Revelations of a Single Woman - Part 1 of 4

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Connally, welcome to For Faith & Family.

CONNALLY GILLIAM: Thank you, Richard, I’m glad to be here.

LAND: One of the reasons I think this book has struck such a cord, and I think is going to strike such a cord, is that it is a subject that we all know about—if you are in the church, you can’t not know it. We are confronted with a situation where in the church today, we have more women who are not married and not living with their parents in our churches than ever before in the history of Christendom, and I think a lot of people don’t know exactly why it is. But they do know that we are experiencing a phenomenon that is a first and it’s not just a group phenomenon. It is a phenomenon experienced by millions of individual Christian women who were raised expecting to be married, wanting to be married, desiring to be married, not feminists, not women who had a chip on their shoulder when it came to men—godly, pious women, and they are not married. I thought one of the most touching parts of the book was one of the conversations that you had with your mother in which your mom says, and I’m paraphrasing now, your mom says, “Well, you know, we always expected to give you away one day, but we expected to give you to somebody, not nobody,” and I think that’s the dilemma, isn’t it?

GILLIAM: Yes, well it is a dilemma, where is home for the single woman? It is with her original family? And what if she doesn’t live near her original family, which, as you mentioned, is increasingly characteristic in a mobile culture. People are moving to major urban areas because that’s where the jobs are; but the family is not necessarily being there. I think that for my parents, my mother in particular, the struggle to say I am letting you go or releasing you, it is one thing to say, of course, you’re always in God’s hands, but it is another thing, I think, for a parent to say, I truly release you into the hands of the God who is not actually visible, yet incredibly real. My mother is a very committed believer but that has been a hard thing for her. Though to her credit, she has worked through her struggles with that as well.

LAND: Well, I was moved to tears as I read this book because, you know, as a dad with a single daughter, I relate to this, and I have seen as a pastor and as a minister, I have seen this as well, women who are coming to terms with, and trying to cope with the fact that they, indeed, may be unintentionally single for their lives. When you wrote this book, were you surprised by anything? Did you come to a new understanding of things?

GILLIAM: I did. I think one of the things in the book that shows up, which I am a little embarrassed about really, is, how do I put this? The idolatry of marriage in myself. There is some way to look at marriage, which I think is to hold it in its right perspective, which is as a good gift from God. And I don’t want anyone to ever deny or have to downplay or pretend like it is a gift that they wouldn’t like to receive or to push it down or pretend they are above all that, or whatever; I’m not that into it. But conversely, as marriage becomes an idol that replaces God, that is problematic as well. And I think for me, the privilege in writing the book was almost that I had the opportunity to grapple with what role in my mind and soul marriage really should be playing.

LAND: Well, I think that’s an important point. I think it is idolatry, but it is one that is not just one that individuals fall into, it is one that the Christian church has fallen into, particularly evangelical conservative Christian churches. You know, it is amazing to me, we have such difficulty as Christians historically getting this right. You know, in the middle ages, we elevated celibacy and made it a holier estate than marriage, which is certainly not biblical, and then from the reformation onward, we have tended to make marriage a holier estate than celibacy and this is odd, considering the fact that we follow a Savior who was celibate. And I think that we have a very difficult time, and have had a very difficult time, in the Christian faith in getting a proper balance in terms of understanding that both celibacy and the marital estate are equally spiritual and holy estates, depending on how you are living in them.

GILLIAM: Right, I think that has only begun to truly make sense, and I’m not talking about just in my head, but down my in soul or down in my knower, that’s what I like to call it, that has only truly begun to make sense as I have realized that really what matters ultimately is the far bigger picture, which is God’s kingdom and when I can remember, hey, this life is really just as C.S. Lewis says, “the title page on the story which is yet to come.” Then I can realize, hey, it might be single, it might still be married, I’m thirty-one, I’m not dead yet. It might be married and then single again, you can’t say, but that is all subsumed under this larger umbrella of, hey, I get to particulate with God in the expansion of his kingdom in making his kingdom real in people’s lives. That seems to give perspective to my own soul’s desires and yearnings.

LAND: Well, I’m going to skip ahead because I think the most profound part of this book in terms of why it is going to strike a cord. It is found on pages 129-130, where you are talking about visiting with Dr. Houston, part of a Scottish couple that you were visiting in Canada, and what Dr. Houston said to you I think really does get at the heart of helping people understand why this is happening. Dr. Houston was driving you back and he said, “Connally, you have suffered much being single, the question of course is how will you suffer? Will you suffer with bitterness or will you suffer prophetically? You see, your generation is experiencing the fallout of a culture profoundly confused about who God is, and, therefore, about what it is to be human and what it is to love. Your relational disappointments and suffering are sadly emblematic of the age. Talk to us about how you felt when he said that to you.

GILLIAM: Well, I felt so many different things. I think I felt scared because I don’t want my sufferings to be emblematic of the age. I just want it to be something I can work on, you know, get a better hairdo or lose a couple of pounds, or go on Match.com or something and just find that man and get it taken care of. So part of me just wants to push back, but at a deeper place, I felt like, wow, this man gets it. He is seeing it, he is seeing that there is something going on that is not just about me or not just about my girlfriend and her issue or this person and their issue, and, in a way, I felt incredibly released. I felt known and I felt that somebody had compassion for the situation without putting me in some victim role, they nevertheless were seeing that, hey, there is a culture that is so confused out there and, unfortunately, to the degree we are living in a culture, which we are, we are going to be affected by it too. There is no way around that.

LAND: Well, that is exactly right and, you know, Barna’s studies showed that 36% of the people in the church are single, and 47% of the population in our nation are single. Those are the highest they have ever been. We have more twenty-somethings who have never been married than ever before in our history. I want to say to all of those single women out there, particularly, because if a guy is single he can do something about it, much more easily than a woman can. Disproportionately, especially in the church, these are single woman. This is not your fault. This is not something that you are just dealing with, this is a consequence of broad-ranging social decay in this culture—a rejection of a Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality, divorce as a result of that. We now know that one of the reasons that children who are the children of divorce are much more likely to never marry. Children who are the product of divorce, if they do marry, are much more likely to divorce. Divorce has enormous continuing consequences on the children of divorce. You take all of these together, and you understand why there are more women in your age group, Christian women, who are single than ever before and there is not a lot of resources, not a lot of understanding, not a lot of support groups. Many of the support groups I see for single women are, how can we help you get married? How can we help fix you? That’s why I think your book is such a ministry to single women and those who love them.

GILLIAM: Well, you know, it is interesting too, Richard, because I have had great feedback from single women but I think also from married people as well as men, both married and single, because I think what the book does hopefully is it addresses these questions of singleness in our culture but it takes us to a yet deeper question which is, how do we embrace the life that we are given when it doesn’t look like the life we expected? Which, clearly, is an issue for all kinds of people and I think often times in America there’s this sense that, well gosh, we have the resources, we have the capacity, if you want something, you can make it happen, and if you can’t, it’s your fault. And I think it is realizing, no, you know, it varies with bigger God who is in control. There is a culture that is big, and our best bet is learning simply how to be good followers of Jesus in the midst of it and release the demands that life has to look like we want it to on our terms.