“Celibacy is a vacancy for God. To be a celibate means to be empty for God, to be free and open for God’s presence, to be available for God’s service.” (Henri Nouwen, Thomas Aquinas)
If you are single, you are called as a celibate. To be celibate is to leave a vacancy for God. To be empty for God, open for His presence to fill you.
If I am a single believer in Christ, I am consecrated (set apart) as a celibate for my First Love, for God alone, unless the Lord leads otherwise in a new season.
Jesus was single. Jesus was a celibate. Jesus had a vacancy (an emptiness) within Him reserved for God alone. Even with this vacancy, this emptiness, Jesus was a fully-realized man. He wasn’t a half-realized man. He wasn’t a half-fulfilled man. He was fully fulfilled as a human, and as a man.
And so it is with us, also.
Contemplate this for a moment. Take some time and go for a walk, or think about it wherever you are right now.
If you are single, you are a fully-realized, fully-fulfilled human being, AND woman or man. We are not above our Master, our Beloved, who also walked out His entire life on earth AS A SINGLE MAN who died at a young age, IN HIS PRIME.
Yet, Jesus fulfilled everything He was called to do. He was not jipped. He was not a disgruntled, ripped-off, discontented man who complained to the Father that he was not being given what He was entitled to in order to fully live the life He was meant to live. Jesus did not feel that He had to postpone His “real life” until His “partner” or “spouse” came. He went forward, in joy and serene acceptance, and did not see His singleness as an obstacle to be removed, but saw it as the path in which the Lord’s will would be fulfilled on earth.
And He did fulfill God’s will, without a spouse. Without children. Yet His life is the most fruitful one in all the universe.
To be single, to be celibate, to be a man or woman who never partakes in sexual union, does not make you less of a woman or a man. If it were so, we would have reason to say that Jesus was only half a man…
…but He was the most alive Man this world has ever seen. And we will never see another as real, as fruitful, as fulfilled as this Man, whom we adore and willingly lay down all of our agendas for, to pick up this high calling, this privileged position as a single, as a celibate for our Beloved.
Selah. Ponder that.
~Alison
