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| Clipart image of a person with a bunch of complicated paths to choose from. Image source. |
So here's a question: If "God has a plan for your life", is it possible that this plan involves marrying someone from a different country?
When I was evangelical, of course I believed "God has a plan for your life" and this plan includes 1 specific (opposite-sex) person you're supposed to marry. God has destined a soul-mate for you, supposedly. (This whole "God has a plan for your life" idea causes evangelicals an incredible amount of anxiety because they have to constantly worry about if they've made the wrong decision and accidentally gotten off track for the plan.)
But then, in college I dated a guy who was an international student from China. (I am American and went to college in the US.) Let's call him Xin. I was starting to rebel against purity culture, and I did something extremely naughty: I made the decision to start dating him even though God hadn't told me that I was supposed to. Yes, super naughty and rebellious, and I had a lot of guilt about it. Purity culture teaches that you can't date someone just because you want to- you should only date 1 person, ever, in your entire life, and it needs to be the person that God "planned" for you. You can't date someone just based on your own choices and feelings; no, you need to ask God. Because really, how are you going to know if it's the person you could marry, if you haven't even dated them yet? No way of gathering enough information to know that, without compromising your "purity"- therefore, the only way is to get God to tell you the answer. (Or, in some subcultures of purity ideology, your parents would do most of the work of deciding which potential partner is good enough to marry, before you date them.) And if you end up not marrying them- if you *gasp* break up- well that would be THE WORST THING EVER. You lose so much of your purity. Your God-picked spouse might not even want you anymore, after that.
So I was dating Xin, a guy from China, and one thing that worried me SO MUCH was that I felt this couldn't possibly be "God's plan." Imagine the incredible number of steps God would need to plan out in order to bring me and him together. First, Xin would need to decide he wanted to go abroad for college. Then he would need to choose where to go. After he chooses the US, just think about how many universities there are in the US. And all the factors that would go into picking 1 of them. And then, from my side, there were all the factors that went into me picking which college to go to. And then, once we're both there, God would have to arrange for us to meet. We met because I had suddenly taken an interest in studying Chinese, and I was going to meetups for international students.
It's just... A LOT of steps. Each step could have gone in SO MANY different ways, which would have led to us ending up THOUSANDS OF MILES apart, and never meeting each other.
So how could something like that really be planned?
It made more sense to me to imagine that "God's plan" would be something like, I marry a white guy with a pretty similar cultural background to me. Each step in that "plan" would be something that's fairly high probability- an American chooses to go to an American university, a white student has a friend group/ dating pool which is mostly white students, nobody suddenly develops an all-consuming desire to learn a foreign language, and so on.
Or rather, it depends how far you have to plan ahead. Is it like, God's making this "plan" when I'm already a college student, and the plan is that I should marry someone from China, and so God looks at the students from China who already exist at the same college as me, and then makes a plan from there? Or is it like... planned from birth?
At the church where I grew up, every year when students graduated from high school, the church had a ceremony where they would read all the graduates' names, and each one would tell what their plans were. And I always thought it was funny, roughly half of them would announce they were going to one local Christian college, and roughly half would announce they were going to the other local Christian college. I remember joking with my sister about it- every year we would tally up which college got more. (And then there would be the occasional 1 or 2 students who weren't going to either of those colleges- like me.) Like... being predictable. See, that's the kind of situation where God can easily plan way in advance, about who is supposed to marry whom. Or, say, 2 people both born to families who attend the same church- yeah, God can easily get them together.
But how can it really be "God's plan" to be with someone who was born on the other side of the world? Who for a significant fraction of their life wouldn't have even been able to talk to you, because you didn't speak any of the same languages?
The logistics of it are just a NIGHTMARE. The incredible number of tiny little decisions that need to go a certain way, in order to get these 2 people to meet each other. I just couldn't believe that anyone- not even God- could make a 20-ish-year-long plan that involved so many low-probability events, and have it actually go successfully.
Yeah if the plan is that I marry *a* Chinese person, that's one thing. That's doable. There are lots of Chinese people. But a *specific* one, picked years and years beforehand? No way, not even God could get that to work.
I remember talking to another Christian about this, back then, and she saw it totally opposite from how I did. She said, because all these little things needed to go exactly right in order for me to meet my boyfriend, doesn't that seem even MORE like it was God who had done it?
I didn't buy that, when she said it. We constantly have random encounters with people, caused by a long series of tiny decisions, each of which may have been high or low probability at the time that it happened. It's impossible to predict, but the overall statistics tell us that in general this is how it works. Probably every day I happen to meet people who are in this specific city partly because of some weird unusual event that affected the course of their life long ago. Low-probability events happen all the time, of course they do, but of course you don't know which ones they're going to be. Just like how you don't know what the winning lottery number will be, but you know it will be SOMETHING, likely something that looks like an unremarkable string of digits.
(And also, race is an aspect of this. I felt like... I'm specifically attracted to Chinese guys, is that like... bad? Is it bad to have a preference based on race? And what did God think about it? I had always imagined God to be like my white pastors and Sunday school teachers, viewing China as some faraway backwards place where they talk weird and eat weird food. My God was vaguely racist- I found it impossible to believe that this kind of God would make a plan for me to marry a Chinese guy.)
Way back then, it really had me questioning the whole idea of "God has a plan for your life." Dating a Chinese guy was so new and unexpected for me, and I just couldn't bring myself to believe that it could be something planned by God from the beginning of my life. I just couldn't.
Anyway, fast-forward a few years, and I moved to China, and started dating a different Chinese guy, and now we are married. When we got engaged, it was a very big deal to me that it was an actual choice I was making. It wasn't "God's plan" and I just passively go along with it- no, marriage is a big deal, and it was my decision to marry him. Marriage shouldn't be something that just kinda happens to you as you float through life on "God's plan"- it should be a real choice.
I don't believe in "God's plan" anymore- and I'm glad I don't. It raises way too many questions about how God could possibly make such an intricate plan work successfully, it means you have to constantly be stressed about whether any little decision you make is totally throwing you off track for "God's plan", and it means you're not allowed to make your own choices, but need to be constrained by whatever biases you imagine God has.
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Related:
In Purity Land, a First Date is a Bigger Decision Than Marriage
Is There Choice in the Kingdom of God?
This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now
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