Villagersonline : blogs : clrclady : Singleness Response

From: clrclady
Date: Sat Feb  7 10:46:07 MST 2004
Subject: Singleness Response

Responses
Boojeee: Abstinence (2/9/04)

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Boojeee: Abstinence (2/9/04)

I am hesitant to respond to this singleness discussion because I don't know if I know how to be single well. However, I am learning a great deal. I believe singleness is about being alive with all the longings and desires of your heart awake while learning to have them filled by God and the community around you. Being dead to the longings and desires, is not being single well. I think there is much to learn while being single. Although, God will probably teach me much if it is in His plan to marry, He has done amazing things to develop me in my singleness. There is another type of oneness that the Bible talks about other than the oneness of marriage. It is the oneness of the body. Ephesians 4 talks about the fact that we are one body and have one spirit as believes. To be honest, open, trusting, valnerable and weak with each other to the point that I can say that I am one with them can be a scary, challenging, growth experience in and of itself. I think this is what the call is to everyone, whether married or single. I believe the need is to live life, alive and to its fullness while being single without the constent thought that life does not start until one is married. Life is now!!! Life begins where each person is and God is there molding and teaching along the way. However, if you hide your head in the ground like a good ostrich and feel nothing and share nothing, you are not living well whether single or married. I know this from experience on the single part. I have lived with my head tucked safely away for years, trying not to feel or acknowledge anything. It is truly death, although it feels much safer then life most of the time. So, the conclusion to all this rambling. To live well single is to cherish the relationships that you have around you and to pour into other's lives as they pour into you, feeling the fear, the pain, and the joy that it all brings.

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From: Boojeee
Date: Mon Feb  9 07:18:00 MST 2004
Subject: Abstinence

I dare to enter this discussion on singleness and abstinence, though I married at 21.
Not all of us Villagers were given the gift of abstinence in our pre-puberty experience. I among others were sexually abused as children and this played itself out into my older years in the form of what felt like uncontrollable promiscuous behavior and other self-destructive paths, followed by a time of “spiritualized” shutting down of all sexual desire [you know, after I “came to Jesus”]. Confusingly, then when I was married and the opportunity for making love presented itself, I was still shut down and wounded and struggled in this area of married bliss… I have greatly appreciated my husband’s offerings of abstinence within the confines of marriage during times when I needed that respite for healing.
So I guess I offer this to broaden the value of abstinence as a discipline. To my mind, abstinence is the choice to not have sex when the opportunity to make love is unavailable. The discipline requires that we offer to God the focal person of our sexual desire if there is one, confess any sinful parts that may be present in that desire, and acknowledge any temptations that are presenting themselves in the midst of our desire. Abstinence is a great value to those who practice it because sexual endeavors when making love is not possible is damaging to us, married or not. Learning to abstain before God without shutting down, disengaging from people, or avoiding our own inner struggle seems to me to be what Nouwen was trying to get at in the quote from Derek’s blog: “This explains why solitude affects our sexual needs. Solitude prevents us from relating to our sexuality as a way to prove that we can love and thus liberates it from its compulsive quality. It allows us to experience our sexual feelings as a manifestation of God's unconditional love.” When we are called to abstinence, we in some way are connected to what God experiences when he loves us and we are unavailable to him. When our sexual desires have a person attached to them, we have the opportunity to love that person without the fulfillment of our perceived need. In marriage, this applies when our desires are rightly focused on our spouse and when the desire for someone else emerges. I don’t know what it means when the sexual desires are more generalized frustrations…
Anyways, there are my two bits or so…

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