The Gospel Is Bigger Than Statistics
It doesn’t take much to set my mothering heart into a flutter of worry. According to culture, the future is not bright and the odds are stacked against our children. It seems the ways of addiction, peer pressure, and darker paths lie in wait for them more and more with each year they age. Nearly 10 years ago as a single mom, I held my two-year-old daughter in a church while the preacher, in an effort to laud the importance of a two-parent home, listed off the statistics of those children who were raised by single parents. Each number, each prediction, each warning settled around me like a fog. What good was it to pour my life out for this girl if it was all doomed anyway? I was a newly-single mother, a home teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and learning a whole new world of parenting. The numbers were daunting. Devastating. Surely enough to make anyone recognize the fact that I was insufficient for the task at hand.“Kids who grow up in single-parent homes are more likely to….” It doesn’t matter how the statistic ended. It was never good. It rarely said “...become doctors.” It was more likely to be something that had me envisioning the demise of my toddler, an inevitable failure on my part to keep her from the fatalistic end she had in store.
And I felt completely unable to change it. How could I, as a single parent, prevent these outcomes? If I held her enough, rocked her enough, would that stop it? If I read the Bible to her every morning and prayed for her every night, would that be enough to move God’s heart to spare her of this fate? Her tiny curls twisted around her forehead and in that moment I knew this—I needed something more dependable than numbers. Both of us needed the gospel to root deeper than sin, reach farther than the frayed edges of pain, and cover more than my arms could reach.
We needed the gospel to be bigger than statistics.
It’s been 10 years since that Sunday morning. Since then, I’ve remarried and the man who called us his own was and is an immense gift to our home. When we posted about our wedding, some well-meaning people cheered that I had found my happy ending, our prince charming had arrived, our hero had finally shadowed the doorstep. The implications were that my husband had trotted in on a white horse at just the right moment, rescuing us from whatever awful ending we were headed towards. It seemed to me that some people agreed – a single parent home was insufficient, incomplete. How could that end happily?
Yet I knew before the ring was ever on my finger that only one person had turned the pages in the story for us and it wasn’t the dashing, handsome, bearded man whom I now call “husband.” It was the bloodied, sacrificial lamb of God on the cross who changed the course of her life and mine.
For the women who stood off to the side and watched until Christ breathed his last, I wonder if they felt the statistics slither around their feet again. What hope did a recovering demoniac, an aging mother, and a female student of the rabbi have now that their leader was dead? If the men they knew denied the man upon the cross, how likely were they to step in and care for the women whose future was now bound up in whatever culture determined for them?
But Jesus.
Jesus, bursting out of the tomb not only undid every statistic that the enemy wants to entangle around us, but he shattered the myth that we are inevitably bound to live by those numbers at all.
Afterall, as Ephesians 1:18 tells us “...that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.” Any parent will tell you, single or not, they feel insufficient for the task at hand. The answer to this aching insufficiency isn’t a wedding ring. The truth is, no matter how many competent, loving, and faithful adults are present, without Jesus, our children are bound to statistics and an uphill battle against the odds stacked against them. Sin is in them, sin seeks to devour them, and it is hungry no matter how many parents are in the home. The good news of salvation isn’t that good, two-parent homes will save our children. The good news is that statistics have nothing on the gospel. The burden-relieving breath of fresh air is that even out of the most imperfect or teetering-on-the-brink circumstances, the work and redemption of Christ is sufficient to give us an inheritance that none of us actually deserve. Not the married parent. Not the single parent. Not the statistic-ridden child. The inheritance wasn’t ours to earn, no statistician could have predicted it, and yet it’s ours.
I remind my sisters in the church who are single parents of this as often as I can. When they fear the predictions, when they worry about the outcomes, when they repeat that one thing that someone has told them how “Kids who grow up in single parent homes are more likely to…,” I remember that sinking panic. The fear of how they’ll fail. So I remind them of this—it was never your job to save them. Just point them to the one who can.
So to my single mother sisters — the next time someone wants to wrap the net of fear and “likelihoods” around your children, remember that Jesus is bigger, loves those kids even more than you do, and laughs at the statistics. After all, statistically speaking, no one can be resurrected from the dead, can they?
