Family Matters 3 | Singleness | Jessamy Kinghorn

So today we're going to continue our series Family Matters by looking at singleness.

And I recognise that for many people this topic carries very real experiences of grief, of disappointment, of loneliness, rejection, and sometimes trauma as well.

And I don't want to minimise any of that this morning.

While for some people singleness is chosen and deeply valued, for others, it's a life they never wanted or expected.

But it's a real privilege to speak to you about this.

Because I think this is a really important conversation for us to have, all of us, those who are married as well as those who are single.

So married people, please don't switch off.

There's something in here for everyone.

It's important because of the culture that we're living in.

The kind of church family that God has called us to be.

And because it can raise some of the deepest questions we ever ask about God's goodness and his plans for our lives.

And I've sometimes struggled with some of the language that can be used about singleness, particularly the phrase singleness is a gift.

Depending on your experience of singleness, being told that can sometimes feel a bit like being handed an unwanted Christmas present.

You know, your friends have opened Xboxes, theatre tickets, or maybe even a new phone.

Maybe you've just got generous friends.

But things they actually wanted, and you open yours and it's an MS jumper that might look good on your grandma, but wasn't on your Christmas list.

And you kind of smile politely and wonder if they've kept the receipt.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, um, verse 7, whilst talking about marriage and singleness, marriage is a gift.

Um he said he's talking about each person has a special gift from God of one kind or another.

Marriage is a gift, he's saying.

Singleness is a gift.

So we're going to try and unwrap singleness this morning.

Um, and if I'm completely truthful, I've had issues with this verse and how it can come across.

Singleness is a gift you should be grateful.

You know, all the other gifts in the Bible are considerably more appealing.

Um, but I've discovered that Paul is actually saying something much richer and much more radical than I'd understood.

And before we go any further, we just need to acknowledge that there isn't one experience called singleness.

Being single at 20 is very different from being single at 70.

Never having married is different from divorce.

Divorce is different from bereavement.

Some people desperately want to marry, but some people don't.

Some Christians choose celibacy because they're same-sex attracted.

Some people love aspects of being single and find other aspects desperately hard.

And there are married people here who know profound loneliness too.

So I'm not going to stand here and offer you a one-size-fits-all account of singleness.

I can only share something of what I've learned.

I'm single following a difficult marriage and a divorce many years ago.

I've been a single mum since my children were very, very young.

Um, and I've spent a long time wrestling with some of this.

And I've come to believe with all my heart that singleness is not a limitation, it's not second best, and it does not disqualify anyone from a full, fruitful, and purposeful life with God.

And it might surprise you, but it took me quite a while to figure that one out.

I had to let God deal with disappointment and grief and quite a lot of lies that I'd believed about marriage and singleness, and about myself, and about God.

So this morning, I want to look honestly at some of the challenges of singleness.

I don't want to spiritualise away the pain.

I don't want to tell people who are hurting they should simply be more grateful for their gift.

But neither do I want us to stop at the pain.

I want us to lift our eyes and ask what singleness and marriage look like from the perspective of eternity and what it means to live fully and faithfully in the life that God has given us now.

And I want to say up front that both singleness and marriage are good, but they both come with challenges.

God makes it clear that it's not good for man to be alone.

He designed us to be in community with him and with each other.

His word says he sets the lonely in families.

He commands us to look after the widows and the orphans.

We, Bethany, are a family who God has brought together to share life, to support, to strengthen and care for one another.

Singleness can be hard.

Even those happy being single aren't immune from its challenges.

So I'm going to chunk some some of the challenges into four areas cultural, emotional, practical, and spiritual.

There are probably plenty of others, but we all have lunches to get to, I'm sure.

We live in a culture where there are two different narratives dominating.

On the one hand, you are entitled to whatever you want.

Marriage is unnecessary or disposable.

Sex and personal fulfillment are the destination.

On the other, you're incomplete until you found someone.

Marriage is the destination, with singleness being the waiting room.

Spoiler alert, neither are God's way.

But single Christians can feel under great pressure to succumb to one or both ways of thinking.

And you can see the first one in our changing attitudes towards sex.

In 1983, 42% of people surveyed in the British Social Attitude Survey said sex before marriage was not wrong at all.

By 2022, that had risen to 78%.

We're increasingly living in a culture where marriage is considered optional, but sex isn't.

A culture where sex and personal gratification are idolized, scripture is often compromised, and those who choose to remain single and celibate are ridiculed.

Just have to think about the film The 40-year-old virgin.

The title itself tells you something.

The comic premise works because a man reaching 40 without having sex is considered so unusual that it's funny.

Sexual experience has become one of the ways that our culture measures, social media, and the conversations around us reinforce the message.

Sexual desire is something to be satisfied.

Waiting is strange.

Celibacy is stranger still.

And the idea that someone might voluntarily deny themselves something they deeply desire because of their obedience to God seems almost incomprehensible.

That's the culture our single adults are living in.

It's also the culture our children are growing up in.

But strangely, alongside that message sits an almost opposite one.

You need to find your person.

So from fairy tales and rom-coms to media, we're still surrounded by the assumption that life follows a particular trajectory.

Find someone, fall in love, get married, and have children.

Celebrities only have to go Instagram official with dating, and news outlets are clamouring to know if they're thinking of marriage.

And it might seem ridiculous, but it reveals something.

Start dating, and people ask, when are you getting married?

Get married, and it's when are you having children?

And if you're not moving along that path, at some point somebody wants to know why.

If you're anything like me, you might have grown up playing weddings.

I married off all of my dolls and my teddy bears.

My brothers and I even made family trees for all of our Lego people.

As a teenager, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do career-wise, but I knew I wanted to get married and have children.

It's what Christian women did.

And when I started dating the man I married, we'd been together less than six months, we hit a bit of a wall, we went to talk to an older Christian couple, and somehow came out of that meeting planning a wedding.

And looking back, there were people around us where we lived at the time who might have asked a few helpful questions or usefully said, slow down, are you sure?

My parents did, but naturally, as a fiercely independent teenager, they were the last people I was going to listen to.

Instead, much of the response from the Christians around me back then reinforced what I had already believed.

My Christian destiny was to marry a guy in a church.

Marriage was clearly the next step, so why wait?

In my head, the marriage train had arrived.

Why would I stay on the singleness platform?

Because somewhere along the way, I'd absorbed a message that marriage wasn't something simply something good.

Marriage would make me complete.

I'd fallen hook, line, and sinker for that second cultural story.

Now, I have no regrets.

I have four beautiful children.

But it typifies the pressure we can inadvertently put singles under.

And church, we need to be careful here.

We can reject the world's sexual ethic while accidentally accepting its underlying assumption that marriage or an intimate life partner is essential for a fulfilled life.

It isn't.

Marriage is good, but it's not the destination.

And we need to be careful that our language, our expectations, and even our enthusiasm for relationships don't communicate to single people that they're still standing on a platform waiting for their real life to begin.

There's enough pressure without us adding to it.

And it's not just cultural challenges that single people have to deal with.

In the book Surviving Christianity, Unmarried, author Carissa Sovdi describes the emotional turbulence of singleness.

I quite like how she puts it.

She says, I can still be surprised at how grief can sneak up on me in the middle of a fantastic weekend with my girlfriends and make me lonely.

Some days I'm giddy with independence, and other days I find myself choking back tears over ticking the single status on the tax form.

I sometimes break down in the grocery store at the random recognition that I may always cook for one.

I think she captures something important.

You can be genuinely content with your life and still be caught off guard by loneliness.

A birthday, a wedding, a photograph on a friend's social media, coming home to an empty house, and suddenly you're reminded of something you hoped your life would contain.

There was a period in my life when outside work and Sunday mornings at church, I could go through the week barely speaking to another adult.

There was nobody at home to process a difficult day with, share something exciting with, both particularly challenging for someone who's an external processor.

And doing very well.

And I became lonely, and that loneliness made me want to withdraw further.

But one of the hardest things for me personally was what I call being nobody's first.

Friends are great.

They can love you deeply.

But quite rightly, spouses and families become their priority.

And there have been times when I've got very low thinking, will I ever know what it feels like to be someone's first person?

Their choice.

The person they prefer, come home to, make decisions with, build their life around, lay their life down for.

And it's important to be honest about how it feels, because hidden hurt can open the door to jealous and bitterness and resentment.

And I think it's important that we name things like that rather than rushing past them.

Because that experience being nobody's first can have very practical consequences too.

When you're single, there isn't a default person to share the load with.

So no one to pick up the shopping, share the housework, do the paperwork, no one to put sun cream on my back, or check to see if any of the freckles back there have changed shape.

And having no option but to unblock the toilet by yourself.

That happened to me recently.

And holidays are tricky and significantly more expensive.

They're up to twice the price per person for someone travelling alone.

And you can't always go to all the destinations you want to.

And you need a companion who is prepared to spend their money and their precious annual leave on a holiday with you ahead of spending it on anyone else.

And for single parents, there's one income, one pair of hands, no one to take over when you're exhausted or share childcare in the school holidays.

And for others, there's the uncertainty of the future.

Who will be there as I get older?

Who will notice if I need help?

Who will care for me one day if I can't manage on my own?

And these aren't reasons to despair about singleness, but they are real practical questions that married people really have to think about.

And I don't want to dwell on the negatives because there are lots of positives to singleness too.

But loneliness, disappointment, grief, uncertainty can create fertile ground for lies the enemy uses to pull us off course and lead us down dangerous paths.

And the most dangerous lies are the ones that sound a bit like they could be true.

There must be something wrong with you.

If you had more faith, God would have answered by now.

Or like he did with Eve in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of Genesis, God is withholding something good from you.

You can't trust him.

He loves to find a crack to worm his way into our minds with the sole purpose of eating away at our trust in God and stopping us from becoming who God has called us to be.

And I've seen too many people lose faith in God because they feel that God is withholding something good from them in this area.

They put their desires ahead of their trust in God and turn away from him to meet their own needs.

For a long time I believed the lie that I couldn't fulfil God's calling on my life without a husband alongside me.

Nobody had explicitly taught me that, but I'd absorbed it.

Every church leader I'd known was married.

Everyone I saw in ministry seemed to be married.

Even Christians called into the workplace talked about the invaluable support of their spouse.

And I felt I'd had my one and only chance.

All my dreams, my hopes, my expectations, the calling I thought God had placed on my life all lay in tatters.

I thought it wasn't fair.

I didn't deserve it.

I grieved the loss of the life I thought I would have, and my life became about surviving, not thriving.

I felt like an athlete who'd false started and been disqualified.

But the problem wasn't God's calling.

I'd got my perspective wrong.

And perspective matters.

Because we live in a culture offering us a very attractive vision of the good life.

And sometimes faithfulness means looking at something that seems good, feels good, perhaps even looks like everything we've ever wanted, and saying no, because we trust that God's way is better.

And that reminds me of the book of Daniel.

Daniel and his friends had been carried into exile in Babylon.

They were selected for the royal court, taught Babylon's language and literature, and trained to serve in its government.

Now Daniel didn't reject everything about Babylon.

He learned its language, he received its education, he served in its government.

But there were lines he wouldn't cross.

Babylon could educate him, it could employ him, but it couldn't have his allegiance.

And one of the first tests came over food.

Daniel chapter 1 tells us that the king assigned them food and wine from the royal table.

Daniel 1 · chapter mention

These weren't prison rations.

This was royal food, the very best Babylon had to offer.

Imagine being hungry and presented with juicy lamb, roast poultry, freshly baked bread.

Am I making anyone hungry yet?

Rich sauces and the finest wine.

And then choosing vegetables and water.

That's what Daniel did.

The issue wasn't that vegetables were somehow more holy than roast lamb.

Daniel believed that eating the king's food would defile him.

He chose obedience to a God he couldn't see over something extremely attractive right in front of him.

And I think there's something here for us, because in one sense, we're in Babylon too.

This isn't our permanent home.

God's kingdom is.

And the culture around us constantly puts things in front of us and says, look how good this is.

Why would you deny yourself?

Surely God wants you to be happy.

It's the same whisper we heard in Eden.

Can you really trust God when He hasn't given you what you want?

And for a single Christian longing for intimacy, companionship, or marriage, that whisper can become incredibly loud.

And I know because I've been there.

A little while before COVID, apparently, I don't know if anyone else has noticed, the calendar is now BC and AC before and after COVID.

But I found myself a choice between God's way and my way.

And I wish I could tell you that because I love Jesus, the choice was easy.

It wasn't.

I dilly-dallied, I wrestled with it and I stumbled because what was being offered looked incredibly attractive.

It looked like so much of what my human heart wanted.

And some people around me told me, God wants you to be happy.

Now I'm sure God doesn't delight in seeing me unhappy, but I had to decide whether I believed that my happiness was safer in my hands or in his.

That was the real question.

And eventually, with God's help and people like Sonia around me who knew what I was wrestling with, I chose God's way.

I don't know what would have happened if I'd chosen differently, and I won't pretend that obedience magically made everything easy.

But I do know this.

I have never regretted trusting God.

Daniel didn't know how his story would unfold when he said no to the king's table.

He simply knew whose he was.

And I think that's the challenge for us, single and married, because this is bigger than marriage, companionship, sex, or relationships.

When God's way costs us something, do we still believe he is good?

When the alternative looks more attractive, do we still trust him?

When obedience feels like going without, do we believe that God knows better than we do what leads to life?

Daniel could make that choice because he knew that Babylon wasn't home, and neither is this our home.

So if we're going to understand marriage and singleness, we can't simply look at them from the perspective of what we have or don't have right now.

We need to lift our eyes.

We need a heavenly perspective.

So imagine this chair represents the person someone wishes was there.

So the husband or wife they haven't met, the spouse who died, the marriage that ended, the children they imagined, the person they wish they could come home to and tell about their day.

Being content isn't the absence of longing.

Even if we're comfortable in our or reconciled to our singleness, we don't need to pretend that there aren't moments when we would love the companionship and intimacy of a spouse.

Desiring marriage is not wrong.

Desiring marriage is normal and healthy.

Someone can deeply desire marriage and still live fully now.

God doesn't Ask us to pretend we wouldn't like our circumstances to change.

In fact, we are encouraged to lament and express our feelings, our loneliness and our longing, not hide it away.

In Psalm 142, David cries out, Look and see, there is no one at my right hand, no one is concerned for me.

I have no refuge, no one cares for my life.

He wasn't lamenting the absence of a spouse, but I recognize that.

That sounds an awful lot like I've sounded at times.

The Bible gives us permission to lament.

Lament gives our pain a voice in the presence of God.

But lament is different from fixation.

We can acknowledge the empty chair without spending our lives staring at it.

Because the danger is that what isn't there becomes so large in our vision that it starts to define everything else.

I'll be happy when?

I'll really start living when?

I'll feel complete when.

Lots of us have empty chairs and feel the pain.

But look around.

You can look around, that's fine.

If our focus is on the chair that is empty, what is not there, we miss out on what is there.

The family God has given us.

We miss out on the opportunity for fulfillment within our singleness.

And that's why I think we need to lift our eyes.

Not because the empty chair doesn't matter, not because wanting marriage is wrong, but because the empty chair isn't the whole picture.

Our circumstances here are real, but they aren't ultimate.

Married or single, widowed or divorced, with children or without them, none of us is living in the final version of our lives yet.

We're living in the now and the not yet.

We belong to Jesus now, we belong to his kingdom now, we have his spirit now, but we're still waiting for the day when everything broken is restored, every longing is finally answered in him, and we see Jesus face to face.

And there's something particularly significant here when we're talking about marriage, because earthly marriage was never meant to be the destination, it's a signpost.

And in Ephesians 5, Paul is talking about marriage, and he says, This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church.

Human marriage points beyond itself to something greater.

Jesus and his bride, us, the church.

If you're married, your marriage isn't the ultimate marriage, it points towards that one.

And if you're single, you haven't somehow missed the great love story of your life.

You are already in it.

That doesn't mean, well, you've got Jesus, so you shouldn't want a husband or a wife.

We were made for relationship.

Human intimacy and companionship are good things, and their absence can genuinely hurt.

But it does mean that marriage cannot give us the ultimate thing we were made for.

And singleness cannot deprive us of the ultimate thing we were made for either.

So part of learning to live well in singleness is learning to hold two truths together.

I can genuinely long for something I don't have, and I can genuinely live a full life with God while I don't have it.

And that's exactly the tension that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 7.

He's writing to people in all sorts of different circumstances: married, unmarried, widows, people wondering if they should marry.

And his message isn't that marriage is good and singleness is second best, nor is it that singleness is more spiritual and marriage is a distraction.

He takes both seriously, but he refuses to make either of them the thing that defines whether a life is full, faithful, or fruitful.

And we need to realize just how radical that was.

Paul wasn't writing into a culture which celebrated single independent life.

In both the Jewish world that Paul came from and the Roman world the Corinthians lived in, marriage, family, and producing children carried enormous social weight.

Jewish tradition treated marriage and having children as an important religious duty, particularly for the men.

And in the Roman Empire, marriage and childbearing were considered so important that Augustus had introduced laws which encouraged marriage and penalized some adults who remained unmarried or childless.

And even widows of childbearing age were expected to remarry within a specific period.

Marriage was the expected adult path.

Your family line, your social standing, your economic security, and your place in the community could all be bound up with it.

So when Paul calls singleness a gift, not a problem that needs solving, and he sees freedoms and opportunities within it, he is directly challenging the status quo.

In a culture which puts enormous pressure on people to marry, Paul takes the single person out of life's waiting room.

Marriage is good, but isn't compulsory for a full, fruitful, or faithful Christian life.

And he's not reluctantly finding something useful for single people to do.

You know, at least you've got more time to serve in church.

Who's heard that before?

He's giving it value.

And Paul has the same eternal perspective we've been talking about.

Later in the chapter, he says the time is short and this world in its present form is passing away.

He's not saying that life, this life doesn't matter.

He's saying this isn't the final chapter.

And knowing that doesn't make us disengage from the life we're living now, it frees us to live it.

And at the beginning, I compared singleness to getting a Christmas present you didn't want and being told to be grateful for it.

But it's a misunderstanding of the gift.

Paul isn't telling hurting single people to paste on a smile and be grateful they haven't got married.

He's saying that your relationship status does not prevent you from receiving and living the life that God has for you now.

But how do you live fully now when the life we've got isn't the life we hoped for?

How do we acknowledge the disappointment and the grief and the loneliness without allowing them to define us?

And I've thought about what's worked for me and what I've learned from others.

And I think it comes down to four things.

So they conveniently all start with a letter L.

So lament, look up, look around, and live now.

We talked a little bit about lament already.

Tell God the truth about what hurts.

Don't confuse contentment with pretending.

Be honest with God.

Lament says, God, this hurts.

This isn't how I wanted things to be.

I don't understand what you're doing.

I wish it were different.

But I'm bringing that pain to you.

It's acknowledging the hurt and surrendering.

And when we offer our surrender to God, including our dreams and the future that we imagined.

Don't put on a mask that everything is okay.

Brush it under the carpet or dive headfirst into busyness to cover the hurt.

Be real with God about it.

And look up.

Remember whose you are, where you belong, and where you're going.

Don't ask an earthly relationship to carry the weight of your ultimate hope.

Keep returning to scripture that lifts your eyes from your circumstances and reminds you of God's character, his promises, and the bigger story that you're part of.

There's a passage in Isaiah 56 that speaks into this.

It says, And don't let the eunuch say, I am a dried-up tree with no children and no future.

For this is what the Lord says.

I will bless those eunuchs who keep my Sabbath days holy and who choose to do what pleases me and commit their lives to me.

I will give them within the walls of my house a memorial and a name far greater than sons and daughters could give.

For the name I give them is an everlasting one, it will never disappear.

The eunuch says, I'm only a dry tree.

I can't bear fruit, I can't have children.

And God's response is basically, no, that's not your identity, that's not your destiny.

I will give you an everlasting name that will endure forever.

You belong to me, you have a name, you have a place, you have a future, and your story is eternal.

Don't define yourself by the empty chair.

Define yourself by what God says about you.

Your relationship status may describe something about your circumstances, but it doesn't define who you are.

You are not primarily single, married, divorced.

One who is known and loved by God, chosen by him, belonging to him, and given a place in his family, and whatever your circumstances, nothing can rob you of that.

So invest in your relationship with God, put down roots in his word, pray.

Allow him to heal old wounds and challenge the lies that you've believed.

And ask people you trust to pray with you.

Have some prayer ministry.

Don't wait for some future version of your life before becoming the person God is calling you to be.

And look around.

Don't stare so intently at the empty chair that you miss the people God has put around your table.

Invest deeply in friendship.

Church family, biological family, neighbors, younger and older generations.

And when you're struggling, reach out rather than withdraw.

Earlier this year at Catalyst, a couple of those old lies suddenly resurfaced for me.

You'll never be all God has called you to be on your own.

You can't really fulfil your calling without a husband.

Your failed marriage disqualifies you from leadership.

I knew they weren't true, but I also knew from experience what could happen if I gave them space.

So I looked around to see who was there.

And I um I grabbed Kelly, dragged her away from packing down her tent.

I'm sorry, Andy, I don't know where Andy is, but I probably should apologize to you.

And I told her what was going on in my head, and I asked her to pray with me.

Sometimes looking around simply means refusing to fight the battle on your own.

Find people who will know you, challenge you, encourage you, and pray with you.

Be willing to say, I'm struggling today.

Will you help me?

Because although Jesus is ultimately sufficient, God hasn't designed us to be relationally self-sufficient.

The New Testament version of the church is one of shared lives, mutual encouragement, hospitality, accountability, carrying burdens, meeting needs, friendship and love.

So when we call ourselves family, do people who are single actually experience us as family?

Because Jesus' understanding of family was much bigger than marriage to children.

As John shared the other week, when Jesus was told his mother and brothers were looking for him, he looked around and he said, Here are my mother and brothers.

Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.

The church isn't a collection of nuclear families who occasionally practice hospitality towards single people until they find a family of their own.

It's family.

Each of us has something to offer and a part to play, and we need each other.

And that should have practical consequences.

So if you're married, think about the single people in your life.

Who notices when they don't turn up?

Who would they call if something went wrong at 2 a.m.?

Who helps them out if they're ill?

And when you're planning family life, Sundays, Christmas celebrations, is there room at your table?

Some of the acts of love that I've remembered most have been incredibly ordinary.

When we first moved to Harmenden, Maureen invited me and my four children for a meal when I was barely coping.

Sally once appeared at my door after work with a birthday present, not knowing she was the first person that day to wish me happy birthday in person.

They probably seemed like small things to them, but they weren't small to me.

And a number of years ago, when my children went to the Friday Night Youth Group, I realized that I had spare seats in my car and I could help facilitate date nights for friends by taking their children too.

And yes, of course, there were moments where I thought, oh, it's not fair, I'd love a date night.

And in those moments, I made a choice about how I responded.

But we're family, we belong to one another.

It's reciprocal.

So look around.

Who has God already put around your table?

Who could you make room for?

Who could you ask for help?

What help could you be to somebody else?

And not just emotional or prayer support, make it practical.

Help with DIY, household chores, fun family outings, real life.

If Jesus says we are family, let's become the kind of church where nobody goes home and wonders whether we actually mean it.

And the last of those elves live now, don't put life on hold for a hypothetical future spouse.

Make decisions, build a home, create traditions, pursue calling, serve, take risks, celebrate things, invest in people.

You don't need to wait for another person before your real life begins.

And for me, making myself go to church every week when I was at my lowest was the first step.

And even now, I know that going to community group when I don't feel like it or reaching out to someone when I'm lonely are important.

But serving, joining a team, building connections, doing something nice for somebody else all shift my focus from my circumstances to God and help me live well in the now.

Because there's a danger in always thinking, I'll do that when.

I'm a classic for that one.

When I meet someone, when I get married, when life looks different, when this season ends.

But this isn't the waiting room.

This is life.

A scripture that's been particularly helpful in my life is Jeremiah 29, 11.

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.

They are plans for good and not disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

And it's a verse we can quote so easily that it can sometimes sound trite, especially when someone's life hasn't gone to plan.

But its context makes it so much more powerful.

God was speaking to his people in exile in Babylon.

And just a few verses earlier, he tells them something they probably didn't want to hear.

You're gonna be in Babylon longer than you expected.

So build houses, plant gardens, live, seek the good of the city where you are.

In other words, don't put life on hold waiting to get out of Babylon.

God wasn't promising them an immediate escape from the circumstances they didn't want.

He was telling them, I haven't forgotten you.

I still have a future for you.

Don't wait for your circumstances to change before you start living faithfully and fruitfully where you are.

And sometimes we're so focused on asking God to change our circumstances that we miss what He wants us to do in the now.

And maybe we need to stop only asking, who do I wish were sitting in this chair?

And ask, what could I do with the space that's there?

Who can I welcome?

Who needs family?

Who could become part of mine?

The empty chair can represent absence, but it can also represent capacity.

So build, plant, live.

And I just think it's lovely this morning that we've just been singing about how wonderful God is, and just it's been such a joyful morning.

And singleness can be such a joyful time and joyful period.

And and and I yeah, I just I just felt if you I could just like us to respond this morning.

So I'd just like you to have a think for a moment about what that empty chair represents for you.

And I'd like you to pause for a moment and just ask yourself this question if you're single, am I living with God fully in the life that I have now?

Or am I waiting for something to change before I really begin?

And if you're married, am I helping make this church genuinely feel like family to people whose lives and relationships look different from mine?

And I don't want this to be a really, really heavy thing, you know the presence of God is joyful.

But these just my sense this morning, God just wants to lift our eyes and just look at eternity.

All of our circumstances, whatever they are, are in the context of eternity.

And so as you just think about this question, I'm just gonna ask Timmy, I'm not sure where Timmy is, um, just to um if he could just come and play.

And I'd just like us to just have a couple of minutes quiet, um, really just to just to reflect.

I'm aware that there's been some hard stuff this morning, and things might felt quite difficult for people.

And so I just want to take this time, just just you and God, just processing a little bit what you've heard with God and just asking God, what do you want to show me this morning?

Am I living fully in that life that I have now?