The holiday season can get pretty depressing. To start off with, you've got the short number of daylight hours and the bitter cold. Add to that the stress of shopping for gifts and navigating the treacherous waters of family gatherings, as well as the high probability of gaining weight, and you've got a winning recipe for some December despair. (Add powdered sugar as desired.) Spending the holidays as a single adult can be the icing on the cake, or the whipped cream on a large glass of eggnog. So, considering my own long-held status as a bachelor, I wasn't particularly surprised that a few friends have asked me how I'm holding up this month. “Are you feeling lonely?” they've asked. Happily, the Holiday Blues isn't something I've really been afflicted with.
While I sincerely appreciate the concern of those friends, the question itself reminded me of how much our society privileges a certain type of companionship: the romantic kind. There's a world of good to be said about romance and being able to share your life with a girlfriend or spouse. But we're told again and again in books, movies, shows, and advertisements that life is all about finding that special someone. It's about falling in love while staring into each other's eyes over a candlelit dinner or in the rain. We're taught that living without romantic love somehow makes you unfulfilled or less than a whole person. If I'm going to measure this year by the standard of finding “the one,” 2013 was a failure.
Fortunately for me and the other singles out there, romance isn't all that life, or even love, consists of. I know this deep down, from experience, and from the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. For Jesus, love wasn't finding “the one person waiting for you,” (as a recent eHarmony ad claims), or even going to Zales to show your spouse how much she means to you. In his mind, there was no greater love than laying down his life for his friends, than dying for us while we were still sinners. No mushy feelings, no flowery declarations of affection or love poems. Hard sacrifice. He knew that what matters most isn't that we've found our soul mates, but that we've loved our neighbors as ourselves. In the Greek of the New Testament, that love is undetachable from our behavior. It's centered around actions rather than feelings, in our deeds more than just what we say. Trusting in God's definition of love instead of Hallmark's can be extremely difficult. But it's what He wants from us.
If there's one thing I regret about this year, then, it's not that I'm single. It's looking back on all the ways I could have lived in a way more worthy of the sacrifice Jesus made for me. I think about the words spoken out of anger and unkindness, about the many times when I could have extended my hand to help someone in need and didn't. I hope that 2014 will see me treating people at even a percentage of how well God and my family and friends have treated me. I hope that the fact that life is less about who we love than how we love won't just remain as a thought in my head, but that I can actually act on it by being a more positive force in people's lives. That I can show love, in deed and in truth, to family, friends, strangers, and enemies. And, if God wills, that special someone.
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