Here's the truth, as I see it: You and I may not get married -- or remarried, as the case may be.

"You know, Lori, the right guy is out there, and he's worth waiting for." Liz sipped her coffee and shot me a reassuring glance. As much as I love Liz, I couldn't believe her.

Liz was a happy-thinker (after several single years, I had learned to fear them). She was kind. She wanted me to be happy. She knew I wanted to be married. She thought God would give me what I wanted. She spoke with the assurance of the prophet in the wilderness. But what did she know?

Some happy-thinkers send their warm wishes with a vengeance. They wear their marriage as a badge of honor that they have attained a level of spiritual maturity beyond us -- they were completely content, they waited on God without giving Him a timetable. They committed to be a long-term missionary in a small African village known for cannibalism. Whatever it was, they're sure if you would just do the same thing -- attain the same spiritual maturity they had before they married -- God would reward you. The worst of them chime, "Ah, well, God must have more to teach you."

At such well-meant idiocy (for it is idiotic, if well-meant -- can you imagine treating a cancer victim that way? "I'm so sorry the cancer spread to your liver; God must have more to teach you"), one question rises in the minds of the entire Christian single population: What in the world are they talking about? (And, ahem, just maybe . . . are they right?)

Here's the truth, as I see it: You and I may not get married -- or remarried, as the case may be.

(We're getting the worst part over first.)

Call me a pessimist, a glass-half-empty girl, a little-faith. But I had to accept this truth before I could enjoy the single life God has given me, without always looking around the corner for what's coming next.

God promises to provide all our needs. He promises to be with us. He doesn't promise us a husband or wife. It has nothing to do with our spiritual maturity, and everything to do with God's plan for our lives.

I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't hope, but there's a wonderful freedom that comes when you face your worst fear head-on and -- with God's grace -- move beyond it.

Inevitably, people believe the most reassuring thing they can tell you is that it will all work out. God will bless you: the perfect husband or wife will come; you'll be married and have a beautiful family. They believe these blessings are nearly guaranteed for you. You're their friend, brother, daughter; they can't imagine your not getting married.

And it's easier for them -- and for you -- to believe that it will all work out. It's much harder to say, "Whatever happens, God will be with you; He knows what He's doing."

If we believe that God will bring us a husband, we're only required to trust Him a little bit -- enough to bring us a man. If we believe that no matter what, God will be in it, and will act on what is best both for us and for His eternal plan, then we have to trust God with all of our hearts. That's much harder.

This is just one example of the way our faith has gotten sloppy.

I recently overheard these comments:

"God is going to bless me; I know He is! I've been through so much lately -- it's just been a time of fire, of trials, you know? So I know there's a huge blessing right around the corner."

"You know, if you do that, if you're faithful and give up Kyle -- what's most important to you -- you'll get a reward. If it's not getting him back, it's someone else. But it's something. God will reward you for that." (What about the reward of knowing God?)

We believe that having faith means believing that God has good things in store for us. We emphasize His goodness, kindness, and love, and the tangible ways we know they'll work themselves out in our lives -- a new job when we're suddenly laid off, a beautiful new house when we're forced to move, the perfect roommate, the health of a loved one, the perfect spouse. That's not faith.

Don't get me wrong. God does have good things in store for us, and He blesses us every day. It's not wrong to hope in that, and I'm not saying that in order to be a good Christian you have to hang your head and believe you're doomed. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)

We err when we use the logic, "Since God is good and desires to bless me, He will give me x." (Fill in the blank here -- a wonderful husband, a new house, healing for a close friend.) We slip into a name-it-and-claim-it theology, believing that God will keep us from the things that would be the most painful for us.

We say things like, "You'll get better soon; God is watching over you," implying that God heals those He watches over. And the ones who die, or stay sick forever and ever? Did God forsake them?

Perhaps we do it because we don't want to face the truth about who God is; we sense there may be an uglier reality beneath all of this that we don't want to swallow.

It wouldn't take much effort to believe in a God who was always there pitching in at the right time with the perfect solution to each of our problems. The irony is, we know deep down inside that God -- or life -- doesn't really work that way, so it does take a great deal of effort to believe in this kind of fairy godmother God. We work and pray and trust, and the reality of faith and God eludes us.

When I interviewed Dr. Larry Crabb about his book, Shattered Dreams, he talked about our tendency to trust Christ for a good life:

I was saved at age 8 at a boys' camp where the counselor had 80 boys look into a bonfire and said, "Boys you have a choice to make. Trust Jesus or burn in the fires of hell forever." I thought that was a no-brainer so I trusted Jesus, and I think when I trusted Him for salvation to go to heaven I think I was trusting Him for a good life. I think I was trusting Him for pleasant feelings, for nice circumstances, for everything going well: meeting a nice girl, marrying her, having wonderful kids, having great sex, having great money, having great health, all the blessings of life.

And God has given me a ton of blessings -- there's no question of that -- but there have been some bumps. I had cancer 4 years ago -- that wasn't part of the plan. My brother was killed in an airplane crash 11 years ago. My mother has Alzheimer's. As I got older I think I began to realize that God is not committed to the good that I thought He was committed to. One of my favorite quotes is from Oswald Chambers. He says, "The root of all sin is the suspicion that God is not good." I think I have always believed in His goodness but more on the basis of the way He would bless me than on the basis of His kindness and love.

Genuine faith is believing that whatever decision God makes is the right one...and that he's still good. It's praying for a loved one, and still believing in God when he or she dies anyway. It's trusting that God is good and His hand is at work when there's a pain in your soul that goes beyond words.

The Bible is full of stories about people for whom the call of faith meant tremendous difficulty. Abraham picked up his family and moved, with no idea of where they would end up. Joseph was sold into slavery, spent years in a prison -- and, in the end, was wise enough to recognize that God meant it for good. For years, God's prophets were tortured and killed for speaking the truth. The hall of faith in Hebrews 11 honors those who "were killed by stoning, by being sawn in two; they were murdered by the sword. They went about with nothing but sheepskins or goatskins to cover them. They lost everything, and yet were spurned and ill-treated by a world too evil to see their worth" (Heb. 11:37-38).

At this point, you may be thinking that you didn't really sign up for more than a camp bonfire and a simple decision between Jesus and hell, and you'd like to get out. Christianity isn't easy. The value in our pain is that through it God draws us to Himself, molds our clay into a better piece of work, wears away rough edges around our heart.

This principle reverberates through scripture, though perhaps no more clearly than in James:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4, NIV)

J.B. Phillips translates the passage like this:

When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, my brothers, don't resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realise that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character, men of integrity with no weak spots.

And Paul repeats the theme again in Romans 5:

Since then it is by faith that we are justified, let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace, and here we take our stand, in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.

This doesn't mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys -- we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles. These very things will give us patient endurance; this in turn will develop a mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope, a hope that will never disappoint us. (Romans 5:1-5)

"Consider it all joy. . . . " I'm not anywhere near that. That's a verse I ignore whenever possible. Through the pain of my breakup with Brian, though, I got a few small glimpses into what it means to count it all joy.

At the beginning, God gave me hope through Pastor Blake's message that bleak Sunday morning. I had a vision of God taking my desperate feelings of grief, loneliness, and shame, and using them to grow me into someone more like Himself. I was sustained by the hope that I would be changed, and the knowledge that God was close.

Several months later, on Easter Sunday, I sat in church thinking how ill-prepared I was for the Easter service, how little time I'd spent contemplating the sacrifice and miracle we celebrated. My closest friend, Brenda, was married on Good Friday. I'd moved the week before for the fifth time in as many years. I was exhausted. Then, the choir sang, the scripture was read, and I realized again the truth of the resurrection.

Nothing else mattered. God knew me. He had saved me. Jesus had risen. In the midst of darkness, God was a strong tower, the only place I was secure.

I was surprised -- though I shouldn't have been -- by these flashes of joy in the midst of what was for me the pit of despair. In many ways, God was closer in my deepest pain than He had been before.

Madeleine L'Engle, in Two-Part Invention, a biographical account of her marriage to Hugh Franklin, details their struggle with the cancer that eventually took Hugh's life. Madeleine talks about knowing God more intimately in "the place of excrement." She quotes these lines by Yeats, with the following commentary:

But Love has pitched her mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent. . . .

. . . I hear different people tell of some good or lucky event and then say, "Surely the Lord was with me." And my hackles rise. My husband is desperately ill, so where is the Lord? What about that place of excrement? Isn't that where Love's mansion is pitched? Isn't that where God is?

Doesn't such an attitude trivialize the activities and concerns of the Maker? Doesn't it imply that God is with us only during the good and fortuitous times and withdraws or abandons us when things go wrong?

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when the good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

One of my favorite stories is the one about Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. You may know them by the Babylonian names they were given after they went into captivity -- Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Trapped in a foreign land, under orders from the king to bow down or be burned alive, they responded with the utmost strength and grace:

"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:16-18)

"Our God can save us. He's strong enough to do that. But even if He doesn't -- if He chooses not to -- we refuse to bow. We love Him more than our own lives."

These men understood real faith.

They knew God's power: He was able to deliver them. They acknowledged His sovereignty: He could deliver them or not. The decision was completely His. They understood enough of God's faithfulness to know that He would deliver them one way or the other -- by life, or by death. They trusted implicitly that whatever choice God made was the right one: they knew God was good, and made good choices. And they honored God's worthiness: live or die, they would worship only Him.

Their obedience was not contingent on God doing what they thought best or pleasant. They found the object of their affection in God Himself -- not in what He could do for them.

It seems audacious to compare the burden of singleness to a heroic leap into Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, but in some sense we're in the same predicament. We have to love God for God Himself, not what He can do for us. He's powerful enough to answer our prayers, but He may choose not to. We love Him anyway. We love Him more than our own lives.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, argues that the one-time complete sacrifice is sometimes easier than the smaller, ongoing sacrifices we are called to make. He's describing the faith of the youngest son, Alyosha, and his contemporaries, who were eager to play the martyr for a worthy cause.

" . . . these youths do not understand that the sacrifice of one's life is in most cases the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their life, full of youthful fervor, to hard and difficult study, if only to increase tenfold their powers of serving truth so as to be able to carry out the great work they have set their hearts on carrying out -- that such a sacrifice is beyond the strength of many of them."

Some of us are called to 5 or 6 years of "hard and difficult study," of finding contentment and serving Christ in a life we would not choose. Some of us are called to 10 or 20 years, or to a lifetime. Our daily sacrifices add up to something very honorable in the end.

Jeremiah 29:11 hangs on my wall: "'For I know the plans I have for you,' says the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you, and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" It's often frustrated me as another item in the happy-thinkers' arsenal. What does it mean? Does God have good plans for me, individually? What kind of good plans?

It's worthwhile to understand the history behind the promise, though if you've studied Old Testament history at all, the roles will be familiar:

• Judah (the southern kingdom of Israel): errant child; plays the harlot with her faith, looking for any other God than the one she already knows, even if it means sacrificing her own children.
• God: supreme Deity; loving Father loathe to punish; sends a messenger to warn of punishment and call His children back.
• Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon: powerful aggressor sent to chastise (later becomes acquainted with Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, when he tries to get them to worship his image in Babylon).
• Jeremiah: prophet; in the middle of all the action, pulling out his hair for lack of an appreciative audience; must speak whatever God tells him to (Judah will be conquered if they do not repent) as often as God wants him to (over and over and over and over).
• False prophets: gain popularity by telling the people what they want to hear; claim to speak for God to give their message credibility (though I doubt they would make that claim in God's presence, since they're really just making everything up).

There were more gods than there were cities in Judah, including Baal, to whom they offered live sacrifices of Judean children. God equated their faithlessness to spiritual prostitution, and said of them, "How skilled you are at pursuing love! Even the worst of women can learn from your ways" (Jer. 2:33). Yet, He pleaded with them to change. Jeremiah carried God's pleas to Judah for more than twenty years, until Jeremiah's heart was worn out.

Judah refused to change. Babylon attacked, as Jeremiah had prophesied. Nebuchadnezzar carried off all the men, women, and children who survived, along with the country's treasures. II Chronicles sums up the situation:

The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through His messengers again and again, because he had pity on His people and on His dwelling place. But they mocked God's messengers, despised His words and scoffed at His prophets until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against his people and there was no remedy. He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged. God handed all of them over to Nebuchadnezzar. He carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord's temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. They set fire to God's temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem; they burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there.

He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power. (II Chron. 36:15-20)

The story didn't end with Judah's captivity. The people wanted hope. False prophets proclaimed that Babylon would fall, and Judah would be packing up soon to head home. God had other plans: Judah's stay in Babylon would last seventy years.

To set things straight, Jeremiah (who was still in Judah) sent a letter to the exiles in Babylon telling them to relax and settle in a bit. In the midst of this letter sits Jer. 29:11, giving them, as a nation, the hope of a future in their own land with the God who continued to seek them:

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. . . . Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them," declares the Lord.

. . . "When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you," declares the Lord, "and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile." (Jer. 29:4-14, emphasis mine)

Jeremiah 29:11 was given directly to the nation of Israel, not to each individual but to the nation as a whole. It was tied to their repentance and return to the Lord. At the end of seventy years, they would seek God with all their heart, and find Him. He would then gather them back from all the places they were scattered. They'd have to wait much longer than their false prophets were predicting, but God hadn't given up on them. They did, in fact, have a future as a nation.

So what does this mean for each of us? The life of Jeremiah may be a telling example. Jeremiah was alone. No one liked him. His family and friends turned against him. His life was threatened more than once. He didn't enjoy being a prophet, but when he tried to keep quiet, he found that God's word was like "a fire shut up in [his] bones" (Jer. 20:9), and he couldn't keep from speaking it.

Kathleen Norris talks about Jeremiah's emotional highs and lows in The Cloister Walk:

The voice of Jeremiah is compelling, often on an overwhelmingly personal level. One morning, I was so worn out by the emotional roller coaster of chapter 20 that after prayers I walked to my apartment and went back to bed. This passionate soliloquy, which begins with a bitter outburst on the nature of the prophet's calling ("You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed"), moves quickly into denial ("I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones"). Jeremiah's anger at the way his enemies deride him rears up, and also fear and sorrow ("All my close friends are watching for me to stumble"). His statement of confidence in God ("The Lord is with me like a dread warrior") seems forced under the circumstances, and a brief doxology ("Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers") feels more ironic than not, being followed by a bitter cry: "Cursed be the day that I was born." The chapter concludes with an anguished question: "Why did I come forth from the womb, to see sorrow and pain, to end my days in shame?" . . .

In the Book of Jeremiah we encounter a very human prophet, and a God who is alarmingly alive. Jeremiah makes it clear that no one chooses to fall into the hands of such a God. You are chosen, you resist, you resort to rage and bitterness and, finally, you succumb to the God who has given you your identity in the first place.

God had good things planned for Judah, when they sought Him. He would continue to love them. He would forgive them. But part of that good plan was for Jeremiah to ceaselessly talk about it, even when no one would listen -- a task that left Jeremiah with "a fire in his bones."

We share Jeremiah's predicament. We are chosen (though sometimes we see no grand purpose in the pain of our unfulfilled dreams), we resist God's choice for us, perhaps we resort to rage and bitterness, and eventually we give in. The beauty of Jeremiah 29:11 is that we know the nature of the God we are giving in to: He is forgiving. He doesn't give up easily. He wants us to seek Him; He wants to be found. On a grand scale, He is working out good plans that we have the privilege to be part of.

I'm still tempted to read the verse hanging on my wall and trivialize it -- turn God into the fairy godmother who will show up with a beautiful gown and save me from scrubbing floors. But then I remember the man who wrote it, and the fire in my own bones, and pray that -- in the end -- it will be a good part of a bigger plan.

Psalm 37:4 is another difficult verse to understand. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." The way we interpret it says a lot about our view of God. Is He cruel, giving us desires only to watch us struggle when they go unfulfilled? One guy who emailed me thought so:

To be satisfied without having a desire met. That is a tough thing to do. I think for God to give someone a desire to be married, which I believe is in His will for the majority of singles, and not meet that desire is cruel of God to do that.

Most of the interpretations I've heard for this verse say that rather than granting all your wishes, God will give you your desires -- that is, not grant them, but work with the actual substance of your desires, so that your desires match his. But what do you do with the woman in her forties or fifties who still wants to be married, but doesn't have any hope? For years, she's begged God to take away this desire, but He hasn't.

Perhaps it should be interpreted to mean that God Himself will become the fulfillment of your desires. He will meet you: in knowing Him, the deepest desires of your soul will be met.

David's theme is that righteous people will be rewarded, and evil people will be punished. The righteous don't have to worry about justifying themselves in men's eyes, or punishing those who have wronged them. God will take care of all of this.

At the beginning, David exhorts us to righteousness, listing dozens of things we should do when we're wronged:

Do not fret because of evil men
or be envious of those who do wrong;
for like the grass they will soon wither,
like green plants they will soon die away.
Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
Delight yourself in the Lord
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret -- it leads only to evil.
For evil men will be cut off,
but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.
(Psalm 37:1-9)

We often focus entirely on verse 4 and neglect the other commands this passage contains:

• do not fret or be envious
• trust in the Lord
• do good
• dwell in the land
• enjoy safe pasture
• delight yourself in the Lord
• commit your way to the Lord
• trust in Him
• be still before the Lord
• wait patiently for Him
• do not fret
• refrain from anger
• turn from wrath
• DO NOT FRET! (emphasis mine).

David emphasizes the fact that God is faithful to the righteous. He will defend their cause and protect their justice. We know that if He doesn't defend us now, He will in the end. We have nothing to fear. Ultimately, we will be saved.

When we delight in God, our perspective on life changes -- part of the radical transformation described in Romans 12. "Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-make you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed. Thus you will prove in practice that the will of God is good, acceptable to him, and perfect" (Rom. 12:2). Rather than focusing on what our desires are and how God is meeting them or not meeting them, changing them or not changing them, we need to delight, to rest, to trust.

I struggle with believing that God wants me to delight in Him. In a journal entry last March, I wrote:

God wants us to dance at His feet, to delight in Him.

I cower at God's feet. I don't dance.

But there's so much to cower from, and so many reasons to hide. Even if I've confessed everything that I can think of, there's so much that's just evil inside me -- so much of the core of who I am -- that I just can't confess it all.

So I hide, I sheepishly step forward and give my too-short prayers. (If guilt keeps me from praying, it also haunts me when I pray -- surely they are not in the right format, long enough, sincere enough -- and exactly why am I not getting up at 4 am to pray? I have no good excuses. The history of the saints is enough to condemn me.)

Maybe you've felt the same way. I wish I could delight in God without any second thoughts. I hope He will teach me that.

I still don't understand exactly how to apply Psalm 37:4 to my life. I think, though, that the main point of the verse is that delighting in God is the key to handling our desires. The delighting should be our focus; the desires, God's. We also need to remember the other commands, which are equally as important: don't worry, trust God, do good, stay away from anger.

My friend Sarah put it like this:

I'm having a really hard time with God right now. I feel like I'm standing at the top of a cliff, and being told to jump. And everyone says that God will catch me, but He doesn't always catch you. And faith means that you have to jump anyway. How do you live with that?

So many people act like it doesn't happen -- you won't get hurt if you're a Christian. But you do. Sometimes you do. Don't people think? I mean, there were Christians in the holocaust who were killed -- young women and children. Didn't God care about them? It doesn't always work out.

The truth that we as singles have to face is that we may not get married. For me -- and maybe for you -- facing that is like jumping off a cliff without anyone to catch me. I have to accept this possiblity, and believe that God is still good, no matter what.