08 - Preview

I was starting to concede that maybe my distress over being single was exaggerated by my incomplete view of the situation. God was telling me that, just like a toddler who assumes his life is ruined because he’s been left with a babysitter for an hour, things weren’t really as bad as they felt to me. Okay. Maybe there was some truth to that. But seriously, what kind of starry-eyed perspective could God possibly be coming from that would make me want to embrace my singlehood?

The Golden Ticket

You see, here was my way of seeing things: A relationship was my ticket to the main attraction. It was what I needed to get in the door so that I could experience the love, approval, fulfillment, and purpose that other people had. All the good things in life were behind that door, and without that ticket, I’d miss out on all of them.

So I centered my entire life around my pursuit of the golden ticket. Behind everything I did was the underlying goal of finding a relationship. When I went to a party, I considered the night a failure if no one asked for my number. When I joined a small group at church, I considered it a failure if there was no potential partner in the crowd. When I went to the grocery store, I considered the trip a failure if I didn’t rate a second look. Based on these standards, nearly every minute of my life was a failure, and my consistent inability to attain the ticket caused me understandable anxiety, because without it, I was doomed to miss out on everything good in life.

Coming from that perspective, when God told me that being single wasn’t that bad, frankly, I thought he was delusional. Are you kidding me? How could it not be that bad to miss out on everything good that the world has to offer?! However, as I started listening to God’s point of view, it dawned on me that the significance I placed on relationships was another roadblock in my conversation with him.

The Preview

This is what he began to show me. According to God, a relationship was not the ticket to the main attraction after all. It was not the prerequisite for my experience of love, approval, fulfillment, and purpose. In fact, God told me that I could have all of those things (and more), even if I never got married. That’s because in reality, relationships aren’t the main attraction. Rather, they’re just the preview.

Let me explain. When I’m considering seeing a movie at the theater, I usually like to watch the preview ahead of time. Having some foreknowledge of the storyline gets me excited about the actual film, and it helps me to decide if I really want to drop 10 bucks on a mere two hours of entertainment. If I do decide it’s worth it, sometimes the preview helps me to understand the movie better by establishing a point of reference and some background knowledge for me. It gets my mind thinking about the story ahead of time. So movie trailers can be a pretty valuable part of the overall motion picture experience.

But you’ll never catch me spending $10 to see just a preview. I’ve never planned my Saturday night around the trailer for a movie, and I’ve never put the opening of a new preview on my calendar. I’ve never felt as though, in the long run, missing out on the trailer caused me to miss out on my enjoyment of the actual movie.

Why is that? It’s because the preview is a valuable thing, but it’s not the main attraction. The preview gives me a clue of what the film is going to be like, and it gets me excited about what I’m going to see, but the preview is not the thing I’m actually after. It’s just meant to whet my appetite.

But as weird as it would be to give more significance to the preview over the movie itself, God showed me that I was doing that very thing with relationships. You see, in my mind, a relationship was the main attraction – and because of that, I was dedicating everything I had to getting in the door.

But what if a relationship was really meant to be just a preview? What if it was really meant only to whet my appetite and to get me excited for the real thing?

The Main Attraction

What’s the real thing? Well, when God created the world, his intent was for us to live in perfect community with each other and with him. He planned for us to be fully loved and accepted. He designed us to be fulfilled and to live with a purpose. In other words, in God’s plan, everybody got free admittance to the main attraction – no ticket required – and that main attraction was the satisfaction that comes from a relationship with him.

But starting all the way back with Adam and Eve, we humans have messed up the system. Instead of enjoying the love and fulfillment that God intended for us, we’ve suspected that God is somehow holding out on us – that there’s something else out there that he’s withholding. Because of that, we spend all of our lives looking for the golden ticket that we think will gain us access to the elusive pot of gold. For Adam and Eve, that ticket was a piece of fruit from the forbidden tree. For me, it was a relationship. For others, it may be a career or reputation or money. Whatever we go after, it’s our continual searching and striving for something other than God that has sent our world spiraling into selfishness, bitterness, fear, rejection, and pain.

It’s no wonder that with all of that craziness around us, we’re all trying to find a way to make ourselves feel better! We’re trying to fix what we broke! And because God has given us this beautiful thing called a relationship, I, for one, assumed that this was the way for me to restore my life and to reconnect – that it was the way to gain access to all the perfection that God had in mind for me in the first place.

But the thing God showed me was this: As good as a relationship can be, it’s not the main attraction. Surprisingly, the main attraction is something much bigger than that! It’s the ultimate love story we’re all involved in – one that I wasn’t even aware of until recently. It’s the love story of God having his eyes set on us, but getting his heart broken over and over again as we continually reject him in order to chase after some other golden ticket. And at this point in the story when it should end in tragedy, God doesn’t give up on us. Instead, the story laid out in the Bible is one of him making himself vulnerable time and time again, always in order to win us back and to restore the world to the way it was supposed to be.

That’s the main attraction – the day when, despite our fickleness, God will finally set things right, and in returning to perfect community with him, we will actually get to experience all the love, approval, fulfillment, and purpose that we’ve been missing.

It’s no coincidence that to describe that day, God uses the metaphor of marriage. Revelation 21:2-3 says, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem (that’s God’s people!), coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’”

So if that marriage is the main attraction, and the ticket to it is a relationship with God, then what is the significance of human relationships?

What God told me was that human relationships are the preview of the main attraction. They’re the trailer giving me some foreknowledge of the ultimate marriage I will one day have with him. Relationships help to prepare me for what the main attraction is going to be like. They help me to understand the way God feels about me. They give me a taste of what’s inside the door. They get me excited about what is to come. They whet my appetite for the real thing.

But they are not the feature presentation. Rather, the feature presentation is the fulfillment I’ll experience when my relationship with God is restored to perfection.

The Good News

To me, this was very good news! It means that when I’m single, I don’t have to worry that I’m missing out on something that everyone else has – because even if I skip the preview, I’m not missing out on the real thing.

It means that I don’t have to worry that married people are more fulfilled than I am, because the preview was never meant to impart the full experience of the movie, anyway. The real experience comes from the main attraction; not from the trailer.

It means that regardless of whether I’ve seen the preview, I can still get the same enjoyment out of the movie as everyone else.

It means that I don’t need to stress out about finding a relationship, because that’s equivalent to stressing out about missing a preview. Instead, I can just relax and enjoy one if it happens to come along.

Seeing a relationship as a preview of good things to come was a perspective that definitely intrigued me. But the thing it didn’t address was my biggest hang-up of all about relationships and marriage. It was this idea that having a boyfriend somehow validated me as a person and proved that I was worthwhile. It was the fear that if no one chose me, then it indicated that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. That’s a pretty hefty roadblock! And that’s where God took me next.