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Thanks to Someone

May6

The Flame Tree by Richard Lewis tells the story of Isaac Williams, the twelve year old son of American missionary doctors in Java, Indonesia. His best friend is Ismail (get it–Isaac and Ishmael?), a Muslim boy who is beginning to be caught up in Nahdlatul Umat Islam, a fundamentalist Islamic group with terrorist ties. Isaac is at first confused when Ismail says that they can no longer be friends unless Isaac submits to Islam. Then things get even worse when a faction of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam captures Isaac and holds him as a hostage. Finally, after facing malaria, cruelty, fear, and degrading treatment, Isaac is released, but then he must decide what to do about his captors and about his bitterness toward God for allowing him to suffer at the hands of evil men. The entire book is an interesting lesson about what can happen when Islam and Christianity clash, and the characters in the book demonstrate that people are complicated and difficult to understand. The Islamic hostage-takers are not one dimensional, stereotypical evil terrorists, but rather men, and women, who are sometimes kind, sometimes very cruel, caught up in a religion that allows fanaticism to grow and at the same time preaches peace. Isaac himself is not sure who he is after his captivity. “Maybe, just like he was neither a Javanese nor an American, he was no longer a Christian, but not quite a Muslim.” Later, he comes to see that, unlike Muslims who have no choice but to submit to the will of Allah, he has choice, and he chooses, by the grace of God, to be a Christian and to forgive. This is a difficult book in the sense that the author describes Isaac’s treatment during his captivity in more graphic terms than I was comfortable reading, but I realized after reading about the cruelty of some of the terrorists that perhaps I needed to be made uncomfortable in order to appreciate the miracle of forgiveness that comes in the ending.

At first I didn’t think that the second book I read this week had much in common with The Flame Tree. The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer is historical fiction/fantasy set during the 8th century AD on the coast of England and in Scandanavia. It includes Viking raids, trolls, dragons, talking animals, and magic spells. However, there are at least a couple of points of similarity. Jack is eleven when the Northmen, berserkers, raid his village. He, too, learns that people are not all bad nor always to be trusted. Jack, like Isaac, is a captive, and any time he begins to trust and even admire his captors, he is reminded of their cruelty and otherness. Jack is Saxon, and his village is Christian. The Northmen are worshippers of Odin and believe in seeking a glorious death in battle which will send them straight to Valhalla, a “heaven” that sounds a lot like an everlasting drunken feast. Jack remains a Christian, mostly because he doesn’t seem to think he has any choice, but he does learn to care about the Northmen even though they are not to be trusted to act in accordance with Christian morality, but only to act as their own pagan religion tells them to in order to maintain their honor. Jack, like Isaac WIlliams, returns home at the end of the book. Unlike Isaac, Jack doesn’t deal with the choice between bitterness and forgiveness; he just feels happy to be home, although he does wonder if he should have given kindness to one of his enemies when he was a slave to the Northmen. His teacher reassures him that “no kindness is ever wasted, not can we ever tell how much good may come of it.”

It seems to me that both of these books teach the same lesson: peace and forgiveness and understanding, as important as they are, can only go so far. At the end of the day, if those who follow a different god are determined to be obedient to their own evil desires and to revel in cruelty, we must defend ourselves and our families and villages even as we forgive and try to understand their blindness (there but for the grace of God go I). Hell is real because some people choose it. Not even God forces forgiveness on those who do not believe they need it, those who believe they have done nothing wrong, those who practice cruelty and sin in the name of Odin or Allah . . . or Jesus.

I have a problem. I’m getting lots of good recommendations for books to read from bloggers, too many ideas for the time in which I have to read them. However, that’s not the problem. I just finished these two books that I saw recommended somewhere maybe a month or two ago. I have no idea who recommended The Sea of Trolls nor The Flame Tree. Thank you, though, and be sure to comment if you gave me the tip on either of these.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Apr25

Reverend John Ames is seventy-six years old, and he’s been told that “his heart is failing.” So he begins to write down his memories for his seven year old son, the product of a late and very happy marriage to a much younger woman. Reverend Ames starts out writing about his father and his grandfather and about his love for this life, his memories and his regrets. However, before long, he finds that he must deal with the unfinished business of forgiveness and letting go of the past. The book has several themes:

Fathers and Sons
‘My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself. He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way he went about it made him disappointing from time to time, and not just to me. I say this despite all the attention he gave to me bringing me up, for which I am profoundly in his debt, though he himself might dispute that. God rest his soul, I know for a fact I disappointed him. It is a remarkable thing to consider. We meant well by each other, too.”

Heaven, Hell and Eternity
“If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.”

“I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence,the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

On Predestination and the Possibility that People Can Change
” . . . there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”

“Your mother said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change.’ ”

Faith and Doubt
“I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not,so to speak, the mustache and walking stick happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.”

I liked the quotes. Rev. Ames has a voice that reminds me of my father-in-law, a Southern Baptist country preacher who lived in our home before he died several years ago. (Interesting aside: I never figured out what denomination Rev. Ames belonged to, just that he was not Baptist, not Presbyterian, not Lutheran, not Quaker, and not Methodist. He believed in baptizing babies, though.)

However, the story itself was what kept me turning the pages of this memoir/novel. I wanted to know the “back story.” How did Rev. Ames come to marry a woman more than thirty years younger than he was? What happened to his grandfather, an abolitionist who knew John Brown and who lost one eye in the Civil War? Why did his brother Edward go to Europe to study and come back an atheist? Can the characters in the book forgive those who disappoint them, especially can Rev. Ames forgive and extend grace to an old friend who may or may not be a repentant sinner? And how did John Ames retain his faith in God and in life itself?

Gilead has lots and lots of questions and even a few answers. I’m planning to read Ms. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published back in 1981, as soon as I can find it, and I’ll read anything else she writes. This book was one of the best I’ve read in a very long time.

Heroes

Apr6

Barbara at MommyLife is blogging about and asking about heroes. She lists four heroes: Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, Henry V, and Mother Teresa. I tend to take my heroes (and heroines) from fiction rather than rather real life since there’s then no danger of my finding out that the person I was admiring is not such a hero after all. In fact, I think I became rather careful about real life heroes when I was a teenager. I greatly admired a couple in my church, Godly people, wise teachers, hospitable, leaders in our church. You can probably guess the end of the story. A couple of years after I graduated from high school the wise Christian man to whom I had gone for counsel and advice left his wife and four children saying that his wife of twenty years was no longer interesting or attractive to him. I was disillusioned, to say the least. Even historical heroes can be deconstructed and demythologized, a la Thomas Jefferson, into anti-heroes or at least flawed heroes.

The danger in having fictional heroes is that I may not be able to live up to their fictional perfection. However, high standards aren’t all bad, as long as you cut yourself some slack. At least with fictional heroes, I know all about the person, good and bad. Frodo’s not going surprise and disillusion me by deciding to give in to the evil of Sauron. So my fictional heroes are:
1. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Like Churchill, they never gave up even when everything looked as if it were hopeless. And contrary to the movie depiction, they never lost faith in each other. I want to be as faithful and loyal and hopeful as Sam Gamgee.
2. Horton. (Dr. Seuss) “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. And an elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”
3. Frog and Toad. (Arnold Lobel) Their friendship is unshakeable. Even when Toad is a grouch or Frog is a bit dense, they still stick together and look out for each other.
4. Don Quixote. He dreamed and believed in his dream no matter what happened. He endured suffering and abuse and hardship and misunderstanding and doubt and still knew himself to be Don Quixote de la Mancha, knight errant.

I begin to see a theme here. My heroes are those who live out this verse: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 2 Timothy 4:7

I do have some Biblical heroes:
1. Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” Job 13:15
2. Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:68-69

And I do admire some living and historical people. I simply remind myself that human beings may fail or disappoint, but there is only One who never fails.

1. Joni Eareckson Tada. She continues to point to hope in the Lord after twenty or more years in a wheelchair.
2. I know at least two mothers who have been serving the Lord, homeschooling their children, honoring their husbands for many years. SJ has thirteen children, and several of them are grown. SJ isn’t perfect, and neither are her children, although those who are grown are serving the Lord, too. However, she is faithful. She continues to do what God has called her to do, faithfully serving her husband and her children and her Lord. She is a heroine.
JR has seven children. She also remains faithful to her calling in spite of physical infirmities and prodigal children. Some of her children have made good choices, and some have not–yet. She continues to pray for them and love them and train her other children who are still at home. She, too, is a heroine.
3. Corrie ten Boom. She served the Lord in obscurity until World War 2 and Hitler’s persecution of the Jews brought a crisis of decision to her doorstep. She couldn’t turn these persecuted people away, so she hid them. Then she survived prison and managed, by God’s grace, to forgive those who were cruel to her and killed her sister, Betsy. And she never quit testifying to the goodness and hope to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ: “there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”
4. C.S. Lewis. He, too, remained faithful to His Lord to the end of his life. “Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.” The Screwtape Letters

These are the kinds of heroes I want to emulate. I want, not to just make a good start, but to finish the race. I want to be found faithful.
Thanks, Barbara, for making me think about heroes and renew my commitment to faithfulness in the Lord’s grace.

Cafes, Cathedrals and Communities

Apr4

Cafes and cathedrals are both very good things and have their places within communities. But somehow I think that “cathedral thinking” in this century requires us to consider a vision that is both bigger than a simple cafe and smaller than a city-of-God-type cathedral. We need to be building communities. My problem is that I don’t really know how to go about doing such a thing. I do have several models and threads of ideas from various sources:

1. The mega-churches aren’t all bad, after all. Build a place that becomes a community center, a place for people to come and exercise, study, have lunch, do crafts, and worship. The problem with these mega-church buildings is that the (relatively) rich people who build them sometimes feel such a sense of ownership that the “riff-raff” are discouraged from attending the church or using the building or becoming part of the community. So we need a central space/building that is dedicated to God by the entire community.

2. The Highlands Study Center isn’t a mega-church with a huge multi-purpose building, but they are a group of Presbyterians who are building a community similar to what I have in mind.

The Highlands Study Center exists to help Christians live more simple, separate, and deliberate lives to the glory of God and for the building of His kingdom. And that’s a big job, one done not simply, but deliberately. As a ministry of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, we stand with the Westminster Standards. Our hope is to help Reformed believers apply those principles to the way we live our lives. To that end we have a number of different ministries.

I doubt if I’m reformed enough or theologically erudite enough for them, but the idea of a community of mostly homeschooling families gathered around a church and study center is appealing. Somehow I still want to add in the outreach and evangelism component of Catez’s Open Late Cafe.

3. In her book The Severed Wasp, Madeleine L’Engle creates a Christian community that revolves around life at a fictional New York Episcopal Cathedral. The setting is based on Ms. L’Engle’s real-life experiences as volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence at the Epsicopal Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City. Norma at Collecting My Thoughts wrote last year about her Lutheran church and its many ministries, including a Visual Arts Ministry which showcases various artists including, but not limited to, church members. Our churches and cathedrals and communities should be places for artists and poets and writers-in-residence and architects and musicians to work and worship and follow God’s calling in their lives.

4. L’abri Fellowship in its various forms and locations is another model for what I’m trying to articulate.

L’Abri is a French word that means shelter. The first L’Abri community was founded in Switzerland in 1955 by Dr. Francis Schaeffer and his wife, Edith. Dr. Schaeffer was a Christian theologian and philosopher who also authored a number of books on theology, philosophy, general culture and the arts.
The L’Abri communities are study centers in Europe, Asia and America where individuals have the opportunity to seek answers to honest questions about God and the significance of human life. L’Abri believes that Christianity speaks to all aspects of life.

5. Another model is the Celtic monastery that I wrote about here.

6. Our homeschool co-op, called REACH, is yet another example of intentional Christian community that reaches across denominational lines. We have about 100 families participating in a co-op in which mostly moms teach children from babies to high schoolers on Firday mornings. All the moms teach or help in some way; we use the facilities at a large Baptist church. We are not a church, but we have learned to care for one another in a way similar to the way a church cares for its members. And we call on the gifts of each co-op member in a way that parallels the way the great cathedrals were built. To teach our children we need mathematicians and scientists and crafters and artists and nurturers and organizers and bloggers and readers. We all work together to build and maintain an organization that we hope will help educate the children and bring glory to God.

Study and evangelism and the arts and worship and families and churches and libraries and other institutions with actual buildings—I think we should be building all of these things to the glory of God. I would like to see these things built together as a Living Cathedral that forms a vibrant Christian community. I don’t know how you organize such a vision and bring it to fruition without the huge institutional support from the Catholic Church that was in place already during the Middle Ages. I guess what I’m seeing are many scattered communities-in-the-making and ministries and churches with a bit of vision for this or that piece of the Living Cathedral I’m envisioning, but nothing to bring it all together in any one place and make something that would glorify God and draw men to Him for generations to come.
Maybe you start small and trust the Holy Spirit to bring things together into a unified whole in His own time.

Cathedral Building

Apr4

Mark of Pseudo-Polymath is asking for bloggers and others to submit writing on the subject of “cathedral building,” how we as 21st century Christians could/should adapt the vision of medieval Christians who built catherdrals to glorify God and to last through the ages. He’s already received some interesting submissions.

Jollyblogger writes about Cathedral Thinking:

. . . we should teach our children with the mindset that they will embrace and further our work, not reject it for the newest fad. Further, we must rule out discouragement. Even if I fail, even if I die trying to advance the kingdom of Christ, Christ will reign victorious over all the earth.

Mark himself writes about modern cathedral building in terms of building “places, practices, and institutions”that bring people into Christian community and that tax our abilities and resources in the same way that building the cathedrals of the Middle Ages required the work and contributions of generations of Christians in a given community.

Then, Catez at AllThings2All gets specific with a vision of “The Open Late Cafe,” a sort of Christian coffeehouse/aid center for the broken, the needy, and all of us who just need a friend in the night.

I think this topic is great, and it relates to some things I have written about and thought about before. Read what these guys have to say, and then I’ll try to write something tonight about cathedral building and community building.

Good Friday

Mar25

Today is Good Friday, the day of Jesus’s crucifixion. This year it’s also the day that Jewish people celebrate Purim, the commemoration of the deliverance of the Jewish people from genocide at the hand of a Persian official named Haman. The fact that the two holidays coincide is appropriate since Esther risked her life to deliver her people from their enemies, and Jesus gave his life to rescue us from Our Enemy.
This year Passover, however, the Jewish holiday that most closely relates to the holiday Christians are celebrating this weekend, isn’t until late April. I have never understood why Passover and Easter week don’t always come at the same time. Here’s an explanation—but I still don’t understand. If that’s not confusing enough, Orthodox Christians use different rules for determining the date of Easter, and one of the rules is that “Easter shall never precede or coincide with Jewish Passover, but must always follow it.”
Right.
Nevertheless, Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on Thursday evening before he was crucified on Friday. And the Bible says that He became our Passover sacrifice, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Because of His blood shed for our sin, death and Satan no longer have lordship over those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Hallelujah! It truly is a good Friday.

Bored–Nothing To Do

Mar14

Spring break hasn’t even started yet, and one of the urchins is already worried about being bored. While I’m tempted to bop her over the head, I promised instead to make her a list of 100 things to do. Here’s the list. Feel free to use it to amuse and stimulate your bored urchin.

1. Read a book and write about it on your blog.
2. Bake a cake or some cookies and give them away.
3. Help Bee with her scrapbook.
4. Organize all the pictures you’ve taken with your digital camera into a scrapbook on the computer. (iPhoto?)
5. Sweep the porch or the driveway.
6. Plant the flowers in the flower bed around the tree in the front yard.
7. Go to the bookstore with your sister.
8. Help Bear clean and rearrange her room.
9. Read to Z-baby.
10. Send postcards to all your friends telling them how much they mean to you.
11. Write a real letter to your grandmother or to your aunt or to your cousin.
12. Take a photograph for each letter of the alphabet and make Z-baby an alphabet book.
13. Take someone with you and go for a walk.
14. Make a list of 100 random things about you: books you like, clothes you wear, things you’ve done, things you want to do, etc.
15. Draw a picture of something beautiful and give it to someone, or frame it and put it on your wall.
16. Plan a meal and make it for the family.
17. Write someone’s name at the top of a piece of paper. List all the ways you can think of to bless that person.
18. Rearrange and clean out your bookshelf.
19. Make a pillow for someone you love.
20. Write a poem every hour for a whole day–12 poems. Share them with someone you love or post them on your blog.
21. Make a list of every person you know and beside each name write at least one good thing about each person.
22. Find your favorite poem. Read it out loud twice a day until you have it memorized.
23. Read Psalms all the way through.
24. Find a place where you can be alone and pray for 15 minutes. Can’t make it for 15 minutes? Try 10. Try 5 minutes.
25. Go for a whole day without speaking. Can you do it? What do you learn by not talking?
26. Write a letter to yourself to be opened at your high school graduation. Tell yourself what you would like to be doing when you are eighteen.
27. Tell knock-knock jokes with Z-baby.
28. Make jello.
29. Put on some music and dance with your sisters.
30. Choose a drawer and clean it out.
31. Learn how to say “I love you” in ten languages and make a card for someone using the languages.
32. Help Karate Kid plan his birthday.
33. Try not to think about polar bears.
34. Comment on 20 people’s blogs.
35. Play cards (Alligator) with Bee.
36. Daydream.
37. Paint your nails.
38. Do 25 crunches.
39. Play SET on the computer.
40. Make brownies.
41, Update your calendar.
42. Jump on the trampoline.
43. Call a friend on the phone.
44. Find something that’s lost.
45. Play dominoes.
46. Drink nine glasses of water in one day.
47. Put lotion on your feet and then wash someone else’s feet and put lotion on them.
48. Turn your mattress over.
49. Clean out a flowerbed and buy some seeds to plant in it.
50. Tell somebody a joke.
51. Sort out our photographs. Have an envelope for each person in our family and and envelope for groups.
52. Match all the socks in the sock basket.
53. Ask Daddy to give you all his shirts that are missing buttons. Sew buttons on them.
54. Write 100 words in a journal or blog every day–no more, no less.
55. Give every person in the house a hug.
56. Listen to someone else’s music.
57. Learn to play a musical instrument.
58. Eat so much junk food that you’re sick of it.
59. 27 fling boogie.
60. 27 give away boogie.
61. Brush your hair 100 strokes. Brush someone else’s hair 100 strokes.
62. Take a long hot bath.
63. Do a math lesson.
64. Read the encyclopedia.
65. Color in a coloring book with your little sister.
66. Ask a neighbor if you can do something to help her in her house.
67. Write a story.
68. Read the jokes in the old Reader’s Digests and tell one to someone else.
69. Watch one of the movies on Semicolon’s 105 Best Movies list that you’ve never seen.
70. Scratch someone else’s back.
71. Rake up all the pine needles in the backyard.
72. Make funny faces.
73. Clean all the writing off the windows in the gameroom.
74. Find a way to display our collection of buttons.
75. Find a new word in the dictionary and use it in conversation at least 5 times today.
76. Go outside with a piece of chalk and write something encouraging on the sidewalk–in ten different places.
77. Send a thank you note to someone who’s done something for you.
78. Wash and dry all the comforters in the house.
79. Walk around the couch and tell yourself stories.
80. Videotape the younger children doing a show or a play.
81. Clean out the van.
82. Organize the pantry.
83. Doodle on the whiteboard.
84. Read a short book of the Bible out loud all the way through.
85. Pray for ten people who need your prayers.
86. Write something in all the other children’s blank books.
87. Paint a picture.
88. Play with make-up.
89. Make milkshakes or smoothies for the family.
90. Teach Bee to play hopscotch.
91. Learn calligraphy.
92. Make a collage.
93. Find your “life verse,” the Bible verse that God is giving you to help you see His purpose in your life.
94. Think of something you want someone to do for you. Do that thing for someone else.
95. Do something kind for someone for free–in Jesus’ name.
96. Read the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). Use your camera to take one picture to illustrate each Beatitude. Or take pictures to illustrate one of the psalms.
97. Read a magazine.
98. Get Karate Kid to teach you some martial arts moves.
99. Sing a hymn out loud.
100. Sing all the songs from your favorite movie musical.

I told the bored urchin that she should do something for someone else when she’s feeling bored, but this idea didn’t go over too well. So I tried to make my list to be fun and reflect that idea. Maybe some concrete examples will help. I do believe my children spend way too much time worrying about how to entertain themselves, and that goal invites boredom. Joy really is found in service, but it’s a hard lesson to learn. (It’s also a hard lesson for me to model sometimes since I tend to be as self-centered and entertainment-seeking as the next person.)
Some of these ideas, by the way, were loosely based on ideas found at a site called 52 Projects.

Post-Partum Depression

Mar8

ANYONE who has ever dealt with post-partum depression or who has ever known anyone who experienced such depression or who is going through this sort of hell now needs to read Amy’s story at Amy Loves Books.
Guys especially, if you even suspect that someone you love is dealing with post-partum depression issues, please read Amy’s story. Her husband, just like the husband of a friend of mine who experienced severe post-partum depression, was essentially clueless. I’m not criticizing; it’s hard for guys to know what going on when ladies’ hormones start acting up. But we all need to try to understand what’s going on and help each other to survive such a difficult time. By the way, I’ve never been depressed after having a baby, but I do understand hormones that seem to be causing me to act in ways that are not normal for me.

a baby story: part 1 of a tale I don’t tell
part 2: birth
part three: all we need to know of hell
the end: monster

WARNING: Amy’s story is very honest and moving and ultimately, I believe, encouraging, but if you are pregnant now or in a vulnerable place emotionally, you may want to have someone else read this story and help you to know whether it will help or hurt you right now.

Thanks, Amy, for having the courage and taking the time to share this story with the world. I believe you will be a blessing to many.

To Grow or Not To Grow (Up, That Is)

Mar7

I found a link to this interesting (2002) NRO article, Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy, by Frederica Mathewes-Green at Boar’s Head Tavern, where they’re discussing singleness and marriage and saying that the evangelical church is way too hipped on marriage.
From Mathewes-Green’s article:

Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.

But we no longer think of children as adults-in-progress. Childhood is no longer a training ground but a playground, and because we love our children and feel nostalgia for our own childhoods, we want them to be able to linger there as long as possible. We cultivate the idea of idyllic, carefree childhood, and as the years for education have stretched so have the bounds of that playground, so that we expect even “kids” in their mid-to-late twenties to avoid settling down.

I was discussing this problem with a friend just last Friday. We know a whole group of young men, homeschooled, from Christian homes, professing Christian themselves, who have dropped out of college, are working at minimum wage-type jobs, and playing around with dating. planning to get married “someday.” They don’t seem to be preparing themselves financially for marriage; they don’t have any discernable long term goals. They aren’t preparing for or taking leadership positions in the church either. If this behaviour isn’t a refusal to grow up, I don’t know what to call it.
Then, there are the dozen or more young Christian women that I can name off the top of my head who have graduated from high school, finished college, learned to manage a household in addition to preparing educationally for a career, and who still aren’t married at age 20+ or 30+. I don’t think that for most of these young ladies their standards are too high; there just aren’t as many committed Christian men as there are women. So, any suggestions? What is the key to encouraging the Christian young men that are in our families and churches to grow up and committ themselves–to marriage, to career, to education, whatever the Lord is calling them to do?

By the way, all the discussion at BHT started with this address by Dr. Albert Mohler, Part 1 and Part 2
Then, iMonk wrote this essay asking, Have We Said Too Much (about marriage, that is)?
From there, you can go on to read all sorts of responses, both pro and con.
Put me in the same camp with Dr. Mohler. I see too much anecdotal evidence that young men, especially, are delaying adulthood in many areas, not just delaying marriage. I am praying that the Holy Spirit will bring revival, not so that everybody will get married, but rather so that that the church will have the strong male leadership that it needs to follow Christ in this century.

Finding a Mate

Feb23

I found these suggestions on “Finding a Mate” at a blog called Homeliving Helper, and I thought it contained some good advice. Since we have four teenagers (I prefer to call them young adults), the subject is of some interest to me.

“I don’t believe in this sitting-around-stuff that some single girls are ascribing to, waiting til someone magically appears. The parents need to be alert and be able to recognize a good man when they see one, and pursue a friendship with him. I agree you shouldn’t chase men, but I do think there are many things you can do to bring one into your life.
In this current day, parents take a greater interest in choosing the college their children will attend, than they do in choosing a future mate. You judge for yourself which is the most important.”