Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

I connected with a church planter out in Chicago, who is a bit of a marketing whiz.  He has built a website called “Eat Jesus.com” where church planters and church leaders contribute articles based on the theme of how to be “self-feeding” Christians.  I have been asked to contribute articles there, and I am excited to be involved.  Check it out - subscribe, and learn.

It’s a great idea - too many Christians these days only eat “pablum” - spoon-fed Scripture by their pastor every Sunday, with a midweek snack, maybe, if they are involved in some kind of small group or larger group like Young Adults or Youth or Singles or Young Marrieds or Old Timers or MOPS or Men’s Ministry or Women’s Ministry… you get the picture.

Tell me: how healthy are you if you are only fed a bowl of pablum twice a week?  You’d be pretty anemic and starving to death.  Tell me: how often do you need to be eating physical food to nourish your physical body?  Twice?  Three times a day?  More?  Now tell me - if God made our physical bodies to need food regularly - like multiple times a day, how healthy will we be spiritually, if we only feed  spiritually twice a week? Now you get the idea of how important it is that we as Christians become self-feeding.  Our pastors cannot feed us as often as we need to be spiritually healthy.  If we are wondering why our spiritual life seems barren or fruitless, we need look no further than our feeding habits.  A starving, emaciated faith does not produce much fruit.

Jesus said in John 6:53-58, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.   Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.   Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.  Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.   This is the bread that came down from heaven.  Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” He is speaking about spiritual nourishment.  It doesn’t get plainer than that.  Eatjesus.com and live.

(Crossposted to Planting on Faith)

One thing I really like about work is my co-workers.  They are incredibly intelligent, thoughtful people and they love to talk about serious things.  They don’t shy away from anything.  A heart like mine that loves to debate looks forward to coming to work with such people.  Though I have to say we often have very different opinions, we do often agree as well, on some surprising issues.

Yesterday, the subject of the day was the necessity of marriage.  Our little cubicle world split down the middle - on the one side were three married people, and on the other were three unmarried people (although two of the three are in serious, long-term relationships).  We talked about the purpose of marriage - the public declaration of commitment, the element of involving the community in holding you accountable for your marriage, the saying of vows to establish security not just for the man and woman but also for any children that come of the relationship.

Now, myself, my view of marriage is in the context of my faith - but yet the concept of marriage is a universal one.  Every culture, every religion has a tradition around the exclusive bonding of man to woman and vice versa, for life.  Yet, today, that is being questioned.  Is it necessary to be “married”?  Is not a commitment more meaningful if it is made in private with nobody else’s input factoring in?

One thing that became clear is that people marrying in the past for the wrong reasons has built up this resistance.  Because some people have been “forced” to marry against their will, either by parents or sometimes church (sadly), or community, or peer pressure, it has come to be viewed by some as negative.  Because there is this connotation of coercion we rebel instinctively against it.  If it could be perceived as forced then it must be eschewed.  This seems to me to be faulty.  Just because some people misuse or misunderstand a tradition is not the best reason to ignore it.

Is a commitment made in private more meaninful, somehow stronger?  I think that depends on your view of mankind in general, and yourself in particular.  If you view yourself as complete, moral, and truthful; if you view yourself as one who does not change or waver in your commitments; if you view yourself as such a complete individual that you do not need others’ guidance or support, then I would have to agree.  If such a man or woman existed, they could truly pull off marriage without the “marriage” as most cultures know it.  But the reason that marriage is universal is because deep in our hearts, we all know just how inconstant, changeable, and prone to stupid decisions we are.  The Bible calls this “sin” and calls it universal.

Knowing that humanity is prone to all these things, the process of marriage in its basic characteristics becomes common sense.  It becomes a reward for all those participating in it.  For the man and woman involved, there is real security, knowing that someone is not just saying what you want to hear to get what they want.   There is a foundation of trust, knowing that you and your partner share the same respect for and values of a lifelong commitment to each other.  This commitment insulates the marriage against challenges and gives you a foundation to lean on in those tough times, like the classic vows “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health”.

Some people think such language is onerous, or burdensome.  They want the freedom to be able to get out if they don’t like it, or if they “fall out of love”.  If they seriously feel that way, then they aren’t in love.  Love is the selfless giving of oneself for another.  If you’re thinking of yourself, you are not in love, and you wrong your partner if that is how you feel.  They may not feel that way, and if they knew you did, they likely would not be interested in any kind of long-term relationship.

Following from that I think is the real root of most people’s objections to marriage.  It’s not that they have a problem with the institution itself.  It is that they don’t believe it is even possible to succeed at it anymore.  Why try if it is doomed to fail?  Any conversation about marriage inevitably features someone bringing up “50% of marriages fail, so why bother?”  As I said in that conversation yesterday, this is a statistic that gives a very false impression - a futile impression that reinforces negative predispositions.  The real statistics show that if you take all marriages - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, then that statistic is true.  But if you look in more depth, the chances drop big time.  First, the old “50%” number is old.  In the USA, divorce rates peaked in the 80’s around 50%, but that number has dropped down to the high 30’s now.  Second, all kinds of background indicators, including education, income, and family of origin can be significant in decreasing your chance of divorcing.  For myself, because I had a child after I was married (as opposed to before), go to church, my parents are not divorced, I have some college, and I make more than 50k a year, statistically I am 95% less likely to get divorced - to say nothing of my own personal convictions.  But even further, the per captia divorce statistic is skewed because people who divorce are statistically much more likely to be serial divorcees.  If you have 100 couples who marry, and only 20 get divorced but each remarries 3 times that is 60 divorces for 100 couples - a 60% divorce rate, despite only 20% actually getting divorced.  You can see how looking at that statistic in isolation would make you think marriage is doomed, despite 4 out of 5 people having successful marriages.

Some declare that marriage is a waste of time because it is doomed to fail (see above) and it is expensive, so it is better not to marry at all and “save money”.  Again, the statistics work against this argument.  Common-law separation is not less expensive, and breakups without marriage are not less acrimonious.  Lawyers cost the same whether you are married or not.  In fact, it is worse, especially for women, because the breakup will not be divided as evenly as in marriage law.

But that is just the statistical reason.  Then there is our culture, which continuously reinforces through media and entertainment the commonplace nature of infidelity.  We have social scientists telling us all men are apes, and are designed to seek out multiple partners, and women should simply accept it.   We are told that “falling out of love” is a valid reason to abandon somebody.

I think, deep down, we feel unlovable - we feel that nobody could possibly love us forever, or stay with us no matter what.  So we settle, we make peace with this “reality” and allow others to simply use us.  A temporary fix, a salve, to get us through until something better comes along.  We accept the platitude that we want to hear, “Really honey.  I don’t need to marry you to love you forever…” but the truth is that without marriage, common-law relationships break up at an exponentially higher rate.  The odds against a couple going the distance without getting married are 5 times as high as those who marry.  The rates of violence and spousal abuse are significantly higher.   It is not reasonable to contend that because marriages break up we shouldn’t get married, when cohabitation is so much less stable.  If we truly seek stability and safety in our relationships, we should be seeking marriage, and not settling for less.  If we’re settling, it’s because of this deep-seated insecurity about our own value and impatience that one will come along and marry us.

But what is the positive case for marriage?  The statistics for the positive effects of marriage on personal mental and physical health are numerous.  The statistics for the mental and physical health of children of marriage are numerous.  The odds of truly having a partner for life are much much greater.  The public acknowledgement of your relationship builds trust and intimacy between both partners.  The involvement of friends and family in the marriage gives you hearts and minds to lean on, to turn to, to be counselled by when times are tough.  If nobody was involved in your wedding, nobody is invested in it either.

I am not saying all weddings need to be big, lavish affairs.  That’s another favorite argument of those who don’t view it as necessary - it is too big and expensive.  Of course, it is merely a cop-out as everybody knows it is not necessary to “do it big”.  If marriage is really important to you, then you will find a way.  If it is not important to you, you will allow such excuses to stand in the way.  But I hope that with this essay, you will find that marriage is a little more important than you previously thought.  Be encouraged!  Marriage is alive and well, and a lot more satisfying than popular culture likes to portray.

Solomon once wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Ever wonder just how true that really is?

Check out Cracked’s compilation of completely unexplained archaeological finds.  Warning: if you don’t like reading foul language, don’t go to cracked.com.  But if you can overlook the language, check out these six unexplained archaeological finds - like batteries from ancient Mesopotamia.  A clockwork atronomical device from Greece.  Complex pipe networks in backwater, uninhabited, ancient China.

Myself, I look at these and I see something that logically fits with the Biblical account.  Just after the flood, God himself marvelled at human ingenuity, and had to confuse language to keep humanity from too much pride.  It makes perfect sense to me that from creation onward, the capabilities, strength and health of humanity have been progressively decreasing, in keeping with the second law of thermodynamics.  It makes perfect sense that mankind has had highly technological moments in the past, but been brought low.  And all these treasures are directly in keeping with that.

Everythings so blurry
And everyones so fake
And everybodys so empty
And everything is so messed up
Pre-occupied without you
I cannot live at all
My whole world surrounds you
I stumble then I crawl

You could be my someone
You could be my scene
You know that I’ll protect you
From all of the obscene
I wonder what your doing
Imagine where you are
Theres oceans in between us
But thats not very far - “Blurry” - Puddle of Mudd, 2001.

I don’t get it.  Everyone knows the truth of these lyrics.  We see it every day.  The disorder of hate, the disorder of killings, abuse, ignorance, apathy.  These disorders all come from within - from the heart of each human on this earth.

The only people who think there is nothing wrong are people who are so wounded that they have normalized the disorder.  They have fooled themselves, inoculated themselves, callused their hearts so much that they accept this now.

But this is not what life was meant to be like.

The song lyrics speak of a man desperate for meaning, and trying to find it in his love for a woman.  He is so close to the truth but can’t grasp it because his eyes won’t see past his own desires.  He doesn’t know why he thinks he will find meaning in another person, though he questions her ability to take away his sense of disorder in the world.

Her love won’t change the world.

But love can.

Throughout history, man has made his own gods.  There have been gods for everything - from harvest gods to war gods to death gods to love gods to sea gods.  Humanity sees something beyond its control and assumes that something must be controlling it - something that can be bribed.  Because sometimes the bribes “work” and sometimes they don’t, they assume that their god must be capricious.

But there is a God in heaven.  People hunt around for a God who will be appeased, because it is easier to deal with than a God who loves.

That God - not a god of love, but a God who IS love - has already told us about himself.  He has already explained the depth of his love for us and desire for good for us, but we turn away, we ignore him.  And then we write songs like this, bemoaning the hideousness of a life lived without this God who loves us.

Sin is insidious.  It has infected even those who do know and love God.  And because of that, there are those who have been hurt by them, and assign the blame to the God of those who sin.  But if they got past the human beings who really are no better than themselves, they would see who God really is and see that what he taught us - the way of life described by Jesus in his time on earth - is the only way for humanity to get past the fakeness, the emptiness, and the messed up parts of our lives.

It really is the only way.

Islam?  Appeasement of a capricious Allah.

Buddhism?  Turning inwards to attain a state of nirvana, and shutting out the pain of the world.  In the meantime, leaving the world suffering alone.

Judaism?  Trying desperately to follow rules that are impossible to follow (and ignoring the real message of their own writings - that one would come to save them and would be preceded by signs that show he is who he says he is.  That one has already come.

Animism?  Appeasement of capricious spirits.

Taoism/Shintoism?  Appeasement of dead people who have no power.

Atheism?  Living without meaning.

Christism?  A God of love, loves you, and wants you to love him back.  You already know what true love looks like.  You know in your heart how it works.  If you start doing it, then love for your fellow man, for your neighbour, for your enemy flows from that.  Respect for the world that God made for you flows from that.  Putting others before yourself flows from that.  Not needing “things” to make one happy flows from that.  Contentment and joy flows from that.  It all begins with love.  Why is it so hard to understand?

I am not sure if he is making fun of atheists or Christians but who cares?  He’s darn funny.  I miss Monty Python - too bad there’s nobody doing such intelligent humour anymore.  It’s like comedy has been reduced to mean-spirited personal attacks and varying combinations of foul language - usually a combination of both.

From William Lane Craig, research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology.

Read the article - it deals with some of the classic arguments for the existence of a god, revised by modern philosophy.

I am more startled by the below quote:

The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that’s not postmodernism; that’s modernism! That’s just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can’t prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

I’ve been reading so much on postmodernism that I don’t know what to do with this idea.  I’ll need to think about it for a while.

This hit hard.

Hat tip to Chris Reeder.

Just ran into this umm… well, it’s not really a dating site. It is a marriage proposal site. It facilitates arranged marriages, based on the old testament model of bride price.

It is an interesting idea on a number of levels, if a bit foreign to North Americans coming out of the European pattern of marriage.

The bride price concept is not meant to assign a monetary value to women, so much as to establish how much the husband is willing to sacrifice - a demonstration of his commitment and seriousness in pursuing marriage. It was in the past a nod to the expense of raising a daughter, who could not do as much physical work as a boy could, contributing to the production and wealth of the family. Today, this isn’t as true (physical labour is rarely the primary driver of income in families today), but on the other hand, the cost of raising any child has gone up substantially. If you ask around couples these days how many kids they desire, the answer is always a very low number as compared to previous generations. If you follow up with a why question, the first reason is invariably, “kids are EXPENSIVE!” If that is true, then paying a bride’s family makes a certain amount of sense.

The second major area of discomfort is the fact that the site caters to families who are offering their daughters for marriage young. Some as young as 13, though it is unclear if they actually expect the marriage to be conducted and consummated before a reasonable time has passed and legal ages are attained. This brings to mind some of the bad press around the FLDS, and the commune that made the news in Texas, as well as the Bountiful, BC situation. Certainly nobody advocates such nonsense, least of all me. Coercion is probably the biggest issue in both those news stories.

It is a fact, though, that girls are attaining puberty at earlier and earlier ages. With the onset of adult hormones comes adult desires, and the tremendous volume of teenage sexual behaviour is now a fact of life. As Christian parents, who seek to see their children into marriage without having fallen to sexual temptation, we are faced with two choices: teaching children self-control and modelling proper relationships, and supporting them in remaining celibate until their wedding at whatever age (which is also moving later and later into the twenties on average), or finding alternative ways to help our children express themselves sexually - while maintaining God’s will for us in marriage. Practically speaking, that means marriage.

In the mainstream, there has definitely been broad-based support for and creative approaches to the former approach. I have heard of father-daughter balls, and other types of approaches to building strong loving relationships between young girls and their dads. Statistics seem to bear out that the stronger a girl’s relationship with her father, the less likely she will be to seek affection prematurely from young men. On the other side, chastity rings and other ceremonies meant to create and support agreements to remain a virgin until marriage are becoming increasingly popular. The sexual urge is a strong one though in young men, borne out by the entirety of human history. It can be used to drive the young men to prepare, if they believe that they cannot have what they want until they accomplish certain things. There is something to be said for directing boys that way, to prepare for marriage, and to prepare for their future that way.

Every person is different though. Some may find it easier to maintain their virginity and resist temptations while others will find it harder. Paul seems to recognize this in his writings - talking about whether people should get married or not (1 Cor 7:8-9). He also points out that this drive should be given freedom in marriage (1 Cor 7:2-5). Some consideration should be given, in my opinion, to Christian parents endorsing earlier marriages amongst their children. Some will be better served by an early marriage. With rates of some STD infections as high as one in four in the USA, there are serious dangers to not keeping it in your pants until marriage.

Now to consider the negatives to early marriage. First, there is next to no way for teenagers to earn a living wage independently. Sure they could get minimum wage jobs and live in cheap housing, but it would take a lot of discipline to get them ahead, and get them the educations they need to be successful in life. It is possible, but very hard. Most parents support their children financially and in terms of education well into their child’s early twenties. If they are already willing to do this, why would loving parents stop if their child was married?

There is also the maturity factor to consider. I firmly believe that a big reason for the historic rules and customs in cultures around the world that restrict the young from marriage were there is because of the basic fact of life - wisdom comes from experience. There are exceptions, but it is true in the vast majority of cases. Young people make dumb decisions which is why the old almost invariably, are the ones who make the important decisions in culture and society. Respect for elders is a preservative against stupid, rash decisions anywhere. The idea of arranged marriages is premised on this - that your parents because of their experience and wisdom, and their impartiality as compared to the child’s position, are better prepared to make a choice for a life partner for their child.

So is it wise to simply let kids marry younger? Probably not if they are making their own decisions unfettered by wisdom and experience. However, the system that the website seems to support is insulated against that by the tradition of arrangement. People don’t go there to “buy” a girl for their son. They go there to initiate a process of evaluation and examination to see if this is a “good” match. If the two young people have much in common, similar values, similar goals, then there is a reasonable expectation that their marriage can work. As I understand it, once the parents on both side approve of this potential marriage, then the potential couple can commence some kind of courtship to get to know one another and decide if there is the attraction that needs to be there for a successful marriage. Loving and supportive parents will give their children the opportunity to veto the match, so nobody is bullied or pushed into anything. “Arranged” does not need to be synonymous with “forced” or “coerced”.

From reading on the site it also appears that most of the girls listed are consenting to the process. They want to be matched for marriage. Now, as we have seen, this process can be abused, as in the case of the FLDS (if you think that your salvation is based on marriage, you are sorely deceived!) But if the children understand that this is their choice, but informed by all kinds of processes and people who have their best interests at heart, I see no reason why it could not be successful.

So am I in favour of arranged marriages? Mine wasn’t. But there is something desperate, random, and unsafe that comes from the ubiquitous quest for “the one” that has been popularized by romantic writings for the last 400 years. I also think that certain pitfalls that I fell into as a young man, and even while I was dating and engaged to my now wife, could have been avoided had our relationship been guided by such a process. As I understand the process - intiated at the consent of both the son and the daughter, assessed by their parents with the view of long-term marriage, then courtship entered into with the goal of determining for each of the betrothed the suitability of the other for permanent marriage, with the potential for veto of either party, and finalized by a bride price to demonstrate the earnestness of the suitor, certainly seems both practical and efficient.

UPDATE: It turns out the site itself is a fake.  As I mentioned, the site was short on details, and abiguous about when a child can legally be married.  However, I stand by my above comments in the sense that I don’t have a problem with people arranging marriages, assuming that rules of human decency and the guidelines I mentioned above are followed.  Anything else I would have big problems with.

I was reading this book last night, which talked a bit about calling.  It got into what it takes to lead in a church, and one thing it did that I found especially thought provoking was look at the qualifications outlined in 1st Timothy 3:1-3.

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

I like to think I am on the way or arrived at most of that.

• One wife - check.
• Sober-minded?  Well, I am pretty serious most of the time.
• Self-controlled?  Hmm.  Need to work on that.  I think I let myself wander into self-absorption more than I should.
• Respectable?  Well, you’d have to ask around but I think I am getting there.
• Hospitable?  I love having people over, but I think there is a missing ingredient there, in the sense that I don’t do enough to prepare my house to be open.  And I let “things” keep me busy.
• Able to teach - I am getting there I think.  The more I do it the more comfortable I feel in it.
• Not a drunkard - yes.  That is for sure two so far.
• Not violent but gentle - only one person has ever angered me to the point of violence.  It’s been a good ten years since that one occasion.
• Not quarrelsome - I used to be pretty argumentative, but I am slowly learning to rein that in.
• Not a lover of money - I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with that, but even more so lately, I see money as a means to an end.  I think of what can be done with money, not the money itself.

But you know what gets me?  The above reproach bit.  I think it is a call for personal holiness.  Man, I just feel very inadequate in that field.  I don’t pray enough.  I don’t spend enough time in the Word.  I don’t let Phillippians 4:8 guide my thoughts nearly enough.  When I wander off on the internet into “gossip” sites (which are more and more passed off as “news” but that’s no excuse) and junk like that, I can feel it sap my vitality.  It’s actually beginning to physically affect me.  You’d think that would drive me away from it, but oh no.

I do realize that I can’t overcome this stuff on my own, that I need to enlist God in it.  But you know what?  The Bible says flee from sin.  I don’t do that enough.  It also says I actually have to ask for help from him.  That I don’t do enough of.  So it’s my own fault.

I think I’ll quote the Paulmeister.

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

Like Paul, I know the answer.  Now if only I would actually take advantage of that rescue more regularly!

I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about parenting, and how some people, even churchgoers, will set aside what Jesus teaches to do what is right in their own eyes.  It makes for horrible optics for those who don’t go to church, who expect more from the “Christians”.  But I contend, it is to the next generation that the damage really goes.  Whether we like it or not, we are role models, ambassadors for Jesus.  When we drop the ball, willingly, with excuses like “pain” in our lives, or “everyone is doing it”, we not only discredit the faith we claim to have, but we lay waste to our own credibility.  This is what I wrote to him.

It is easy to worry about what others are doing, but [I'll mention] one more bit of wisdom [that I learned] from that Jesus dude that people love to ignore when it’s inconvenient.  It’s you who are responsible for you.  Others are their own problem and you can’t control them.  If they’ve [children] got one parent to look to for moral guidance, it should be their father.  We’ve been given the job of shepherd of our family.  Even from a distance, that means something.  They will turn to you sooner or later with questions like, “I really like this boy/girl.  Can I go camping with them by ourselves?”  Hypocrisy hurts deeply both the one who speaks it and the one who hears it.

It aggravates me to no end that people set such low expectations for morality these days.  People actually think it is impossible not to have sex before marriage.  People think it is impossible to have self-control.  With God, all things are possible.  I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.  There’s two verses in a row for you.

What I know is this: there were two things that allowed me to enter into marriage a virgin (and my wife was too).  One was God’s immense grace - he kept me from places and situations where I would have made the wrong choice so many times.  The other was my decision to follow him, seriously, when I was 16.  One verse back then meant a lot to me (and it wasn’t either of the ones above) - “present your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your spiritual act of worship.”  I knew that God wanted me to not share sex with anyone but my wife.  I brought a lot of other crap into the marriage, but past partners to compare her to was not one.  STDs weren’t either.

Most luckily was an absence of history - emotional ties to other women, or worse, children with other women that would divide my emotions and keep me from unity with my wife.  I want that for my kids.  I want to be able to say to them, you don’t have to have sex to be human.  You don’t have to sleep with someone to show them you love them.  You don’t need to “try someone out” to decide if they are worth marrying - they are worth marrying because of who they are not what they can do in the sack.  And most of all, I want to tell them that they don’t have to be like “everybody else” - because I wasn’t.  All of these things I am so glad I can tell them, but it was about the choices I made, not to just settle, or give in.  And those choices came from deciding that it was Jesus I was following, not the crowd, or the other kids in my youth group, or the other people in my church.

Church doesn’t work.  Jesus does.  When you give him a chance.

I’ll just add a bit more.  People are losing hope in this world.  They don’t believe that it is possible to love someone forever anymore.  They don’t believe it is possible to not have sex before marriage, or avoid adultery.  The mother-father-children model of family is falling apart because nobody believes it exists anymore.  But why not?  Who is telling these lies?  Where are all the families?  You are a light in the world, because Jesus is the light of the world.  Every time a marriage fractures, every time another young person buys into the “sowing oats” idea, that light dims.  We need to stand up in our communities, and be a voice that says, it doesn’t have to be this way.  This is the hope that Jesus offers - hope of restoration, hope of healing, hope of wholeness.