day. Now. Once we enter the season of dating, marriage, kids, etc., we get to continue living and experience the beauty of a new chapter of life with all of its joys and challenges. But the chapters that came before it are not “less than.”

I know there are struggles to singleness. I know it can be hard for those of us who (like me) are genuinely happy with the single life right now to be misunderstood by people we love and pressured to get into a relationship. I also know it can be hard for others of us who strongly desire to be married to wait and trust God and even to feel supported well by fellow Christians in that waiting process. We all need to learn to extend grace, encouragement, and support to one another no matter where we are in this journey.

Even still, let me ask you this: Do you have a vision to partner with God in your singleness? To embrace the fullness of the life God’s given you and not wait to have a romantic partner until you start doing that?

Think back to our four categories: God, community, recreation, mission. I encourage you to think about what it would look like for you to fully enjoy, invest and grow in those areas of life in the season you’re in right now. How are you deepening your relationship with God? How are you strengthening meaningful friendships with other singles and with families in your life? What do you love doing for fun and rest? What areas of calling, career, service is God inviting you to pursue?

Lean into those things to follow God’s will, and to enrich your own life and the world around you, first and foremost. But as a bonus, if and when the time comes for you to get into a relationship, your partner will probably find it more attractive than you are fully engaged in your life instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting to be whisked off your feet. And I’ll bet you’ll find someone more attractive who is fully living their life as well. So, whatever season you find yourself in, invite into God in every step of the process, enjoy it, and live it to the full.