Author Archives: justinmcampbell

The Church Needs Single Men To Stay

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So last week while I was writing some thoughts about what we as singles could maybe do about being angry with the church, Donald Miller was writing about how he doesn’t go to church, and then some people responded – ok a lot of people.

So I thought since I’m on a roll with singles and church, I’d offer a couple of thoughts.

First, two quick points that don’t have anything to do with singleness, but I have to say them.  1. What planet were all these people on that they were surprised that Miller doesn’t regularly attend church?  I mean when I see people say they love his books but were disappointed by him sharing that he doesn’t often attend church . . . what the H . . . are you sure you read the books?  2. I always find it mildly entertaining when protestant people in denominations (or “non-denominations”) younger than me try to drop the authority of the church angle on people like Miller.  Yeah that’s consistent.

Ok, just had to get that off my chest.  Moving on.

Miller shared a lot of thoughts, many of which I agree with even if I don’t agree with his conclusion (although to be fair, he was only making that conclusion for himself).  But one of the things that I think he left out, but I would think that he has experienced as I know I have, is that is church is hard as a single person – especially once you hit your late twenties.

Miller like myself lived his thirties as a single man.  And I would say that a thirty something man is in the most awkward spot in all of the church.

Here’s the reality that evangelicals refuse to deal with.  Single people (and especially single men) don’t go to church.  This isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch.  At least in my lifetime all the research has always pointed to the fact that people in their twenties go to church less than any other group.  What would happen essentially is that people would leave, but then when they got married, or at least when they had kids, they’d come back. Because the Church is the “family place“.

The problem is, that when you don’t have that family or even get married, you don’t come back.  A funny thing is that whether you keep following Jesus or not, you get used to not going.  The longer you’re out there, the less likely you are coming back.

When I was in my earlier twenties I never thought twice about it.  Church was fine, everyone around me trusted my leadership as a young man and we all thought I just hadn’t met the one yet.  But as I grew older, that view, both mine and others, changed.

What’s ironic is, in a lot of churches, including many led by the people attacking (lovingly challenging in their words) Miller, he would actually have been limited in what he could be a part of there.  In many churches singles aren’t really allowed to lead.  So we should go, God only works through his local church, we can’t have real community without it, but we shouldn’t have access to it all until we get married.  Yeah that’s a good sell.

Add to this the stereotypes and messages that are sent to single men (men are bad, non committal, only care about sex, are more immature than women, is he gay, etc) and you’ve got a recipe for single men leaving the church.

Single men are the most watched, judged and ostracized people group in the evangelical congregation.

But this is where I want to circle back to what I said last week. For the sake of the body of Christ, we need to not run from the church.  Whether they like it or not, the church needs it’s single brothers to hang in there.  While understanding that the church will not change for us, perhaps we could impact the church for the men that come behind us.

Let me be totally honest with you.  For seven years I rarely, and I mean rarely, attended Church.  It wasn’t all because of the singleness issue, but it played a significant role.  Like Miller, I had just as good of community then as I do now.  I did stuff in the kingdom, even though I wasn’t “plugged in” to a church.  So why did I come back?  Why for the last eight years have I stayed?

For starters, I found a church that didn’t care as much that I was single (they do exist).  For the most part, they treated me as an equal.  But more than that I realized that there were bigger issues at play than my comfort level.  It was for me, more about communion than community.  In other words, while I can get community, teaching, and impact outside of the church, I can’t get communion and that particular connection to the larger body there. Secondly, I had a role to play.  If I invested, eventually I could have impact, not only in how I was viewed but in how singles that come behind me will be viewed – and there are a lot of them coming.  I will not abandon them.

Bottom line to this post as well as last week’s posts is this:  If we all leave, it won’t change.

My Church Doesn’t Get Singleness And I’m Mad Pt 2

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Yesterday I said that a reader had posed the question, “what do we do about anger at the church when it comes to singleness?”  I offered some reasons why it’s important to deal with and some reasons why that anger can be legitimate.  I then said we could leave the church, ignore the problems, or actually engage the problem.  If we choose the third problem I offered that there are at least three things we need to do.
  1. Do our best to understand why it’s the way it is, and trust that most of it is not personal.
  2. Earn the right to have a voice.
  3. Exercise our voice in a way that can be heard.

Yesterday I offered some thoughts on part one.  Today I want to comment on part two and three.

The second part is vital and it starts with this.  We need to do a good job of loving people. We need to love an help shepherd younger single people.  We need to have married friends and learn to minister to them as well.  We can speak into married people’s lives and marriages.  We need to love our married friends well – and this includes loving our married church leaders well.

If we want to change the stereotypes then we have to be different.  There is no reason why we can’t lead a small group with married people in it. Attitude is important.  For example, what do we do when there is a marriage sermon series?  Do we check out, or double down?  How I love other singles, married people, and leaders in the church carries weight. What I’m kind of saying is get off of the defensive, “no one gets it” level and onto the “I’m an equal follower of Jesus and I’m going to live it” level. Church leaders may not pick us to lead naturally, but we have to actually try to serve and lead.  Maybe more than once.

This leads naturally into point three.  That is, once we’ve earned the right to have a voice, freaking exercise it.

I’m not saying it will be easy or that they will listen to that early on.  But that doesn’t mean they won’t listen at the end of the day.  What I know for sure is that if we don’t speak, and don’t act, then nothing will happen.  But if we earn the right and speak up, someone (not everyone) will hear us.

Someone once posted in the comment section , “I wish I was brave enough to share this post with my minister and elders”.  I’m not trying to be self promoting here, but if you like something I or someone else writes about this stuff, share it with people that count.   Have conversations (not just complaining sessions).  Point out that the bible talks about celibacy and that maybe your church should think about it.  Go missional on them (churches are all about “being missional”) and tell them that 50% of people are single and that those people are WAY less likely to go to church.  If they approached it differently maybe those people will come.  Speak up when it’s not right, not just under your breath to your friends on the way out the door, but with your elders and leaders that you’ve earned the right to talk to.

What we need is to lovingly challenge the church.  Not softly mind you.  Firmly and with conviction, but in love, for the good of the whole body of Christ and for the lost.

Offer solutions, and offer to help make those solutions happen.

This blog, and my whole writing and speaking ministry, started in one conversation about four years ago.  My church had a singles seminar that went bad.  I met with an elder and pastor at my church and after some niceties said essentially, “So, your singleness seminar sucked.”  They knew it.  Now understand, I was mid-30s, had helped our church plant a new campus, led several community groups and genuinely loved these guys.  I said, “Look, here are some of the things I would have maybe talked about.” and I shared some new ways of looking at it, from a single perspective.  Less than a year later they asked me to come to a weekend on Marriage and Family (of all places) and present on singles and marrieds together.  I just finished teaching (with another single person) a four week course on Singleness and the Gospel at my church.

Now does it look like it should?  No.  Do we as a Church get it?  Heaven’s no, not even close.  But is God moving in it? I’d say yes.

I don’t have a list of easy answers but here’s my point.  We can sit around, be mad and/or be the victim, or we can get off of defense, go love people, trust that they might have a good heart, forgive them for what they probably don’t even realize they are doing, without selfish ambition offer ideas – and then back it up.  It needs to be bigger than just me and it needs to come from a heart of conviction, not bitterness.  It will not be easy, but it could be good.

The question isn’t “does the church get singleness?”  It doesn’t.  Maybe a better question is if my church doesn’t get singleness – what am I going to do about it? If we don’t initiate the conversation, then who will?

My Church Doesn’t Get Singleness And I’m Mad Pt. 1

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A few weeks ago, a reader asked me if I would write a post about anger at the Church and what to do with that so I thought I’d take a stab at it.

Let’s do two things by way of prologue.

Bitterness Is An Enemy and Not From God

I’ve written before about how as a single we can easily fall into the trap of bitterness. There are a lot of mad singles.  I’ve been there.  Believe me.  There is an anguish.  There can be a sense of entitlement.  There is a sense of loss and we react to it.  I’ve written before that we can be mad at God, mad at women, mad at other guys, and mad at ourselves.  All of these are important things to consider and deal with.  I believe that we are mostly mad at God.  Really all of us at one time or another feel this.  We can also be mad at The(a) Church which brings us to:

The Church in general and in particular within protestantism, has really messed this up.

I mean it’s not good.  Where to begin?  The don’t get it.  And maybe worse, they don’t like it.  We don’t honor or even teach about celibacy.  We often don’t let singles into leadership.  The church is in a defensive position on marriage, and is actually often unwittingly helping to hurt marriage in the process.  The Church as a whole has created an idol out of marriage and family.

Rarely does a church address the singles in it’s midst (let alone the outside of it) and when it does, mostly what it does is tell us is what not to do, wait for the one, and then your questions of sexual prowess will magically be answered.  Of course as a guy the church has told us it’s all our fault, and therefore we are all (men and women) set up to fail.

So basically most of the church’s answer to singleness is to offer spiritual platitudes, worry more that we might marry wrong that if we would marry at all, and never address any of the things that we go through – including have to walk into their doors all by ourselves. And that is just a brief warm up.  So yeah, there is a lot to be mad about.

What Do We Do With It?

The real question isn’t are single people generally frustrated with the church.  It’s not even should they be, because frankly they probably should be. The real question (and the one that the reader was wanting to know) is what do we do with it.

I think there are three choices really.

  1. Say screw the church and leave – if I get married think about coming back
  2. Go to church at least at some level, but not engage the battle.  Maybe find a church that at least isn’t anti-single.
  3. Engage the church, forgive our leaders, earn the right to be heard, and then fight for what we know is right.

We all know option one is wrong, but it is an option.  The problem here is that it hurts the church, and that really shouldn’t be our goal. Taking ourselves out of the equation won’t change the equation in our favor (or anyone else’s).

Option two is where a lot of people I know (and myself for a long time) seem to be at.  It’s kind of a surrender really – this is just the way it is.  That is easier in a lot of ways and I guess at least you are there.

But option three is where I think we need to be.  So how do we do that?  We need to do three things.

  1. Do our best to understand why it’s the way it is, and trust that most of it is not personal.
  2. Earn the right to have a voice.
  3. Exercise our voice in a way that can be heard.

Today, I want to tackle the first one and tomorrow I’ll write about the other two.

I’ve written a lot about this part before, but let’s sum up some thoughts that can help.  We need to understand that the leaders of the church (most of the time) have the right heart, even if the wrong solutions.  There are so many factors in play.  Many in the church are looking around and watching the family fall apart.  They see it and want to help. This is where all the family focus and effort comes into play.  It’s why there are hundreds of Christian books on marriage and family.  They are trying to rescue the family, which isn’t all bad.  To their credit, I think these resources have helped a lot of families make it. That’s a good thing.

They also don’t want to see us hurt ourselves or others, which is why they constantly are worried about sex outside of marriage and all that goes with that.  As I told an audience of singles at our church, the surest ways to get the pastor to stop talking about not having sex, would be if all of our singles would . . . stop having sex.

And finally as I’ve written about before, on a practical level most pastors and church leaders have never been single.  They really don’t get it.  It doesn’t mean they don’t care. They just literally don’t understand.

What knowing these things can do, if we can get past the bitterness, is allow us to forgive people for getting this wrong.  I think we have to start there, because otherwise it’s just about us and that’s not enough.  This whole thing is way bigger than just our own personal situation.  It’s a real problem in the Church and we have a chance to help.  More on that tomorrow.

God The Great Withholder

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I want to revisit one of the beliefs that I think can really hurt us as singles and even as marrieds.  It’s the idea that God has one person for me that he is going to provide but just hasn’t done it yet.

This idea is everywhere.  It is in books on dating.  It’s said from the pulpit.  It’s encouraged in small groups.  “You just need to be patient – God will bring you the one”.  “God will in His perfect timing, bring you the perfect person for you.”  “Just live your life and don’t worry about it, because God will provide.”  “Rejection is God’s Protection – she just wasn’t right for you.”  The list goes on and on.

People try to use scripture to back this idea up.  They use situations like Isaac and Rebekah and say see God will provide.  Yeah I’ll just send my servant to a well. You have to make some major leaps to make this idea scriptural.

The heart of this usually comes in one of two places.  Most people are mainly trying to be comforting.  It’s a quick, painless way out of a the “why are you single” conversation. It’s what I call help you sleep at night theology.  While it might help you sleep, it probably won’t help you find a wife.

The other place it comes from is the good hearted place of wanting to recognize that God is our provider for all things.  Well He is, but the problem is that we don’t treat that the same way in any other place.

If I came to you and said, I’m broke and I need a job, would you tell me to sit tight – that God will provide the perfect job that is just for me at the right time?  I should wait for the perfect job, and for sure not settle right?  Obviously this would be a bad idea.  You’d tell me to go look for a job.  Or maybe you’d say I need to go back to school to train for a different job.  What you wouldn’t likely do is blame God for my joblessness.

I think this whole idea is dangerous to us personally on a lot of levels.

First of all it perpetuates the idea of the Christian Soulmate.  This idea that there is this one person that God has for you.  This to me is not scriptural and frankly more a mix of bad Calvinism, Oprah theology and romance novels.  Nowhere in Scripture are you promised a wife, let alone a soulmate.  You do not have a soulmate.  In fact Jesus specifically says that there won’t be marriage in heaven.  The other funny thing about the soulmate is that the focus is typically on how they will be perfect for me, not so much the other way around.

Second is that many end up in fear of choosing wrong.  What if I marry someone that is not the one perfect person that God has for me.  This can also become an excuse where every person I date just “isn’t the one“.  Not to mention it’s a great excuse after marriage for leaving the marriage.  I mean if I meet someone who seems more like the perfect one, well then I must not have been right the first time right?

It can keep us from working on the things that get in the way of us getting married.  Our (and other people’s) sin, insecurities and/or lack of ability to communicate with the opposite sex.  It’s not anything that I’m doing, or the choices that I or others around me make.  It’s God’s fault.

But perhaps the worst thing about it is that it turns God into the Great Withholder.  God loves you and has someone for you, He just isn’t bringing them to you.  Really?!  This always get’s explained as you’re not ready or they’re not ready or something to that affect. But people get married all the time.  God thought they were ready but you aren’t?  All this does is create unnecessary anger and frustration with God.

It would also mean, as I’ve mentioned before, that God has changed His mind about marriage.  Now I know logic is dead in our culture but hang with me here.  For thousands of years, people got married young.  As recently as 40 years ago if you were 18-29 there was a 60% chance you were married.  Now there is only a 20% chance that you are.  So God used to think it was good to “provide the one” in your early 20s or teens, but now He waits to do it until you are 30.  Really?!

Now here’s the thing.  God is the Great Provider.  But His provision looks a little different than this.  First of all we need to get in our heads that He is not as much our provider as He is literally our provision.  Read that again.  God has given us all we need regardless of our context because He has given us Himself.  We need to start here or all else is foolishness.  The beauty of living in this is that I can live life to the full in any context including single or married.  If I get this, then I am free to search for a wife, instead of The One. If I get married, I’m more free to actually love my wife.

If we walk with God, He will provide opportunities.  But we have a role to play in that and we live in a fallen world where we and everyone we interact with (including someone we could marry) make mistakes and bad decisions.  I believe that God indeed brought my wife and I together.  I fully believe that He was in that.  But I also believe that we both chose to do something about it.

Here’s what we really want.  We want a system where either we don’t have to do anything or where we control everything.  But neither of those are right.  Neither require actually walking with God.

Managing Attraction – I Can’t Help What I Feel

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Do you remember who you were attracted to back in your high school days.  Even maybe middle school?  I sure do remember.  I even had a list in middle school – a top ten list. Haha and all ten were so out of my league so to speak.  I didn’t understand how anything worked.  I just knew who I was attracted to and that I wished they were attracted to me.  I spent most of early to mid adolescence in that place.

But here’s an interesting thing.  When you are all “into” someone, they become even more attractive.  It’s as if our attraction scale slides based on how bad we want someone.  This leads to the feeling of “the one” or of “one that I can’t live without”.  I have a post coming soon to talk more about that idea, but for today I want to focus on a different side of attraction.

As I’ve stated, and fully believe, the feeling of attraction is not a choice.  You either feel attraction or you don’t.  It’s not a conscious in the moment decision.  It just is.  I believe we can do things to be more or less attractive in a moment to someone else (more coming here as well) but I don’t think I will myself to feeling attraction for someone.

However, we can manage what we do with attraction.  Attraction does not require a particular action.  And just because we don’t feel attraction (especially 100% attraction) doesn’t require inaction.

Today I want to talk about the first part, because honestly it’s maybe more important.  Just because you are attracted doesn’t mean you have to act on it.

I’ve had a lot of people (probably more women) tell me something to the affect of, “I can’t help what I feel.”  In other words, I’m attracted to this person and therefore I am going to be with them.  This is a very immature way of handling it.  An adolescent way really.  (No offense to our many fine adolescents 🙂 ).  It is not how you make a mature decision on who to marry – which as a Christian adult (read 18 and over) should be the goal of dating.

This is dangerous on so many levels.  First we should not be controlled by our feelings and desires.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t count.  They do.  But I put my feelings and desires up against the Truth of the scriptures and teachings of the Bible and Church.  I don’t just act because I feel.  This is a part of what it means to be mature.

Paul speaks to this when he says in 1 Corinthians 6 when he says that he will not be mastered by anything.  He is talking about sexual immorality but it’s true for all things. The idea is that while I might feel something or desire something, I don’t HAVE to act on that.

This is where the list of qualifiers I mentioned a couple of weeks ago comes into play. Attraction (whether its creating it or being attracted) opens the door.  It means it’s time to find some stuff out.  If I’m attracted that means I need to find out more.  That’s all it means.

If we don’t bring the feeling of attraction under our control and under the Lordship of God we are setting ourselves up to fail in all sorts of different ways.

  • We can end up dating/marrying someone we know we shouldn’t.  I lost count a long time ago of the people I’ve watched date people they said they never would, simply because they “can’t help what they feel.”
  • We can waist our time pursuing someone we know we wouldn’t marry.  Hard to find the right person while dating the wrong one knowingly.
  • We can set ourselves up to consumer date.  In other words, “I’m not as attracted today so I break up” or “I met someone more attractive so I moved on”.
  • If we do get married we set ourselves up for an affair.  If I “can’t help what I feel” then  what happens when after being married for a while I meet someone else that I’m attracted to?  That will happen you realize.  There are a lot of attractive people.

Attraction matters.  It matters for sure in our context that we live in.  I don’t think we can pretend that it doesn’t.  I think a bunch of verses about beauty fading probably aren’t going to change that.  We aren’t going back to arranged marriages. But while attraction is the starting point its not the ending point.  It’s probably going to be part of the process, but it’s not the end goal.

I want to say more about managing attraction.  Things like how much attraction do you have to have, how do we help ourselves be more attractive so to speak, more on how to flee when you are attracted but shouldn’t be, and some ways to quit comparing everyone to the mystical 15 that I talked about last time.  I’m even going to give a couple of new “qualifiers” that you should look for in someone’s character when considering marriage.

But for today, how driven by attraction are you?  Are you and adult about it, or an adolescent?  Do you control what you do with it, or are you controlled by it?

My Picker Is Broken

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One of the things I’ve heard from several people when it comes to dating is the words, “I think my picker is broken.”  In other words, “I keep picking the wrong people to be with.”

There can be a lot of reasons for this and a lot of different results.  We can can keep getting into relationships with people that we shouldn’t or keep chasing people that we can’t seem to “get”.  Some of it might be self sabotage for various reasons.  But a lot of it has to do with misunderstanding and/or mismanaging attraction.

As I’ve said a lot, attraction is not a conscious in the moment choice.  But it matters and in a big time way.  I believe its not so much that our picker is broken as it is that our attraction meter is broken.  I mean this in several ways.

For starters we need to understand that our attraction scale is skewed.  This is true for both how we see the opposite sex and typically in how we see ourselves.  Let me explain.

Let’s say there is an attraction scale from 1-10.  1 would be extremely unattractive.  10 would be extremely attractive.  This is maybe more straightforward for how guys see women because it’s more a physical thing, but the scale works for women as well, just in a different way.

I think there are very very few 1s and 2s and also very very few 9s and 10s.  Most people fall in between.  In fact it is my contention that most people fall between 4 and 7 but maybe I’m just an optimist.  There is a lot of good news in this.  For one, it can be subjective. While it might be true that a 10 is a 10 to just about anyone, one persons 5 could for sure be another persons 7.  Second we can do things to move up or down in that scale.  Maybe a six can’t be a 10, but presentation can sure make them a 7.  You get what I’m saying.

But the bad news is that this scale is not only subjective, it’s also based on context to some extent.  Here’s what I mean by that.  100 years ago if you lived in say St. Joseph Missouri (a town of about 70,000 people) you would only meet people from there.  So your context of 1-10 was sort of dictated by that.  But then came ease of travel – specifically highways and airplanes.  Now I could view people from everywhere.  This skews the scale.  As a female friend of mine once said, “the great thing about it is, in California I’d be a 6 or 7 but in St. Joseph I’m a 10”.  I remember laughing about that – there was some truth to it.

But now we have a bigger problem.  We have hundreds of channels and of course the internet.  So now the context is the world – every picture, book, story, movie and perversion.  We even have what I call the off the scale 15.  The 15 is the touched up model or the movie star guy.  It’s not real, and yet we’ve spent our whole life viewing that as the 10, when really it’s the 15 – it’s not even actually on the scale.  So our scale is skewed and we need to begin to figure that out.

This leads us to the second problem.  We have this idea that in order to marry someone, we need to be “perfectly attracted”.  We need our “soulmate” so to speak.  Not only should I be 100% attracted, but I should always feel that way.

This makes us eliminate good people that we are actually pretty dang attracted to. Remember most of us are not a 9 or 10 and we are certainly not a 15.  And yet that has become the prerequisite for marriage.

This is seriously frustrating for many of us.  We meet people that have the qualities that we are looking for, but we rule them out because we aren’t attracted enough (read perfectly attracted).  Notice I didn’t say not attracted at all.  We are at least somewhat attracted to all sorts of people.  We need to own this!  While it might be fine to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not attracted to, it’s not the same thing to say I don’t want to marry someone I’m not 100% attracted to 100% of the time.

This is where it comes back to the picker problem.  When we keep looking for the perfect attraction, when we do feel that way, all else flies out the window.  This is part of why so many women end up with the guy who has none of the qualities they are looking for.  They are attracted so it’s now time to rationalize everything else.  Or it leads to the guy chasing the girl who won’t ever say yes, but dang it, he’s 100% attracted to her, so he has to keep acting on it.  And for many Christians it means just picking no one.  I’m attracted to the wrong people so I just won’t be with anyone.  While better than being married to the wrong person, it’s not a good long term solution.

So what do we do?  How do we manage attraction?  I’ll say more about this soon.

By the way, this doesn’t even take into consideration that most men don’t even realize what women are attracted to at all (nor do a lot of women).  

But I really believe the first step is asking some hard questions.  What is your attraction scale? What type of decisions do you make out of that?  Where do you see yourself on your scale?  How do you know where you are? How attracted do you need to be to act on it? To stay with it?

Can You Marry Someone You Don’t “Love”

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I’ve been so blessed over the last couple of years as I’ve shared some of these ideas about singleness to engage a lot of different people.  Young singles, older singles, married people, pastors among others.  During one conversation with some people a woman said, “I don’t want to marry someone I don’t love.  I don’t think you should do that.”

There are so many angles on this idea of being “in love”.  There is the obvious stuff about romantic love vs. sacrificial love.  I get that.  Here’s the funny thing.  Married people (and I mean people who have been married for a while) will almost always tell you it’s not about romantic love.  I can’t count the times someone told me that.  And the thing is, I got it then and I get it now.  But I always chuckled because if pushed, none of them got married to someone that they weren’t “in love” with.  So while that might be true in marriage, and while it can bring perspective to a single person, it’s tough to work through and most haven’t.

Really we have to define “in love” but I’d like to back up a couple of steps.

We need to first own what I talked about a couple of weeks ago.  This idea that while there are things we are looking for in a person (such as a Christian, smart, fun, has a job, driven, likes sports . . . whatever else) those are really qualifiers.  What I mean is that what we want is someone we are attracted to who also has those things.  We need to own up to this because when we don’t, we are just in our own way.

What this woman was saying is I don’t want to marry someone I’m not attracted to. That would be a fair statement. But frankly that doesn’t have much to do with love.

We need to keep two very important things in mind.  Loving someone is not a feeling and attraction is not a choice.

Both attraction and love are real.  Here’s the good news.  When you love someone, I think attraction can grow, and attraction can lead you to love someone.  But when we confuse the two all the time it can keep us single and/or make us bad spouses if we do get married.

Love is a choice.  I can choose to love literally anyone.  This is why it’s a command.  Jesus is not commanding you to feel something. Jesus isn’t saying, “Be attracted to God with all your heart. (Yes I get that we should be and one day will be).  He’s not saying, “be attracted to your enemy.”

Think about this, everyone’s favorite little marriage verses, like, “Husbands love your wife as Christ loves the church”, or “Wives submit to your husbands” have nothing to do with attraction.  Most of the people that Paul was writing to were married through arranged marriages in one form or another.  Not all certainly but the point is that those commands aren’t based on how you feel about it that day.  Love is a choice.

Attraction is not a choice.  Here’s what I mean by that.  As someone I was team teaching with put it a few weeks ago,  Attraction is not an in that moment conscious decision.  Read that again.  Am I saying attraction can’t grow?  No.  Am I saying that you can’t lose attraction?  Of course not.  What I’m saying is that you don’t go out and say, “I’m going to feel attraction for this or that person.”  In that moment you either feel attracted or you don’t.

Now I have a post coming about attraction and how what I’m going to call our attraction meter is completely hi-jacked. But the first step is acknowledging that it matters.  The question is not does attraction matter, but how much should I allow it to matter.

If the question is, can I marry someone I don’t love, then the answer is well sort of.  But if you get married you are commanded to love them so you might want to figure it out.  On the other hand if the question is can you marry someone you aren’t attracted to, the answer is clearly yes.  The hardest part about this for the single person (the part that no married person likes to admit) is that to do so would mean you’d first have to date someone you weren’t attracted to.

Am I saying that you should marry someone you aren’t attracted to?  Not really.  I didn’t. But you could.  What I’m saying is at the very least, own that you are looking for attraction.  I’m saying who you marry is a choice – attracted or not.  Really you could choose to marry a lot of people irregardless of your attraction level – many of whom would have the qualities you say you are looking for.

I’m not saying we should ignore attraction.  In fact I’m saying the opposite.  We need to understand it – what we are attracted to and why, what makes us attractive to the opposite sex and why, and what to do about it all.

How attracted do you need to be to marry someone?  To go on a date?  Which is more important to you – your attraction to someone or the qualities you are looking for?

Should A Single Person Have A Kid On Purpose

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This fall as I was helping to teach a four week course on singleness at our church (note, Way to go church!), we got asked a question that I had never thought about before.  And believe me I’ve thought about a lot of angles on this thing the last few years.

The question was essentially this: “Should/can single people adopt children? And what about artificial insemination?”

To be honest I was not ready for the question.  There were two thoughts that came immediately to my mind that made me want to lean yes.  First, let’s be honest, there are a lot of kids that are in really bad situations.  In fact, in our current culture, more women have their first kid out of wedlock than in it.  Would it really be worse for them to be with a good Christian single parent?  Really?

Secondly, there are a lot of women, and many men who desperately want to have kids.  I believe this is biological as well as spiritual desire.  Heck, we are supposed to go and multiply.  That’s one of the first commands of the bible.  It’s natural to want to do that. We’ve of course completely separated this from sex (which we’ve already separated from marriage) in our culture.  But that doesn’t make the base desire bad.

But after thinking about it more, I have big reservations.

The first big question we’d better ask ourselves is what are our motives?  In other words why is it that you want to be a parent?  While it’s great to have that desire, it’s really not about you.  It’s not about meeting some sort of emotional desire or fulfilling a dream you’ve had of your lineage going forward.  It’s about sacrifice and love.  You will be the number one influence (good or bad) on that person’s life.  That is not to be done out of some sort of personal need.

Secondly we need to understand that there is an order to things. We’ve kind of been sold in our culture that we can skip parts of the order.  Go ahead and have sex without being married.  Live together before you get married.  So why not go ahead and be a parent.  I can’t find someone to marry, or maybe I don’t even want to do the “spouse” thing, but I want to have a kid.  Why not just go for it?

But this is flawed thinking.  And it’s made worse by the idea that we can do what we want by ourselves.  In other words, the whole “I don’t need a man/woman” mentality.  But to be married and have a kid the right way, you actually do.  That’s part of the deal.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be.  It’s one thing to have messed up the order by sinning and have a kid as a result, it’s another to go out and create it on purpose.

Third it’s either better for a child to have both of his parents or it’s not. Most people believe that a stable two parent home where both people are married is the best place for a kid to be.  Now that doesn’t mean that if a kid doesn’t have it that he can’t do well.  If that was true we’d be in real trouble as most kids don’t have that these days.  But just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.  The truth is that the number one thing you can do as a parent is love your spouse.  That comes first.  Kids know.

So what does all this mean practically when answering the question?

I understand there are strong emotions involved here, but here’s what I think.

I think under no circumstance should you as a single person go out and on purpose get pregnant artificially or any other way.  This to me is the most clear answer.  Choosing to go out and get pregnant and bring a kid into the world with only one parent is wrong.  To me that’s about you, not about what’s best.  That’s choosing on purpose to bring a kid into a single parent home.

What’s less clear is the adoption question.  I think that you could make a strong case for adopting an older kid that is stuck in the system so to speak.  But I think we should keep in mind that there are a lot of great ways to help kids without adopting them.  You could be a foster parent.  You could invest in the lives of kids through an outreach ministry.  You could let a kid that is in trouble live with you for a time.

I had a close friend who met a refugee family in our city.  There was one young kid who my friend wanted to help get a good education.  He offered their family a place to live in a good school district.  They said yes, but then bailed.  But he went ahead and took the kid in for two years while the mom got things straightened out.  He sacrificed a ton for this kid. But once the mom was in a better spot, the kid went with her.  My friend never adopted this kid, but the impact was huge.  It was about the kid, not about my friend’s desire to be a parent – even though he does have that desire.

My point is if you want to help a kid in a bad situation, there are a lot of great ways to do that, in which you could have impact.  You can be a parental figure without being a parent. The number one point is this: It should be about the kid, not about you.

You’ve Met Who You Say You’re Looking For

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So lately you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting quite as much.  Part of the reason is that I’ve had a couple of different speaking engagements.  And since, like most of you, I have a real day job, my time has been limited and I wanted to speak and share well which takes prep time.  But one of the benefits of this is that whenever I get to share with groups, it makes me think about things in new ways.  It also leads to new questions from people who are smack in the middle of singleness.  So I’m looking forward to sharing some new thoughts, as well as some new angles on old thoughts.

One thing that got brought up at each engagement was the idea of who it is that we are looking for.  This is kind of an interesting question.  I know for me, that sort of changed at different times.  The basic questions are things like, “I don’t want to marry someone I don’t love.”  “I can’t seem to find a ‘real’ Christian.” “Should you marry some one that you can live with or someone that you can’t live without.”  Those are all upcoming blogs but I want to start with something more simple today.

I asked each group to give me a list of things that they were looking for.  Now understand that these were mix gendered groups with diversity of age and experiences so there were a lot of answers.  Here were some:

  • A Christian
  • A leader
  • Someone who is compassionate
  • Someone that likes athletics
  • A gentleman (lady)
  • A guy who knows his bible
  • Someone who loves their family
  • Someone who has a plan
  • Someone who is driven
  • Someone who wants a family
  • Someone who sees finances the way I do
  • Someone who sees politics the way I do
  • A guy with a job
  • Has a balanced life – work/life balance
  • Dependable
  • Respects people
  • Affectionate
  • Interested in me – wants to know me
  • Educated

I could go on, but you get the idea.  We all have some sort of list.  We have things that we want in another person.  Some are a big deal to us and others are kind of negotiable.  But most of us have a list.

But here is the truth about our list.  Most of the things on it are qualifiers not attractors. What I mean is that we can say, “I want someone who is a ‘real’ Christian” but what we mean is “I want someone who I’m attracted to who also is a Christian.”  I know this is true because if it wasn’t then everyone at my church would be married, but as it stands only about half of them are.

Now your list is actually important.  The list is what keeps you from marrying someone just because you are attracted to them.  Or at least it should.

But you can meet someone who has everything on your list but it probably won’t matter if you aren’t attracted to them.  A woman can say I want a Christian man who is serious about his faith, who is a solid guy, who is smart, has a job etc.  The thing is I could introduce you to fifty of those people right now.  As I said to one group, “If that is what you are looking for, look around the room, pick someone and get married.”

That might be ok, but the deal is you’ve got to own it.  Because if you don’t you end up running in a circle and basically sort of start becoming dishonest.  You can say, “Well I just haven’t met anyone who has this of that quality.” – But you have.  All the time actually.

As I’ve said before, at it’s base level, attraction is not a choice.  The good news is that we are attracted at some level to all sorts of people.  But we aren’t attracted to that list.  The list should help us decide what to do with the attraction.

This has huge ramifications both personally and corporately in the church.

We spend a lot of time telling people that they need to be the things on the list, which is fine.  But we spend about zero time talking about how to deal with attraction – both how to be more attractive, and how to handle it when we are attracted.  Continually beating us over the head with what should be on our list (i.e. “don’t settle”) isn’t enough.  Neither is telling people that if they are those things that they will be attractive – because that’s false.

We also end up hurting people.  We say things like, “well you have all these great qualities, someone will want that” or “you’d make a great husband (wife)”.  While a nice compliment it doesn’t help anyone get married.  It also can cause more pain when we interact with the opposite sex.

In one group I was teaching at we asked people why they thought they were still single. One woman said, “It’s tough to meet a Christian.”  I smiled and kind of cringed because really this woman just disrespected every guy in the room.  She didn’t mean to, and she doesn’t have to.  What she should have maybe said is “I haven’t met a man who I’m that attracted to that is a Christian.”

Now this of course raises many questions including can you marry someone you aren’t attracted to?  That’s a post I’ll write soon but we need to begin to get ahold of this idea. We need to own our attraction issues which can be complicated.  We need to understand that just because we would make a great spouse doesn’t get us married.  They are different skill sets – not opposing skill sets, but different.

There are all sorts of people that can get married that would make horrible spouses and vice a versa.

Some things to think about:

What is really on your list?  How much does your list matter vs. attraction?  How honest are you with yourself and others about all of this?  What is your attraction measurement?

Don’t Guard Her Heart

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So you may have seen the video “Shoot Christians Say.”  There’s a lot of funny stuff here that speaks to our evangelical culture.  But the part I want to talk about comes at about the 1:41 mark.

There is the idea that somehow it is the guys job in a relationship, heck even in general, to guard the girl’s (or perhaps every girl’s) heart.  I think this can be a huge trap for the Christian single guy.

There are a lot of big flaws with this idea.

To begin with, that phrase is used in Proverbs 4:23 –

“Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.”

This is not talking about romance in any way.  It’s not even talking about being careful not to love a person too quickly.  It’s saying keep your heart focussed on God and centered the right way.  Because if you don’t, then everything else will get clouded.  (Quick aside – in the bible, heart is not your emotions.  It is your very central being.  The heart speaks, thinks, remembers etc all throughout the bible – it is not separated out as your emotional self.  It is your core self).

Obviously you can set your heart on many things, including a romantic relationship.  But it’s not limited in anyway to that.  And neither is this verse – especially when read in context.

Secondly, it doesn’t say to guard anyone else’s heart.  Do you know why?  Because you can’t.  I can’t keep someone else’s heart focussed on God.

This is one of the major problems with the whole “Kissed Dating Goodbye” and “Choosing God’s Best” type books of the 90’s.  There was this idea that if you didn’t make out or whatever that no one’s “heart” would get hurt.  This is of course sold in the context of women’s sexuality being linked to feelings while guys are “just” physical so you could somehow help the girl not get hurt by not making out with her.  The problem is that I can have my heart set on a person or relationship without even dating them, let alone without making out with them.

I know this because I’ve had times in my life, especially from about age 16-25, where I had my heart set on someone who didn’t even want to date me at all.  Was it their job to guard my heart?

So for starters you can’t guard someone else’s heart for them.  But that is just the beginning of the problem.

This idea is often rooted in the idea that guys are bad and girls are innocent.  I’ve pretty much never heard a message that a girl should guard a guys heart. (Maybe a couple of times).  The idea being as men we are a sex craved animal who will use women.  So we need to “man up” and protect the girl from us.  Yikes!

This affects Christian guys in a lot of subtle ways that aren’t good.  First it can keep them from asking out anybody or certainly from taking things forward if they aren’t sure they want to.

I can remember times where because I wasn’t 100% sure I was into it I backed away in a hurry because I didn’t want to “hurt” that person.  Now if you know for sure that you are not into it then yes, you should back away.  But a lot of relationships have a some time of not being so sure.  If I’m constantly worried about guarding everyone’s heart, I can end up freezing myself.

Secondly, this is one of the ways that we’ve helped Christian guys become less attractive because they end up coming off as “nice” guys.  We end up “declaring our intentions” or “having the talk” at times when we don’t have to.  We end up being so accommodating that we become annoying.  As I’ve said before, no girl wants a guy that can’t stand up to her.  And no girl wants to know your “intentions” before you’ve had a first date.

Essentially while trying to guard everyone’s heart but our own, we end up either overplaying our hand or not playing our hand at all.

Am I saying to crush girls hearts? No! No! No!  I’m not saying toy with people, make out with whoever, whenever, treat people like an expendable product or lead people on just for the heck of it or because you don’t have the courage to end a relationship.  You shouldn’t do any of those things!  But that’s not guarding her heart – that’s just called caring about another person.  That’s a good idea.  That’s right.  Don’t use people.  Seriously.

But don’t pursue a woman with an attitude of protecting her from yourself.  It’s her job to guard her own heart (meaning staying focussed on God and getting her core validation from Him) and it’s your job to do the same with yours.  You can be protective of her physically and emotionally as best you can, but you can’t guard her heart in the biblical sense or guarantee that she or you won’t get hurt.

What has the term guard her heart meant to you?  Has it been a good or bad thing?  Has it held you back and from what?