Category Archives: Growing Mature

The Bible Won’t Tell You Who To Marry

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I sometimes wonder if I could see the whole picture of my walk with God in the area of dating if He would say, “Well Justin I tried to send you Mary but you were too focussed on Sally to hear it.”  Or maybe another time He would say, “Well I tried to send you Jill but she just didn’t listen to me.  That one wasn’t your bad.”

WIthout a doubt one of the most frustrating things about singleness is trying to listen to God in it.

I know that God speaks to us. There are so many times where He has directed me.  Of course we hear first through the Bible.  At the end of the day it’s the baseline.  Everything can be tested against it. And the great news is that the Bible can tell me a lot about marriage, and even some about singleness. But the Bible won’t tell me who to marry.  It’s not in there.  There’s no Book of Justin.  In fact it won’t even tell me if I should get married at all.  Therefore I’m going to have to actually walk with God.

It is dang hard to hear God clearly in this area of our life.

It’s hard for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, we have a lot of different emotions in all sorts of different situations.  If I’m not dating anyone I can feel desperate, discouraged or angry.  That can cause me to shut down or just choose to date whoever.  I could be dating someone and really like them even though I know in my heart it’s not right – but the more attached I am the harder it is to hear it’s not right.  I can make marriage an idol which can cause me to rush into something or to put so much pressure on everything that nothing has a chance to go anywhere.  With all those emotions floating around it’s hard to hear clearly.

We can also fall into sexual sin.  Unrepentant sin always gets in the way of hearing God clearly.  I can also want to hear Him so bad in this area that I lose focus on God altogether. It can become all that I pray about.  There have been times in my life that almost my whole prayer life centered around this stuff.

Or we can go the complete opposite direction.  To be honest I went through a time where I just flat got tired of talking to God about it.  I literally didn’t talk to Him about it at all. Basically it was like, “what’s really the point?  I’ve prayed it already.  Screw it.”

But we can’t afford to do that.  We have to engage God, we have to keep going there.  But we need to learn how to do it as a grown up.  Here are some things I think can help, or at least have helped me or others around me.

Learn to listen to God in other things that are less emotional.  If I’m not praying and listening to God to begin with hearing Him here will be even more difficult.  It’s pretty hard to hear the big stuff if I’m not listening in general

Start by being willing to hear anything.  

You have to be willing to hear the actual answer no matter what it is.  Half the reason we don’t ask God is we are afraid of the answer.  We don’t trust Him.  It’s akin to the person who says, “I don’t say God send me anywhere because I know He will send me to Africa.” The truth is if you aren’t willing to hear any answer it will be tough to hear the answer He does give.

In that way, I think it is good to start with praying about whether God is calling you to be single or married.  Again hard to hear but be willing to hear either.

Next, obey what you do know.

It’s hard to say, “God should I marry this person” and hear the answer clearly if you are sleeping with said person.  It’s like saying, “God I’m going to ignore what you FOR SURE are telling me but then try to discern what I’m not so sure you are telling me.  It will be hard to hear that I’m called to be single if I’m serial dating or looking at porn etc.  Obviously none of us live perfectly but we have to fight to obey what we do know.

Finally we need to invite others to listen with us.  I talked about this last week, but we need people who can see us and others that we date, and affirm or challenge us as need be.

God wants to lead us in this area of our life.  We have to fight to listen.

Mourn The Losses Of Singleness

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So when I was single in my early 20s I just figured that I would meet someone in the next couple of years.  Then as I moved to my later 20s I still kind of thought, “Hey this will happen soon enough.”  When I was in my early 30s, it was time to hurry this thing up a little. HAHA.  But in my late 30s several interesting things have happened.  First, I realized for the first time, “This thing might not happen at all.”  That was fun.  During this same time (about age 35 or so) God really walked me through some hard stuff and at the end, I’ve ended up being a lot more comfortable with who I am and being single which has been great.

One of the other things I’ve realized is that no matter what happens there is some stuff that won’t happen.

If I get married, my wife and I will not get to start out life together.  Yes I know we will start a new life together, sort of – but thats not the same thing.  I will not enjoy the wife of my youth – because I won’t be in my youth.  I won’t get to share any of the moments of victory or defeat that I’ve had over the last 20 years of ministry.

I probably won’t have kids and if I do it will be different.  I was joking with a friend on the golf course today who asked if I still wanted kids.  I said, “Maybe, but I’m 40 this fall and let’s say I get married in the next year and had a kid within a year.  I’m 42 and changing diapers.  Then I’m 50 or so when they are really ready to play catch.  When they are a teenager I’m in my late 50s.”  I still remember the first time, the summer before my sophomore year, that I beat my dad one on one in hoops.  My kid might beat me at 12.

About a year ago, I started thinking about this stuff.  And you know what it kind of hurts. Now it’s all redeemable.  In fact God has redeemed so much of my story already.  For example after working with teenagers for a long time, I’m a father figure to a pretty large amount of people.  That’s awesome and means the world to me. I love those guys. But it’s not the same thing.

We all (single, married or other wise) face loss.

We need to mourn those losses appropriately.  It’s part of being emotionally healthy.  If we deny the losses then we aren’t living in reality, we are staying in the pretend.  That is not where we want to be.

This might be obvious when we have a big physical loss, like a death of a friend or family member.  But is the less obvious stuff that creeps up on us.  Loss can come from sin (like the loss of our virginity), it can come from wounds from our childhood, or from friends. Even just the common stuff in life, things like the loss of our dreams, our youth, a business loss.

Peter Scazzero points out that typically we insulate ourselves from the hurt through things like denial (It doesn’t bother me I’m not married yet), minimizing (It’s no big deal if I don’t get to be a mom), along with rationalizing, blaming, intellectualizing, and distracting (make a joke, change the subject).

But God invites us to more.  

He invites us to enter into loss with HIm. This doesn’t mean dwell on it.  This doesn’t mean make it bigger than it is.  My cat dying and a friend dying should elicit a different amount of mourning.  By the way over reaction to a minor loss is usually a sign that there is a bigger loss that hasn’t been grieved.

God isn’t asking us to deal with it so that we can stay there, but rather so that we can move through to freedom.  There’s not space in a blog post to go into all of the process of this but here are two key things.  First we have to take it to God.  We need to take our hurt and loss to the feet of Jesus and ask Him to heal us.  Jesus is fully capable of healing any loss – He came to heal the brokenhearted and put things right.  Secondly, it will go a lot better if you have other people you can trust in the mix.  We need people who walk with us in community.

Whatever we do we need to face our losses and honestly admit it hurts.  It’s hard but freedom is worth it – whether we stay single or get married, it will help us grow.

What losses have you grieved?  What losses are you avoiding dealing with?

Passivity Is Killing Us

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So yesterday was father’s day and that made me think of men and the struggles we often face.  One of the areas we really struggle in is our passivity.  It’s pretty much an epidemic really.  We so often fail to engage where we should.  Sometimes that comes from laziness but often times it comes from fear, and our number one fear is failure.

We are all passive in different places, mainly the places we don’t feel confident (which is a lot of places for most of us).  We of course try to only operate in the places we feel confident but that usually fails at some point.  When we don’t know what to do or are afraid to fail, we go passive.

One place that most men are passive though is in relationships with women. This goes all the way back to the garden.  In Genesis, Adam and Eve are in the garden when Satan tempts Eve to eat the fruit.  I’m not going to go into the female part of this here but I want to touch on Adam’s part.  Adam was literally right next to Eve as this is going on.  It’s not like she calls him over and says, “Hey come check out this fruit”.  No, Adam is “with her” and in the Hebrew it says he was literally with her, right at her side.

Adam is there and he does nothing.  He doesn’t lead, doesn’t confront, doesn’t rescue Eve, doesn’t stand up and say, “Hey go back to Hell.  We are following God”.  He goes passive.  Ever thought about why? I’ll tell you why.  He was more afraid of Eve than God.  I have a mentor that says most men are afraid of their wives.  I like to joke that I’m afraid of my wife and I’m not even married yet.

This leads to all sorts of trouble in marriage.  Husbands can become passive and then aggressive to make up for it.  They hide in work.  They can fail to lead their family.  Mainly there are just whole areas where they check out. But this is also extremely important as a single.

As a single person I think it is much easier to keep ourselves in situations that we feel confident without facing our fears.  There is often no reason bigger than ourselves to face them so we just don’t.  This is why having people that know your story, including where you are passive, is so huge.

And when it comes to how we approach women, it just creates one mess after another.  It can keep us from pursuing women that we really want to.  If we do pursue, it can lead to doing it in a nice guy, aw shucks kind of way at best, or make us creepy at worst.  We end up chasing instead of pursuing and that is not where you want to be – trust me I’ve spent way to much time there.

If we don’t deal with passivity as a single guy, one of two things is going to happen.  Either we are not going to get married or probably worse, we are going to marry someone we don’t really want to or someone who is controlling us.  In both cases we end up with a situation where they are leading us.  We end up in a marriage that is all backwards where we are emasculated or where eventually we grow a pair and it all blows up in our face.  All of this is bad, really bad.

Passivity kills masculinity because it steals our confidence and leads to sin. So we need to face it head on. Here are a couple of things that have been helping me.  First of all when you are passive in a situation, don’t spend time beating yourself up over it.  This accomplishes nothing good and in fact will probably drive you to more passivity.  Instead, ask yourself where are you passive?  What situations do you shrink back from?  A way I like to ask it to myself is where do I feel like a 5 year old?  Then ask God, where does that come from?  In other words what are you afraid of and where does that fear originate?  It will probably not be the first thing that comes to mind so engage your heart, and God.

So how about it guys?  Does this resonate?  Where are you passive?  What has it cost you?  How have you responded to your passivity?  Ladies feel free to chime in as well.

Are You Electable?

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So a few years ago after I realized that I was the problem and that I had basically no understanding of how female attraction worked – and I was screwing it up ten other ways, I called a mentor friend of mine and said, “Hey I’ve got big problems here.”  He said, “Well fly out here and we’ll fix it.”  Now I’ll admit I was a little fearful of this trip but hey I was desperate and I knew I was lost, so I booked the flight.

Basically we had an all day counseling session.  I left with a lot of truths.  But here was the overall premise.  My friend said, “Look, you are a strong guy, and you’ve got a lot going for you.  You’d make a great husband, everyone agrees with that.  But you know what, there are a lot of people who would make a great President.  The problem is most of them can’t get elected.”

I laughed, and cringed.  It was an incredible insight.  I think this is a huge problem for many of us single folks who feel like we are called to marriage.  We want to be married.  We want to have the “Christian” marriage that everyone keeps talking about, even though we understand that it will take work and sacrifice – we still desire it and think we are made for it.  And the truth is many of us would make a great spouse – while of course always being a work in progress. The problem isn’t do we want to be married or would we be a good marriage partner.  The problem is we don’t know how to get married – we can’t get elected.

The church community, including us singles, needs to step up in this area. We can talk all day about marriage and all the things not to do as a single person.  And I want to re-emphasize that those things are indeed important.  But I’m not sure that we do a lot to actually help people get married.

One time a pastor at our church was giving the one sermon on singleness I’ve heard him preach (sorry can’t help it).  He actually was doing really well.  Then he dropped this line, “Now some of you are just awkward (read unelectable).  That’s ok, you just need to work on it.  If you don’t know where you’re awkward come find me and I’ll tell you.”  Now he actually had a great point that most pastors are afraid to say, but he wasn’t going to personally follow up with 1000 single people.

But in community we actually could work on this.  And as single people we need to have the humility and frankly the bravery to work on this.  We need to ask questions like, How do I come off to the opposite sex?, What type of people do I date and why?, Am I pursuable or do I have a huge wall up?, Am I afraid to commit?, What kind of first impression do I make?, Why am I so nervous to approach a girl I’m interested in?, and many more.  We need to evaluate ourselves as well as ask others and let them speak into this. This is not a beat ourselves up moment. It’s a real talk moment.

The thing is there are actually honest answers to these questions.  And the best part is you can change them.  You really can.  But if you don’t face them then you probably won’t.  By the way all of this goes way beyond dating.  The root answers to these questions come from our fears, sins, and woundedness, none of which come from God.  They are affecting our lives in all sorts of ways.  Jesus wants to grow and heal us from them, but we have to dive in with Him and His community.

So here is the question – Are you electable?

North Oak Trafficway and The Church of the Hot Chick

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I went to high school in a small town about 30 minutes north of K.C.  There wasn’t a lot to do there so when my friends and I got our licenses we would cruise down to North KC. We would hit the mall or whatever but eventually, almost without fail, we would cruise North Oak Trafficway.  Now the reason we did this is two fold, first we were bored but also it was to see who else (i.e. girls) were also cruising around.  We’d pull up next to a car of girls and then they’d drive forward and we’d cruise by and so on.  Rarely did we actually talk to them, just kind of window shopped.  We’d do the same thing by stopping at places like Sonic where there was a girl on skates that we could look at  – again not really to do anything.

We were kind of like the dog that chases cars.  Great idea, really attracted to the car, but no idea what to do if we actually caught it – and we’d probably just get run over anyway.

The amazing thing is this same thing happens in our church communities all the time. Especially in what I call the Church of the Hot Chick.  These are the churches where all the “hot” young single and married people in town hang out.  My church is one of these.  Now what happens is that we guys know that available women go there and then because more guys go there, even more women go there etc.  The problem is that for the most part all we do is look at each other.  People literally drive 30-40 minutes to come to church so that they can sit in the same room with the Christian “Hot Chick”.  But they don’t do anything about it.

I’ve had this conversation with a few different women.  I asked one twenty something friend of mine who I think is really attractive, “So is it kind of like a meat market for you at our church?  I mean do guys always ask for your number and stuff at church?”  She just stared at me and said, “No because it’s not like any guy is going to actually do anything about it.” I had the exact same conversation with a woman I went on a date with who attends one of the other “hot person” churches in town and she said the exact same thing. She said, “I’ll be sitting there in Church with no one next to me and no one ever sits next to me or says hi.”

Why is this?  Now maybe part of it is not wanting to “hit on” anyone at church, which is fair. But the reality is that most guys are scared.  We have grown up knowing how to look but not ever really being taught how to approach, and certainly not how to talk to, women.  It’s like we are still cruising the road – except now it’s sit in the back so you can see them, watch them during the communion line, or stand in the foyer in the back and hope for a reason to talk to them.  It’s the exact same thing, except now you are 25, 30, or 35 years old. Hows that working out?

Look I’m not suggesting that you go and get numbers at church. I’m not saying we should see a church service as a singles bar, and for heaven’s sake I’m not suggesting you should ask out a new girl from church every week.  I know there are guys that do that (I’ll get to you all later) but what I am saying is that we need to learn to engage the opposite sex in a normal, non threatening way.  And if we can’t learn that in our church community then where exactly can we?

We Are All Wounded

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One of the promises of Jesus is that He will make all things new.  From Jesus’ very first sermon in Luke 4, all the way through the gospels, Jesus is bringing a message of renewal. (This is different by the way than making all new things – that is not the promise – it is making things new, putting things right, making it the way it was supposed to be).

But if this is the promise then there is also an assumption that things are not right – both in the world and in each person’s life.  Otherwise why would we need to be healed?  Yes Jesus came for the forgiveness of sin, but that is not the only reason He came. It is the first necessary step – but not the last step.

This is so relevant to the topic of singleness.  Because if we are wounded then guess what, that is going to play out in how we live.  We are wounded by our others and our own sin. We live in a broken world and we have the scars to prove it.

Our first wounds come from our family.  I don’t care how great your family was they were all human.  There are wounds from that.  This affects how we think about our world, ourselves and most importantly God.

There are a lot of reasons to not see or deal with our wounds.  Sometimes it’s hard and we just don’t want to.  Other times we don’t even realize that we are messed up because it’s really all we’ve ever known.  This can be even more dangerous if we have a good family because we think, “well it all was pretty good”.  Also many times we don’t want to be mad at anyone and rather than deal with it we just let it go.  But that doesn’t solve anything.

I was once in a random bar (called The Coyote Catina – how great a name is that) in Colorado with three guys I had just met.  We were talking about this exact thing.  One of the men said something that was incredibly wise.

He said, “Look at it this way.  Let’s say that you are in the kitchen.  I break into your house, steal a knife and stab you.  This would be horrible but you would know what to do.  You would do your best to fight me off. Then you call 911 and the police and ambulance come. I’m arrested and you go get treated for your wound.  It’s clear I’m the bad guy and you can forgive me or not – but the situation is clear.  Now let’s say that instead you and I are best friends and we are hanging out in your kitchen making a meal together.  I have a knife in my hand.  Then I slip or you slip and I stab you.  You scream in pain.  I say ‘Oh my gosh I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to’ and you say, ‘I know you didn’t mean to’. But here’s the thing – you are still stabbed.  You still have to call 911.  You still have to get treated for the wound”

The point is it isn’t about blame – but it is about getting treated for your wounds.  Because if you don’t you will keep bleeding.  As a single person this can be harder to see.  As a married person a lot of stuff comes out in your relationship and you (hopefully) have to start to deal with it.  If you have kids it is massively apparent and (again hopefully) you start to deal with it.  I think as a single person it is easier to hide from our woundedness.  But we’ve got to deal with it.  Because if we don’t we keep bleeding and we take an even bigger wound into our 30’s, and if we do get married, into our marriage and family.

I have much more to say about this but for now let me ask a couple of questions.  Do you know where you are wounded?  How does that play out for you as a single person?

Sibling Interaction

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I find myself in all sorts of amazing random places.  About 10 years ago I was having a lunch meeting with a guy who I’ll just call an Old Testament Scholar, although that doesn’t even begin to describe the intensity and knowledge of this guy.  I was with him for about two hours and we had maybe 6 different very intense conversations.  I want to share just one.

We were in the car driving to lunch and talking about dating etc.  He asked me about my family and what siblings I had etc.  I told him I had two married parents and a younger sister and brother.  He said, “So you know that you are supposed to learn how to interact with the opposite sex in your family right?” Silence. He went on, “That’s where you first learn how to treat girls by how you see it in your family.  So how did that work in your family?”

Boom!  I was kind of in shock and we weren’t even to lunch yet.  But you know what, he was exactly right.  One of the reason’s many of us are single is that we don’t learn how to properly engage and interact with the opposite sex.  We need to think about this.

Now let me say that I came from a great family over all.  But this area was shaky.  I was the oldest and my sister was two years younger than me.  Now in many ways I was a pretty good brother, but when it came to honoring her as a girl, well, not so good.  I think this really started when we were little and we would play.  I of course always wanted something with competition (and since I was the oldest I set the rules ha). What would happen over and over was she would want to stop playing.  She just wanted to do something different.  But I would be mad – I would say she was quitting etc.  Here’s where the femininity thing came in.  My parents would always say she was younger, or tired, or something like that.  There was never really a sense of, “Hey she is a girl and girls might do something different.”  Not only that but most of the things that were applauded were guy centric stuff.  This put a lot of pressure on my sister and meant that I didn’t really learn to interact on her level.

This played out all sorts of ways later.  One big example I can think of is that for many years she had a horse.  She loved that horse.  She rode competitively and even had some events.  But, I never one time in all those years went with my sister to where her horse was kept, let alone went riding with her.  I had about zero investment in anything that my sister cared about.  In high school I distanced myself from her and certainly didn’t honor her.  I was not a good big brother, and it wasn’t expected.  I’m telling you that not learning how to interact well with her affected not being able to interact well with women.  And remember, I had a intact, solidly moral family.

How you interacted in your family as a kid affects how you interact with people now.  This includes your comfort level with the opposite sex.  It includes how you treat and understand the opposite sex.  It affects everything actually.

So how did your family interact?  How was femininity (and for that matter masculinity) treated in your household?  What was honored?

Are You An Adult?

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When I was 25 years old I was the director of a ministry.  One day I was driving with our committee chairman who was in his 50’s.  He was a mentor and was becoming a father figure to me.  We were calling on some donors together and as we drove along the subject switched to some of the decisions we needed to make.

This man turned to me and got serious.  He basically said, “You are the Director.  You know what to do.  It’s your job to tell me what to do and I’ll help make it happen.  You understand this work better than me.  You are the Director – you’re not a kid – I see you as our director.  You decide and we’ll make it happen.”

Now this was incredible are several counts not the least of which is the fact that this guy was a CEO of a major company.  But basically what he was saying was you are not a kid, you’re a man – decide.

One of the big problems in our culture, and the growth of singleness is both a cause and a result, is that we keep extending adolescence.  The latest studies now say that adolescence starts around 10 or 11 and goes to 26.  Really?!  26?!  Why not 30?  Here’s the deal – we worship youth and we want to live there forever.  And youth don’t get married.

This plays out in all sorts of bad ways.  Just to name a few: the 18 year old body is the example of beauty (and more and more the male body as well); we are able to go to school for seemingly forever – almost never on our own dime; we switch jobs all the time in our 20’s (gone are the days of earning your way up the ladder); we continue to “go out” and “party” because after all we are only young once.  When does young end exactly?  Apparently our job is to do everything we can to not end it.  I mean who would want to grow up?

While this can be a huge problem in marriage (and I mean huge), and just because you are married doesn’t make you mature (although somehow the church seems to think so within it’s mentoring programs – quick name the last time a single person was a mentor for a married person – more on that later), it is a recurring theme for single people.  There are people essentially using their singleness to extend their adolescence.  Other than MAYBE having a job, they are basically still living the same lifestyle, dating the same way, making the same decisions, playing the same video games, and thinking at the same level as they were at age 21.  That’s not going to work at age 30 – at least it shouldn’t.

Here’s a question – and I mean you really need to think about this – Do you see yourself as a grown up?  Seriously what is your answer to that?  I’m not trying to be harsh so don’t hear the question that way.  Take a deep breath. Hear me quietly and calmly asking you, “Do you see yourself as an adult?”

How you answer that affects everything.  Everything.