As I said in my post sharing my favorite life lessons from a movie I love, Courageous, this movie specifically encouraged me in my singleness. This post should be pretty brief, but it’s something worth touching on separately.
When I first saw this movie, I was literally only 8. It was a bit traumatizing for an 8-year-old but as was typical of me, I didn’t care to wait until it was age-appropriate. It’s all fine, though, because I love it now. Well, I mentioned in my first post on it, which I recommend you definitely read before this one if you haven’t so you understand the movie and where I’m taking this, that I saw this again last fall when it was re-released with a new ending. I adored it even more than I did before, and I watched it not too long ago when I bought it myself.
I haven’t talked much about my college experience yet, but here’s a little background on where I was last fall: my roommate and I were very close and saw this movie together twice, and we both loved it. However, my faith was of the utmost importance to me, which is a big reason why I am single because I’m holding out for the man who will share the level of faith I have, and a whole bunch of other things, but that’s the main thing. My roommate, on the other hand, had a lot of relationships that I heard about and was a witness to.
If you are single and have been for any length of time, or even if you look back to when you were, you can probably relate to feeling disdain towards it at some point or another. That’s something I haven’t talked a lot about on here, is my relationship status and everything that goes along with it, but that is a topic I will be hitting heavily in the future. Anyway, when I was younger, I used to be pretty carefree, trusting God would provide my spouse at the right time. Go figure, I got to high school and lost my mind; I suddenly wanted a relationship then and felt that I couldn’t trust God to provide for me, and ever since, it’s been a battle for me of believing what I know to be true in faith and wrestling with my own doubt and impatience.
So when we saw this movie, it was at a time where I was feeling more insecure and down about my lot of having always been single and feeling like I always would be single. Even though this movie doesn’t really touch on that as one of its themes, other than how fathers should protect their daughters’ hearts in modeling how they should be treated by a man and teaching them to wait for the right one (both of which are pretty dang important), I found that as I was watching this with my roommate, one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think through it, God was whispering to me some special encouragement for my season.
It was during the scene where the younger guy is finally starting to figure some stuff out, and the way he was talking to God and showing integrity caught at me, and I thought, that is the sort of man I am holding out for. Lots of people have relationships, and something I’ve struggled with and felt bad about since middle school, as this post shows, is how I haven’t ever had one. Even when I see my friends with people I know wouldn’t be good for me, sometimes it’s still easy to just hate feeling lonely and not getting special attention from the opposite sex. That’s where I was at last fall, especially after coming to college where, even though I KNEW it wasn’t going to be some “hunt for my future husband,” it was still another year of me getting older, feeling more like an adult, and still feeling like I was missing out.
In that scene, though, and then looking back at the whole movie, it really models what godly men look like and, subsequently, how they treat other people and relationships. God used it to remind me that I’m not waiting in vain. Men like that, though they definitely seem nonexistent wherever I’m at (my age, anyway), are out there, and that needs to be the expectation. If you don’t believe in what God has for you and that you’re waiting for something special, you won’t wait and you’ll lose heart. It gave me the motivation I needed to just be still and trust Him again in my season of singleness and waiting. Do I still get sick of it? Oh my gosh, yes, but it helps me still be a healthy person while I wait.
It’d be easy to get in relationships that aren’t healthy at all, to cross lines I don’t want to, just because I feel very lonely and bored at times. But that would leave me in so much more pain. It fills my heart with joy and confidence when I think of how God created masculinity in its healthiest form and wants nothing less for my heart than someone who fears Him above anyone or anything and who lives to obey Him because when he does that, he’ll love people wonderfully—because that’s what He commands (Mark 12:30-31).
So my encouragement to you if you’re single is this: watch this movie. Study how these men act and what God expects of you, too. Cut the ties on romantic relationships with people who don’t love Him with all they are. That isn’t equivalent to being a perfect person, BUT you can easily tell when God means everything to someone and when someone is only halfway in or not even, and that’s not good enough. Call it harsh, I don’t care, because it’s true and I’ve witnessed it with tons of men. And if they’re only halfway in for Him, they’re going be halfway in for everything else in their life, too, because He defines our lives, even if we don’t believe in Him.
Let God be enough because He IS enough. You have to give Him the chance to be enough, which most people don’t even do. Maybe you’re only halfway in, and if that’s the case, as harsh as this may sound, don’t start looking for romance, then. I say this because you would only hurt yourself. God is the One your heart is made for; a partner can only add to your life when you’re both overflowing with His love, otherwise you don’t know love (1 John 4:8).
Why don’t I share that verse in full to sum up this post, since this is what I’m getting at: true love comes from Him. If you want the best, you have to look to Him because He is the best. Only a person rooted in His love will know how to love you best, and that’s what this movie helped me reaffirm and be encouraged in. God loves me enough to protect me from anything less, and He’ll do the same for you as you trust Him.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:8 NIV
