Persevering in God’s Family
I recently lost my closest friend.
I don’t mean that she passed on physically or moved away geographically. Ours was a tragic death of the relational kind.
I am a Christian single woman in my late thirties. I believe in the goodness of marriage and I love children. For many years my lived experience has told the true story of how beautifully singles and families can bless and support one another within God’s family, the church.
So as my best friend told me she was cutting ties — my most trusted companion of adulthood who had intentionally included me in her family as a sister to herself and an aunt to her daughter — I didn’t know how to process the split. This loss at once shattered my heart and ricocheted off my sensibilities as a distinct impossibility. Disbelief clouded my mind like the dense smoke of a house on fire.
It is not uncommon in recent years to read Christian articles and books championing the biblical value of singleness. Marrieds and singles alike are seeking to draw attention to our apparent hyper-elevation of marriage in present-day Western church culture.
Even as we populate nearly half of the church, unmarried congregants often feel at best second-class, at worst disregarded.
Yet it has seemed that we are becoming more collectively aware that singleness is not merely the opening act for marriage.
Bolstered by this understanding, I sought counsel among Christians for the devastating loss of these friends who had functioned as my family.
At the onset I heard that friendship is voluntary, that it’s not a covenant and thus either party can pull out at any time if they feel it’s the right thing to do.
Others tried to enter in but eventually resigned to the ever-popular trope that “friendships are seasonal” and maybe I should just consider that this season had ended.
Later I met a Christian woman who shared an encouraging story about God’s reconciling work in her marriage on the brink of divorce. “Never forget that restoration and reconciliation are at the heart of our God! He is a God who changes hearts!” she exclaimed. With tears in my eyes, I told how her story had ministered to me. I shared a thumbnail version of my situation -- that my best friend had cut me out of her life and didn’t want any interaction with me. Armed with a few details she quickly surmised, “Oh yeah some friendships can become toxic and you usually do just have to end them. It’s so hard, but sometimes it’s necessary.”
It seemed taken for granted that my friend could enable the ejector seat, no questions asked (and I tried to ask questions). Any emotional oxygen I had left after the initial loss of altitude drained away as I was left to deal with the downward spiral of the sputtering friendship engine. My co-pilot in this relationship pulled the relational ripcord to parachute away while I was still belted in, trying to make sense of the spinning gauges.
What happened to our God whose heart is for reconciliation? What happened to the hope of heart change and persevering through the hard seasons? Why were the difficulties in this woman’s marriage worth fighting through but she could so quickly assume toxicity as a death knell for my deep friendship? The message I intuited was that faithful perseverance would apply if I were married, but this was “just a friendship.”
Various people have shared related encounters with me. A married friend tells of her friend who, after a season of disagreements between them, was advised through Christian books and the church to end their relationship altogether. Single friends have commiserated over a lack of true belonging. Some hesitate to fully commit to a local church after experiencing their significant relational needs being disregarded in such a way.
Christians can seem all too ready to apply labels like “codependent” and “toxic” to close friendships in troubled seasons, magic words that throw the kill switch and absolve us from any responsibility to do the hard work of rooting out the underlying issues that could reorient toward health.
Is this really the way of non-marriage relationships in God’s family?
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As Christians we know that through Jesus we have been reconciled not only to God but also to one another as the family of God. Within a cultural moment when the family unit was essential to livelihood, Jesus made the audacious claim in front of his biological family that “whoever does the will of God […] is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). This was no one-off rhetorical statement but the ushering in of a new paradigm for familial commitment.
Our earthly families, often connected by human blood, are certainly gifts from God; how much more our spiritual family, forever united by the blood of Christ.
The Apostle Paul claimed that believers should be marked by “bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other” (Colossians 3:13). Notably the verses that contain these words precede his specific instructions for how to relate within marriage; these exhortations for perseverance in relationships are given to the “faithful brothers and sisters” of the church (Colossians 1:1).
It is to this spiritual siblinghood that we are called and it is in these relationships that we are exhorted to persevere.
Practically speaking, these siblings are going to include people well beyond our functional category of “friends.” We are called to bear even with brothers and sisters we may not be inclined to like very much. So if within the church we cannot persevere with our closest friends, those with whom we have relational chemistry and deep connection, how do we expect to obediently “bear with” those who are naturally more difficult for us?
Certainly we cannot hope for complete security or wholeness in any human relationship; it’s a burden too heavy for anyone but God to bear. But when we encounter a friendship in pain, perhaps suffering under the disease of sin or dysfunction, rather than applying the necessary scalpel to bring healing, we seem more likely to detonate a grenade. Then as we survey the damage of the shattered pieces, we resign to acknowledging in generalities that sometimes surgery ends in death, rather than assessing whether we have miscalculated the precision of the tools employed. In medicine this would amount to gross malpractice.
Why are we so comfortable viewing friendship as disposable and accepting such dissolution of biblical fellowship?
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In his helpful book, The Meaning of Marriage, Pastor Tim Keller says, “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything.” Certainly God provides a particular type of intimate connection within the Christ-centered covenant of marriage. Make no mistake, there are meaningful distinctions between marriage and friendship. This is no attempt to promote an exclusivity in friendship that mimics what is rightfully reserved for marriage. To be sure, our most necessary and secure intimacy is to be found in our union with Jesus, whether married or single; yet we are all made for deep relationships with others, particularly those who are also in Christ.
Where then is human intimacy for the single Christ-follower?
Many faithful Christians would give the hearty rejoinder that intimacy may be found in the church! Yes and amen. Still, offering this depth of family relationship will take more than merely speaking highly of singleness or making particular overtures about who we sit with in a Sunday service. Single men and women need to experience that we are safe to openly fail and grow in relationships that will not be ended when it gets too hard.
The cognitive dissonance between the explicit teaching that “marriage isn’t the only answer to your relational needs” and the implicit experience that “marriage is the only type of relationship to which we will apply tools for perseverance” is debilitating.
We need to see that the church takes seriously what our non-marriage relationships mean in our lives and that those bonds are considered worth fighting to preserve.
Surely no particular relationship should be expected to convey the fullness of the church; the plurality of the Body provides for many types of connections, each bringing strength where others are weak. But we would do well to consider that intimacy does not happen between entities -- “singles” and “the church” -- intimacy happens in specific, committed, trustworthy relationships between individuals that make up the church. It builds over time and should not be traded on lightly.
How can we invite singles to participate as family if we are content to abandon them as “just a friendship” when the rub of intimacy becomes too difficult?
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How we approach perseverance and reconciliation within the family of God has far-reaching consequences, beyond just the life stage distinctions of single or married.
The way we relate as the church, both internally and externally, is at the heart of our gospel mission. Jesus admonished his disciples to “love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Paul spoke of the radical unity of the church as displaying “the manifold wisdom of God” to the watching world (Ephesians 3:10). The beauty of Jesus shines not mostly through our bold vision-casting for familial love, but by its steady demonstration in the extraordinary lives we live with one another in the ordinary world -- an unlikely family persevering together by his grace.
In our evangelistic enthusiasm, may we not proclaim what we are unwilling to sustain.
Consider these implications.
As we encourage faithful LGBTQ+ people to find their home in the family of God, are we willing to persevere through the attendant complex relational needs and sanctifying work this requires? Will those committing to counter-cultural celibacy see single men and women of any orientation in the Body of Christ experiencing long-term relational safety to openly wrestle through interpersonal sin without fear of being let go?
Can we hope to move toward multicultural fellowship, crossing ethnic and socioeconomic lines with transforming love, if we aren’t in the habit of taking seriously the personal sacrifices and commitment that it takes to persist in love outside the lines of our established family hedges?
Are we willing to temper our expressive individualism that prioritizes “life-giving relationships,” recognizing that truer life may be found precisely by working through the challenges that arise with the ones we love?
A parched and weary world is thirsty for our answers to these questions. Oh that we would lean into our holy calling to display the beauty of Christ in how we persevere with one another.