My Hope is Not Deferred

“Single women, your hope is only deferred.”

Pacing across the stage, holding the mic, the speaker continued, “That’s because in the end, there is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. We’re all going to a wedding.” A collective “mmmm” reverberated across the crowd of women. We had gathered for a weekend retreat.

I was too stunned to join in, the familiar proverb flashing through my mind: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Heartsick. That was exactly how I felt. I wanted these women, especially those single like me, to know the truth about our hope. “Deferred” wasn’t even close.

I wondered what would happen if I ran up front and shouted, “I have the living God inside of me, and you are telling me—and the rest of the single women here—that our hope is deferred? Jesus is my hope, and he is not deferred—he is here!”

A part of me regrets remaining in my seat, as if deferred hope had indeed consoled me into silence. Surely I wasn’t the only one thirsting for those glorious truths of the gospel—I am chosen; I am wanted; I am loved. Was I the only one who walked away feeling like God’s leftovers instead?

1. Hope Deferred Makes the Heart Sick.

Being told that my hope is “only” deferred makes me feel like the best that God has for me is a life of waiting, of second-bests, of being an aunt to my brother’s children but never a mother myself.

That’s completely devoid of any consolatory power on Sunday mornings, when I see those families…They’re the ones where little girls wearing big bows reach out for their mothers’ hands, where fathers and sons wear matching red plaid shirts, where a husband puts his arm around his wife’s waist. My throat catches sometimes. I want someone to touch my waist like that.

It’s true, at least for me, that singleness hurts the most at church.

A long time ago, I went to a pastor for advice because I was struggling to build any friendships after years of being a member of his church and serving in many of its ministries. “You’re a minority in our church because you’re single,” he replied. “Minorities need to work harder. You just need to work harder.” Later, a friend told me how a married elder bent down to see her hand, looking for a ring. When there wasn’t one, he abruptly walked away. Another person in leadership explained that he didn’t like inviting singles to parties because “It’s awkward having people who are in a different stage of life over to my house.” When I’m trying to blink back tears to pretend I’m strong enough to swallow words like that, I can’t find comfort in hope being only deferred. It’s like trying to start a car when it’s out of gas; I just can’t get it to work.

And, this is where it starts to really hurt, or maybe where the hurt gets white-hot: When my engagement broke three years ago, my missing diamond ring didn’t make me cling to deferred hope. It made me want to throw up.

So what comfort is there? Is “only deferred” hope the best God has for people like me?

To figure that out, I went to the verse that had flashed through my mind that day:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

There it was: It doesn’t say, “Hope deferred makes the heart feel better,” but “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” According to the proverb, deferred hope isn’t a comfort or consolation. It validates the pain, saying it leads to heartsickness.

Thus, telling someone that their hope is “only” deferred completely misrepresents the proverb. Put another way, to suggest that hope is “only” deferred as if it were comforting is to essentially say, “Single women, you are only heartsick.” It cruelly minimizes suffering.

Even more concerning, however, is the suggested “fulfillment” of that deferred hope. To the speaker, the hope for marriage is “only” deferred because “we’re all going to a wedding,” the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. In this framework, marriage remains the source of hope for single women—eventually, we will be married. Yet the Marriage Supper of the Lamb is not a unique prize for single women who long for marriage. All of us—married, single, divorced, widowed—are in the waiting game for the perfect marriage, for that perfect union between Jesus and his Bride.

When we offer the Marriage Supper of the Lamb as a sort of consolation for singleness, we’re actually further cementing a creeping idolatry of marriage because our eyes are not fixed on the Bridegroom—Jesus. The cosmic glory of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, the consummation of all redemptive history where the Bride of Christ unites with Jesus(!), has been reduced to the time when I am finally not in pain over singleness anymore. Imagine: We’re sitting together at that banquet in glory, in the very presence of the Lamb of God, and I lean over to you, grin, and whisper, “Aren’t you so glad we’re not single anymore!?” 

Jesus has so much more for us than a promise that our pain will pass away (although he certainly does promise us that!). If our fundamental hope is marriage, it’s way too small for what God has for us—right now. What if he is calling us to burst our frameworks of marriage and happy lives and shift the register of our hope entirely to something—Someone—so much greater? He is the Alpha and Omega, the Author of my very own, tear-stained story. He promises me it’s a good story, a redemption story, because he has promised me himself.

That’s a promise for all of us.

II. A desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

The other day, I was headed home after a long workday and then seminary classes. I was trying to stay awake as I made my way down the impossibly busy Atlanta highway, and that old familiar ache for a husband spilled out of my heart and all over me in that empty car. I wanted someone to drive me home, to make me dinner, to lie down next to me that night. I sighed at the empty passenger seat.

“I am so tired of this, Jesus,” I said. “I want a husband, in this car, next to me. And you haven’t given him to me. What good is your presence if I still hurt so much? Will it ever change? Will I ever find someone?”

The stab of grief jolted me awake. The only answer to my questions was “I don’t know.” Those three words were comfortless. My hope deferred felt strung out, infinite, a torment.

There is this thing about those I-don’t-knows; sometimes, lies swarm all over them, like flies on rotten fruit. Those lies latch onto our weakest, thinnest, rawest hurts. They say that sorrow is proof that God isn’t here, that you’ve fallen from his recollection and won’t ever be found. They burrow so deep in our hearts that, well, I found myself crying in Atlanta traffic over a bunch of things I knew weren’t true: You are not chosen. You are not wanted. You are not loved.

“I don’t want to believe those things, Jesus,” I said. “I want to believe what’s true.” I stretched out a trembling hand with the faith I barely had and touched the empty seat next to me. “So here’s what’s true: Jesus, you are closer to me than this empty seat. You are closer to me than a husband. You withhold no good thing. You haven’t let me down.” I paused for a minute, tears falling down my face. “Oh, God, help me believe that. I don’t know how to believe that.”

That semester, I had been reading Augustine’s Confessions, and there’s this line in there that says, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest.”¹

I don’t think I had a clue what Augustine meant until that night, when my whimpered prayer stirred the heart of the God of Heaven. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but as I remembered what was true and reached out for it with faith that would make a mustard seed look giant, God began to drive out the loneliness with an immediacy and intimacy that made that passenger seat look a mile away. My hand, previously outstretched to the husband I so longed for, tilted upward with the rest of my soul. God was near; he was with me; he cared about this broken heart. This was no hope deferred, but a living God roused to compassion for his weak and beloved daughter. I drove home, I made dinner, and I went to sleep. Deferred hope couldn’t dab tears out of my eyes, but Jesus could. And he did.

The first half of Proverbs 13:12 was easy for me to understand, but that night, I got a glimpse of the second:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). We’re abounding in real-life, God-of-Heaven, stuck-in-Atlanta-traffic-with-us Hope. And neither is it “just enough” hope to keep us going. No, the opposite: the hope is abounding; in Greek, the word means excelling, a superabundance.

Maybe this is how in 1 Samuel, Hannah, no stranger to deferred hope herself, worshipped after she poured her heart out to God asking him for a son. One day, she goes to the temple, where she is “deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (1 Samuel 1:10). Tim Keller notes that the audacity of her prayer reveals her confidence that God cares for her:

She’s assuming that the broken heart of a single rural obscure woman matters to this Lord, to whom even the galaxies are nothing but dust on the scales. She is remembering, she is meditating on, she’s reflecting on God, who’s infinitely great and yet infinitely tender at once. This is the biblical God.²

After she prays, knowing that this “infinitely great yet infinitely tender” God has heard her prayers, her face is “no longer sad” (1 Samuel 1:18). The next morning she worships where she previously wept. Tim Keller suggests this is because her hope has changed:

It didn’t say she prayed, she got pregnant, she got happy. It said she prayed and she got happy, even though she had no idea if she was going to get pregnant. Why? That would only be the case if she had shifted her hope to the mission of God and the son was a means to an end, not an end in itself.³

It wasn’t that a priest told Hannah that her hope was “only” deferred. Hannah’s hope had changed—from having a son to knowing God. A few centuries ago, Matthew Henry put it like this: “[God] ‘is both the object of our hope, and the author of it.”⁴ I might say it something like this: Our Hope is a person. And he is a desire fulfilled, a tree of life.

III. Jesus is here.

A few weeks ago, I made lasagna, one of my favorites, for dinner. I began to plate it, and suddenly this weight of sadness fell over me. “I wish I had someone to share this with,” I thought.⁵

I remembered those women nodding with the speaker about their deferred hope. For a moment, those words felt true again: heartsick. My appetite left me.

Singleness is the thing I don’t understand, the thing that I don’t even want an explanation for, as much as a hug and a reminder that Jesus really does love me, that disappointment doesn’t get the last word. Like everyone else whose “deferred hope” could be marriage, health, financial security, a child’s salvation, or something else, I want God to say, “It’s time for that hope not to be deferred anymore.”

So that night I looked at my dinner, forced myself to sit down with a fork, and asked God for a spouse. “You know what I want, Jesus,” I said. “But I’ll ask you again: Please, God, give me a husband. I don’t want to be single anymore.”

Staring at my food, it felt like choosing my hope all over again. Would I, for the thousandth time, drop an anchor down into what God has said about me? Or would I look at that empty ring finger, and let all the lies swarm around the mystery of my future?

“Help me eat, Jesus,” I said. “I can’t even eat without your help. You love me. You care about this meal.”

I remembered what was true: Jesus is closer than my most inward part; he knows how to remind me that he’s with me when I’m stuck in Atlanta traffic, and he knows how to meet me when I’m staring at lasagna I don’t want to eat. When a women’s retreat leaves me feeling like leftovers, he convinces me that I am his first choice, that he never had a backup plan in mind. I can trust my God with my every hope.

So I picked up my fork in rebellion against all those old familiar lies. It was yet another statement of faith that felt pathetic to me but, just maybe, was precious to God. For he chose me, he wants me, and he loves me.

And, right now, Jesus isn’t telling me that my hope is only deferred. He says my hope, if anything, is far too small. And he wraps his arms around me and says, “I’m right here.”

–

About Olivia

Read about my broken engagement, how God continues to hold me fast amidst singleness, or how grief and the persecuted church taught me that nothing can separate me from his love.

© Olivia Davis 2025, all rights reserved

1. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.6, 43: “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.”
2. Timothy Keller. “Hannah’s Prayer for Family.” Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast. Podcast audio, January 10, 2022. https://podcast.gospelinlife.com/e/hannah-s-prayer-for-family/.
3. Timothy Keller. “Hannah’s Prayer for Family.” Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast. Podcast audio, January 10, 2022. https://podcast.gospelinlife.com/e/hannah-s-prayer-for-family/.
4. Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1961), 1795.
5. There’s the obvious answer here—getting together with friends. Indeed, I am very blessed to have many friends I share dinners with! However, in this moment, the ache was specifically for a spouse.