By Monica Miller, a senior music education major from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
This week’s theme: Me & You & the Generations After You
When you think of the generations after you, whose faces come to mind?
I don’t know you. I don’t know how old you are or where you live or what you do for a living. So I can only guess that you thought of your own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They may not exist yet, but that’s probably what the majority of you thought of. Creating a family, whether through marriage or adoption or biological means, is a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and it’s one that unites all of us around the globe.
Or, almost all of us, I should say. Because I have to exclude myself.
We know that God’s covenant was expanded from the Israelites to include all people through faith, and we know that, spiritually speaking, we are siblings in Christ, biologically related or not.
And yet, our most prized models for understanding and getting to know God are rooted in examples of the healthy nuclear family, particularly in marriage (understanding God’s faithfulness) and parenthood (understanding a facet of God’s love for us).
As we are stretched in this Lenten season to experience our covenantal relationship with God and each other in new ways, may we also be stretched to hear different voices, in this case those of single people: that through intentional singleness one may get to know different sides of God more deeply than one can any other way. Yes, marriage and parenthood offer important insights into God’s character, but let us not forget the lessons of unequivocal focus and the prophetic all-sufficiency of Christ in the single’s covenant with God and the spiritual generations after us.
Spiritual generations… now whose faces come to mind?