#212 Marriage Prep and Marriage Help

I've been thinking about sex quite a bit lately. No, not like you're thinking. I've been pondering how we as Christians think about sex, forming sort of a theology of sex. (Okay, I've also had some of those other kinds of thoughts, too, but that's beside the point.) I started reflecting on sex and what it means for Christians becuase my denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, is going to consider a study report on human sexuality at our next denominational meeting. Then a couple months ago I read Real Sex by Lauren Winner, which got my thinking about sex all over again.

There are so many things worth talking about when it comes to sex and sexuality, and I certainly can't cover them all in a blog post. Maybe I'll pick up some different subtopics in the future. This time I want to reflect on sex within marriage. I've been a Christian as long as I can remember. When I was growing up in the church, older Christians, such as my parents, explained that God has designed sex for marriage and so rightly taught me to wait for marriage to have sex. When I was twenty-two, I got married and stepped into uncharted territory. Suddenly sex was no longer something forbidden or something off in some possible future. But I really didn't have much of a framework of how to think about sex in marriage. Almost everything my fellow Christians had taught me had been about abstinence, and that didn't really apply to me anymore. Pretty much anything I knew or thought about what sex was supposed to look like in marriage I had unintentionally picked up from TV shows and movies, from my culture rather than the church. Finally I was in a place where I could appropriately express my sexual desires, but I had very little idea what that should mean for my marriage or my relationship with Christ Jesus.

Now I don't want to be too hard on my fellow Christians. I certainly didn't want to hear anything about sex from my parents. (I still don't, for that matter.) When I was a teenager in youth group, I don't think I was probably ready to really hear about how to approach sex as a married person. I'm sure it came up a little bit in premarital counseling, but we mostly focused on other things. As a pastor, I think working on communication is the most important thing to cover in that brief time. And again, most people probably don't want to hear too much about sex from their pastor or their future spouse's pastor, or the pastor they don't really know who happens to be officiating their wedding as the case may be. And I did hear some good things. The Christians around me did affirm that sex is good in its proper place, a gift from God. I did have some very basic understanding that sex brings two people together as one—and not just in a physical sense.

But I definitely could have used more instruction from a Christian perspective. I think we as Christians tend to drop the ball in thinking and talking about sex within marriage. We're generally not doing all the work we should do in preparing and helping each other to live faithfully as followers of Jesus. Probably what I needed was one or two Christians who had a little marriage experience and whom I trusted to pull me aside after I was engaged and talk with me about how to honor God when it comes to sex. And then after Tess and I got married we should've had some fellow Christians to talk with now and again. But I didn't have that, and—let's not let me off the hook here—I didn't seek that out either. We Christians are often not nearly as interested in accountability as we should be, and we're especially uncomfortable when it comes to sex. So we all end up trying to fend for ourselves and figure things out on our own, which makes us weaker than we could or should be. 

To state the obvious, sex is everywhere in our culture. And the vast majority of what we pick up on TV or online is radically different from what God wants for His people. Certainly God teaches us through the Bible and guides us through the Holy Spirit, but sometimes applying what God wants to our specific situation isn't easy. We shouldn't just expect to figure it all out on our own or leave others to fend for themselves. We Christians can't just be silent. We need to support each other, even if that means learning to talk about a topic that makes us uncomfortable.

I've got a few other thoughts, but this is getting long, so let's leave it here for now. I'll plan to share some general things I've learned from others (and maybe a bit from experience) in a future post.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#211 Madness

I've been mentally drafting a somewhat lengthy and theological post, but I'm running short on blogging time this week, so I guess I'll have to postpone that. (Stay tuned!) This week let's talk about the beauty of watching the men's NCAA basketball tournament in 2021. I have been beyond satisfied watching college hoops the past few days. I love that the broadcasts always show what's going on in any other games currently going on. Those little boxes are fantastic, and they even count down when the clock is running elsewhere. So if the game I want to watch goes to a commercial break, I can flip over to a different game that will show me when my game resumes play. That's amazing. We have YouTube TV at our house, and it makes switching back and forth between games a breeze. No remembering channel numbers or worrying about which network will come up when you hit the back button. On Friday and Saturday I could easily toggle between four games and alway know exactly where I was going. Now all of this stuff will be pretty unnecessary when the tournament comes back next weekend, but for now I'm grateful to have been able to have complete control as I savor the madness. After losing the tournament last year, I'm just so glad it's back.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#210 Alphabet Soup

This post is not going to be very serious, but I think it's still important. Lanie is now four years old, and she's starting to learn about letters. She has some alphabet flash cards that she likes to look at once in a while. So we talk about the names of the letters and the sounds they make. I'd like to a file a formal complaint about this letter: W. We call that thing "double u." That's a terrible idea. Never mind the fact that in most people's penmanship and most fonts it looks more like a double v. Calling that letter "double u" tells nothing about the sound it makes. There's no "wuh" anywhere in there. We should call it "wee" or "way" or—if you don't like that those suggestions are already English words—"wub." Then our poor children might have an easier time associating the letter with the sound it makes.

And while we're at it, I'd like to complain about a couple other things, too. G should never make a sound like J makes. That's what the letter J is for. I don't care if English shares its alphabet with other languages or if some of words are imported from other languages with different rules. Let's standardize our own letter sounds. JIANT and JIRAFFE might look funny now, but we can adapt. Let's help out the people learning English, especially those poor souls who have to learn it as a secondary lanugage.

And don't even get me started on C. Why do we even have this letter? Sometimes it makes a K sound and sometimes it makes an S sound. So let's just use K and S. I'm all for talking about SIRKLES. Actually, let's make that SIRKELS or even SURKELS. Then's it obvious how to pronounce that word. If we absolutely need to hold on to the letter C for the sake of history or because no one wants to redesign or keyboards or whatever, then let's have it make a "chuh" sound instead. That's a distinct and useful sound. Plus, it'll shorten the spelling of a lot of our words. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go sit on my KOUC.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#209 Not Boring

From time to time my blog doubles as a Superman blog. Superman is back on TV these days with a new show, Superman & Lois, so let's talk about Big Blue. When Superman comes to the big screen or small screen I get excited and look for news stories online. Inevitably I run across articles or comments complaining that Superman is boring. Superman! Boring! Today I am here to passionately object. Superman is a lot of things, but Superman is not boring.

First, Superman has a full set of superpowers, including the power of flight. He can do so many incredible extraordinary things. He can go anywhere. But I won't just tell you. Let me show you:

Look at that! I think that scene is so cool. Honestly I could probably watch an entire movie of Supes flying around like that. What's so boring about having super-strength or x-ray vision or super-speed?

But wait, you might say, that's what makes Superman boring. He has too many powers! Nothing is a challenge for him. But that's just not true. Superman faces all sorts of threats that he has to struggle to defeat. Writers will find ways to pit him against other survivors from his home planet or other aliens or monsters that can drain his powers. And there are other ways to challenge Superman, too. Throw a huge hurricane at a populated city, putting millions of people in danger. Superman can't just fix that in a moment. Or, have multiple disasters or villains striking at the same time. Even Superman can't be two places at once. How will he decide what to do first? How will he respond when he fails or can't save everyone? There's good drama there! That's not boring.

Plus, despite what you may think, Superman is far from invulnerable. Sure, almost nothing can physically hurt him. But Superman is also Clark Kent, and he has tons of ordinary people that he cares deeply about. Like any good person, Superman hurts when his loved ones suffer. I would argue that Superman is more connected to more regular people than a lot of superheroes. He has an everyday job as a newspaper reporter that he has to balance with his superheroics. He's not rich. He doesn't isolate himself. He gets involved in people's lives. Sometimes he lets his boss down or struggles in his friendships or worries about whether or not he really fits in when he feels different from the people around him. In those ways I think Superman is more human, more relatable than most other heroes.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think that if you think Superman is boring, there's a decent chance you just haven't experienced a good Superman story yet. I can come up with a couple dozen off the top of my head and could probably give you a list of a hundred if you gave me a day or two. That being said, maybe Superman isn't for you. While I appreciate Superman, maybe you appreciate different characters or different genres of stories. That's okay. But after more than eighty years as a popular and frequently adapted character, I think it's safe to say that Superman isn't boring.

Grace and peace,

BMH

#208 Old Favorites

Sometimes as a pastor I find myself preaching an extremely familiar Bible passage. In the past few weeks I've preached on a couple stories that Jesus told that have worked their way into our everyday language: Jesus' story about a good Samaritan and Jesus' story about a prodigal son. Preaching a passage that probably everyone listening to me remembers and has even heard a sermon or two or seventeen on before can be intimidating. I can start wondering about whether or not my own proclamation of the passage will hold up to what others have said. I can begin to worry about whether or not I'll just repeat what the congregation has already heard before and leave the bored. There can be a temptation to really focus on some tiny details or unexpected perspective to make sure that I'm doing something new.

But lately I've been thinking that trying to be different and fresh with a familiar passage shouldn't be my goal. Some Bible passages we use over and over in church because they're central to our faith, like the stories of Jesus' birth and death and resurrection. Others we come back to because we need to continue to be challenged by them, like God's call to love our enemies or to be transformed rather than conforming to the world around us. And some old favorites I think are a little like our favorite meals. One meal we eat at our house we simply call chicken and rice. It's chicken, rice, cream of chicken soup, and a little milk—that's it. Maybe you add a dash of seasoning salt. It's not the most exciting meal in the world. Certainly you could make fancier dishes with chicken and rice. But we like this dish; it fills us up. It's the first thing Tess made for us after we got married. It reminds me of her and of my mom. It makes me feel loved. Maybe preaching familiar passages isn't about breaking new ground or spicing things up. Maybe it's about being filled by God's Word once again and being reminded of His love. We can't only focus on our favorite passages in the Bible and ignore the rest. We need some balance and variety in our diet. But sometimes we need the comfort of an old favorite.

Grace and peace,

BMH