"Don't give them the message that 'if you're not married, you're doomed,' but let them know that they are valuable and they don't lose their value just because they're not married."
Ms. Olive, who has provided marriage counseling several times, recently shared her perspective as she talked about how to better serve single, unmarried Christians.
During the interactive workshop on the second day of the August 15–19 Global Transformutual Leadership Summit, Ms. Olive shared her insights when asked about the difficulty of marriage for single older Christians in many churches in mainland China and her suggestions on how to better help singles through ways such as singles camps.
She felt that singles camps were a good way to help them. "The first purpose of singles camps is to learn how to live a single life." When asked for her advice, Ms. Olive often said that it was important to first help everyone live a single life well: Are you happy being single? Are you a responsible person? Are you able to keep your life in order? "If you cannot live well as a single person and you are always thinking about relying on others and that they should satisfy you, it is very dangerous.”
Ms. Olive also offered some insights to Christian parents who complained that their adult children did not want to have boyfriends and girlfriends and felt that their children did not value marriage. She asked these Christian parents, "Do you trust in the Lord? Do you believe in your children?" If they did, they should pray to God and entrust their children's marriage to Him instead of just repeating this topic to their children every day and not talking about anything else because they were not married or dating. "You don't understand your child at all. You just want to get them married or get them a wife, but it is they who have to be responsible for the rest of their lives and their marriages, not you. It's not you who's going to get married; you can't put your expectations on your children."
Ms. Olive felt that "leftover men and women" was a very discriminatory term. She believed that we needed to strengthen the confidence of unmarried Christians in the Word of God so that they knew that they had honor and that the purpose and meaning of their lives were not just about marriage. Otherwise, it would be very tragic for the married couple.
She emphasized that older, unmarried Christian men and women must first seek a breakthrough in their mindset and live well as singles, and the mindset of their parents must also change. After making changes, parents would find that they could read the Bible and pray with their children, and after praying, they would see many good things in their children, so they would have faith in their children that they could achieve their goals in life and believe that God would prepare a suitable partner for them.
"It may be very challenging, but that's the way it is," Ms. Olive concluded.
- Translated by Joyce Leung
