I’m sure this post might seem a bit random or abrupt after the other series, but it came up and I thought it was really important. It’s hard sometimes for young and single people to tell if the person they are dating is good for them or not. I’ve been thinking about it in light of my experiences (and others’ as well), and I really feel like this issue needs to be addressed. So I’ll say what I think needs to be said. I hope it’s helpful! ::AHEM::

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she told me about a guy she had recently met and is interested in. I asked her what kind of a guy he is, what she likes about him, etc.. The classic questions. And then she said something that really solidified for me how important this idea is: she said, “Before, when I liked other guys, I didn’t like talking about them with my family or friends because I knew no one approved. They weren’t great guys. My relationship with my mom was harder because she wanted the best for me, but I really liked these guys and wanted to do my own thing. I felt like I had to keep them a secret, and I became a different person. I pulled away from everyone. But with this guy, it’s different.”

This sounded a lot like one or two experiences I’ve had. I was, in a couple of instances, into guys who everyone around me knew weren’t good for me, but I dated them anyway, pulling away from my family and friends as a result. I became a totally different person than the one I knew, complete with different actions and priorities. And this is the point of my story: if you want to know if a guy or girl is good for you or not, examine the changes he/she’s made in your life. Does she encourage you to be closer to family and friends? Does he want to be a part of your life, or does he want to pull you away and have you all to himself? Do you find yourself spending more or less time with God after dating her? Have you kept your same priorities? Do you ever have to lie about anything related to him? Are you motivated? Are you growing? You can learn a lot about the other person by looking at yourself.

I told my friend she needs to carefully remember the differences between the effect these different guys have had on her life. Yes, it’s okay to make mistakes, but learning from them is what makes them valuable. Listen to the people who are close to you in your life. What do they say about the person? How does your relationship with your family change after dating him or her? Because these effects won’t go away if you get married. In fact, they’ll probably be amplified. Make sure you like the changes you see in yourself, and be mature enough to make changes if you don’t.

Of course, even if they change you for good, they might not be the right person for you. But at least (hopefully) you’ll have a much better experience, you won’t lose friends, and you’ll grow through the whole thing.

That’s basically my relationship advice for the week! I definitely plan on taking it for myself in the future. I’m praying for you all! Have a blessed week!

In this article, I want to speak a little bit to the situations I described in the first two parts of this series. I really want to help somehow. The next couple of articles I will write in this series will discuss external forces that pull us away, but before I do that, I’ll wrap up with the internal forces. With some C.S. Lewis of course!

Three Sundays ago at church, I heard a great sermon. The pastor brought up a familiar scene from Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. You might know it. Eustace stumbles upon a dragon’s layer, gives in to his greed for gold, and wakes up the next morning perched on the pile of treasure as a dragon. He had put a gold band on his arm while he was still a boy (which was fine when his arm was normal-sized), but it presently dug into his now-massive dragon arm, paining him greatly. He communicates to the crew that he is Eustace, but they can’t help him. He flies with the ship for a while as a dragon. But then, later in the book, he meets Aslan.

Aslan tells him to bathe his sore limb in the cool pond next to them to ease the pain. But he told him he had to undress first. Since he wasn’t wearing clothing, Eustace assumed he meant that he should take off his dragon skin. So he began scratching his skin, and it all came off. He stepped out of it and to the water’s edge, when, lo and behold, it had reappeared on him. He tried again twice more, but to no avail. Then Aslan said, “You will have to let me undress you.” His massive claws terrified Eustace, but the pain in his arm urged him to lie down and let him take it off.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling it peel away.

He peeled the beastly stuff right off–just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt–and there it was lying on the grass.”

And then, Lewis makes a most interesting comment. “It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”

This is a beautiful passage–partly because of the creativity of the passage, but also because of its deep and profound truth. So often, I believe we think Christianity is something we DO. We read the Bible, we take its advice, and we make ourselves better every day. But unfortunately, this is yet another difficult divine paradox to swallow; no matter how hard we try to clean ourselves, we will never change. No amount of rules or mourning and wailing over our sinfulness will make us better. Only when we consent to lie down before our severely loving God and allow him to rip and tear at our sinful hearts will we ever begin to look like Christ.

And then, my entire point of this story: it would be nice to say that Eustace was never selfish or petty again after that day. It would be nice to believe that, as soon as we become Christians or have yet another dragon skin ripped from our backs, we would walk away from our dragon nature forever. But it doesn’t work that way.

I think if you were to look at things I’ve struggled with over the years–selfishness, pride, jealously, etc.–and notice that I still struggle with it, you’d think “Wow, did she even learn anything?” And sometimes, other people don’t change fast enough for us. Sometimes, people whom we thought stood on solid ground with Christianity begin to question, or they begin making morally questionable decisions. Sometimes, they struggle for a long while. And we think, “They’re not learning. They’ll never change.”

But this is what I want us all to be careful of: you NEVER know what is going on underneath the surface. Even though I’ve made mistakes over and over, God was working underneath. The first time I learned the lesson, “Christie BEGAN to be a different girl.” I’m sure we can all look at ourselves and point out times where we should have changed our behavior after learning a lesson and didn’t, but God was still working.

God has a lot more time on his hands than we do. He’ll persevere with us for as long as it takes. And I can tell you for sure, it wasn’t guilt, condemnation, or comments like “Will you EVER learn??” or “I’m tired of this. I’m giving up on you.” that drew me away from my sinfulness. It was long-suffering love and grace, helping me back up after every time I made a fool of myself, that helped me change.

So if you know someone who fits the bill for these last two blogs, remember that. Sometimes, they are simply beginning to change. What they don’t need is condemnation; what they need is grace. Seasoned with truth, of course, because truth sets us free. Never give up, though. God never gave up on us. The least we can do is turn around and do the same for others. Have a blessed week, and stay tuned!

Last week I promised a story. It’s a good story. And I really think it illustrates very nicely the principle I outlined last week. To refresh your memory, last week, I talked about the human tendency to pull away from God when we’ve done something we know we shouldn’t have. When we’ve sinned, somehow God begins to look not like the loving, benevolent God we’ve known him as, but as a condemning, angry old man coming after us with lightning bolts and calamity to punish our wrongdoing. Even if he draws near to us only to show us love, we will pull away, as Adam and Eve did. But what if people chose not to pull away? What if we drew nearer instead? Stay with me for a moment, and we will see.

Our story opens on a young woman: beautiful, classy–someone who looks like she has it all together. But unfortunately, her own story is not so together as we would assume. She comes from a broken home. Her once-close family was ripped apart in her early teens when her mother turned to alcohol to wash away the pain and guilt of her many extra-marital affairs, which eventually led to her divorce from our young woman’s father. At the tender age of 11, it was our girl who had to call the police when she found her mother unconscious, as she had over-dosed on prescription sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. The Mother turned to another man, also an alcoholic, who physically abused her, and our girl had no choice but to look on helplessly as he often abused her so terribly that she was forced to go to the emergency room for care.  Back and forth, from house to house she went, going to her mom’s when her dad went on long term fishing trips, and back to her dad’s when her step-dad began abusing her mom again. Her siblings’ marriages began falling apart too, every one of them. Their once-happy family was now a tattered remnant of bitterness and pain. No stability, no moral compass, no goodness to aspire to. When she was only 20 years old, she watched her mother die of pneumonia and a broken heart.

In spite of all of this, our young woman had survived the wringer–and with her chin up, to boot.

Fast-forward a few years, and we stumble upon a different kind of scene–a beautiful one. Two gazes meeting for the first time, a beautiful forever just beginning. Our girl meets the man of her dreams: tall, handsome, kind, loving, and best of all, stable and faithful. She knew he would never change, and his love for her would never falter. No more uncertainty, no more instability or pain. And he found her captivating, both for her outer beauty and the inner loveliness of a sweet soul, one not made bitter by her many trials. Needless to say, they fell in love.

Then, the man proposed. They wondered if there was ever a couple so in love, so perfect for each other, as they. And here we find that, because of the lack of moral compass or discipleship, they grew very close emotionally and all too close physically. Nevertheless, from the day they became a couple, the man had taken our girl to church, and in spite of their physical closeness, they continued to draw close to God and kept going to church. If people had known what their struggles were, they might have said that they did not belong there because of their sin. Somehow, the girl had known about God all her life, always knowing that he loved her, that he was always there for her, and she became a Christian–what a beautiful moment! But the turmoil in her heart began. They never stopped going to church, but she cried all the way home after every sermon because she knew there was something wrong, a difference between what God desired for their relationship and what their relationship currently entailed. She knew God never condemned them, however, but she wanted to be baptized and felt that their physical sin was a barrier to her commitment to doing so. The man felt the same way–something needed to change.

And then, they knew what they had to do. They confessed to their Sunday School teachers that they had crossed physical boundaries they knew they shouldn’t yet, and that they wanted to change. She finally got baptized, and her life began to change. As they went through pre-marital counseling, the teachers guided them through the process of repentance and forgiveness. They abstained for the rest of their engagement, asked for forgiveness from God and and each other for crossing the lines, and focused on other parts of their relationship instead. Fast-forward to today, and they’ve been happily married for the 22 years since, still just as in love as from the day they said “I do.”

As you might have guessed, this is the story of my parents. (see picture at left from 1991) It’s a bittersweet tale, I know. But unfortunately, the first part of the story resonates with far too many people in this world. This world is broken, and often, people are not trained up in the right way to live, and they are not nurtured and loved as God meant for them to be. My point in telling this story (and their point in allowing me to) is that they never stopped going to church. They never pulled away from God. Even though they knew something was wrong, they never doubted God’s goodness or acceptance. Because God pursues us and tugs on our hearts with his love, we can only stay in our sinful state for so long. Eventually, we WILL change, if we continue to draw near to him. Today, they are two of the godliest people I’ve ever met, and the best role models and parents I could ever ask for.

That’s my prayer for everyone who may be doubting or who has made choices they aren’t proud of. NEVER pull away from God. He does not condemn you. He wants the best for you, yes, but he wants your fellowship, not your works. He will change you and help you if you draw near to him. And to the Christians around them–don’t judge them! Don’t kick them out or reject them! God is always working in people’s hearts, and redemption comes through love in spite of actions, not because of them. Sometimes, even though it doesn’t look from the surface like God is in them, he is working underneath. Like the picture I chose for this post, all of our hearts are under construction. Pray for them instead. Draw them in with love. Maybe that way, we can save some. It worked for my parents, right?

Stay tuned for next week! I’ll unpack this a little bit more with some perspective from C.S. Lewis on this issue. Thanks for reading! Have a blessed week!

My parents, 22 years later

Let’s face it: there’s an epidemic in the church today. Left and right, my friends have begun to doubt–not a bad thing in itself–but then they leave for good. Now, for me, someone who believes the truth and glorious grace of Christianity, this fact troubles me. We need a diagnosis, pronto. And a doctor, and a treatment. I’ll do my best at the first one.

I’ve been doing a lot of watching lately. And thinking. And I’ve decided the first malady I will address is the world’s striking lack of patience, especially when it comes to sex. My friends and I were talking yesterday and asked each other what we thought two people should do if they found themselves struggling to stay away from sex until they’re married (or if they’ve decided that waiting for the rings is a silly idea anyway). I didn’t so much find an answer to that conundrum, but it got the wheels turning. I have two metaphors that I will use to introduce my opinion.

Have you ever lied to your parents? (That’s rhetorical, by the way. =P) Well, in my experience, if I’ve lied to my parents, I begin to suspect every time they address me that they have discovered me. If my mother were to say, “Christie, I’d love to have some one-on-one time with you; you’ve been so distant lately.” I would immediately assume that she’s found me out and is about to punish me, so I’d likely kick and scream at the idea of one-on-one confrontation. But the truth was that she sincerely missed me and wanted to make sure my soul was doing alright. She loves me, so she wants fellowship and closeness. When she feels the relationship waning, she desires to restore it. But my mind would immediately translate all of her attempts to restore the relationship as condemnation, so I would resist. Just like Adam and Eve when Jesus called them in the garden. Even though he simply desired fellowship, they ran and hid because of their guilt. And it all began with the doubts.

Satan suggested to Eve that God was hiding a good thing from her, something she has the right to take for herself. But what if God DID desire to give her the knowledge of good and evil, but just not right then? C.S. Lewis explores this idea in his Space Trilogy, the second book, Perelandra. It’s a replay of Earth from the beginning: a perfect man and woman, told by God not to stay overnight on a certain island. Satan tries his best to woo them to disobedience, but goodness prevails. When the appointed time has passed, God gives the couple knowledge and understanding–but from his point of view. They remained righteous, and they saw evil for what it was–and they saw that God’s actions were intended to mature them and cause them to trust him even more, not to steal from them.

It’s like Christmas. I think it’s funny that we never question the motives of our friends who won’t allow us to open our Christmas presents before Christmas. And I don’t think we’d question God’s motives for keeping sex for marriage either–if we believed in his goodness like we believe in the pure motives of our friends. We don’t question our friends because we know they do it out of love; they want to give us a surprise, and the wait and suspense before Christmas makes the opening all the sweeter.

What if God viewed sex the same way? I hear people say all the time, “Why would God withhold such a good thing? It’s not bad; I’m not hurting anyone, and it’s awesome.” Well YEAH it’s awesome. My Christmas presents would be awesome if I opened them before Christmas. But if I opened all of them one by one starting in July, I’d run out by the time I got to Christmas. Everyone else would be opening their presents, and mine wouldn’t be as special.

Now of course, when it comes to sex, there’s redemption and all that. (Please know that God’s desire is for us to always come back to Him, and He offers FULL forgiveness and help in our time of need.) But now I’ve come to my first hypothesis for why people turn away from God. In context of the first metaphor: when people sin, and they know they’ve done wrong, God suddenly seems much less kind and loving. He seems much farther away, and like my mom’s situation, all of his attempts to show me love and give me great blessings (in the case of sex, keeping something from me for a little while) look a lot more like a wrathful, judgmental God keeping a grand secret from me so I can’t have any fun. If I were to try it–and like it–I’d probably decide to leave this mean, miserly grandpa of a God and go enjoy my newly opened Christmas present by myself. It’s the easier thing to do, and it’s the visceral reaction of our sin nature. And with the advent of the Internet, I could find all sorts of evidence to support my decision. After observing many cases, I believe this issue lies at the heart of many a Christian’s resignation from the faith.

But I believe God wants to give us something special by wrapping it up and saving it for “Christmas.” That’s why I persevere. It’s why I always choose to believe in God’s goodness even when I’d rather doubt it. I instead imagine God weaving a grand love story, the happily ever after made even more exciting by the hardship and testing. I imagine his eyes twinkling with delight as it all begins to play out, knowing what a beautiful gift awaits me, his dear child, at the end of it all. Of course, no marriage will ever be perfect, and if we believe that perfect happiness (and perfect intimacy) lies in waiting for it, we’ll be disappointed. But I trust God’s goodness, and I’m sure there’s a reason. I’d rather do it his way.

My heart goes out to those who’ve gone away. I want to help, somehow. I hope this is at least insightful, and uplifting at best. I’ll continue with a practical story of two people that are very near and dear to me (with their permission, of course); it’s transparency will surprise and, I hope, encourage you. Have a blessed week!

For the first time in my life, Mr. Franklin, I’m going to have to disagree.

I remember hearing a little while ago a great sermon from the church I attended while at school: a sermon on faith. I feel like I should have already known what the pastor was saying, but for some reason, his perspective on faith and how to get it was new to me. You probably already know this (I feel like I often write about things that should have been obvious to me a while ago… haha), but maybe not! On the off-chance that this perspective will be new or fresh to you, I’ve decided to write about it!

Let me give you a little background on why I think this idea sounded so novel to me. A long time ago, my family and I sat down to take the “spiritual gifts test.” I remember I scored really low on “giving” and “faith.” I rationalized (at about 14 years old, I think) that the reason I was low on giving was just a personality thing, since I used to squirrel away every spare bit of money I had, not appreciating my parents’ admonition to give a bunch of it away when I had no idea where it was going. When I realized I was allegedly low on “faith,” I reasoned that away in the same manner. “I guess I’m just not cut out to have a lot of faith like my mom does.” I couldn’t be more wrong!  I actually think that the test was not beneficial for me because of the way it altered my thinking towards these two gifts. Today, however, I have overcome my “lack” of giving, having prayed earnestly that God would make me a joyful giver (and he has!). But anyway, as you can see, I thought for the next few years that I just wasn’t cut out to believe God for great things.

Fast-forward to about a year ago. Maybe less, I can’t remember. One day, I really decided that, when I sit down to read the Bible, I wasn’t going to just pick out bits and pieces. A professor at Summit had given a talk emphasizing the importance of context when reading the Bible, and context is gleaned from reading not just verses, but chapters, books, and the whole thing. From then on, I read whole chunks at once. And somehow, it changed my whole perspective. I gleaned SO much wisdom and knowledge of God through doing it. I was able to, for instance, realize that Romans 8 and 9 didn’t mean what I thought they meant. I always used to think, in the age-old calvinist/arminian debate, that this passage supported the idea of election and exclusivity when it comes to salvation, along with other concepts like irresistible grace and limited atonement. I realized that Paul was talking to the Romans (who worshipped many gods, never knowing whether they were in good graces, or “saved,” from one moment to the next) specifically, assuring them of God’s unchanging nature and their unchanging salvation and election with God. Now, if those fancy phrases don’t mean anything to you, don’t worry. They’re not that important to what I am talking about.  Basically, I just learned the “big picture” and came to know God in new ways. I CAN’T underemphasize the importance of reading big pieces at once. It changed my life.

Anyways, I digress a bit. The whole point of my story is the pastor’s sermon. A simple phrase was all it took for this whole thing to make sense: “faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the Word of God.” Wait, we don’t pray to ask God for faith?? Well, kind of, but not really. The reasoning lies in the definition of faith, and the definition of what it isn’t.

Faith is NOT blind, baseless belief in something irrational. It can be likened to my confidence in the couch I’m sitting on. The more I learn about the couch’s integrity and good design, the more confident I will be that it will support me when I sit on it. That confidence is “faith.” Faith exists in the space between the knowledge that the couch can support me and my experiential realization of this truth (when I actually sit on it).

Thus, by learning more about God–who he is, how he operates, and the nature of his plans for me–I gain more confidence in his integrity. When I read over and over that our God does not change, that he is good, and that he has NEVER broken a promise, I can be confident that he will not fail to come through when he asks me to take action on this “faith.” The more I read about him, the more I realize I can trust him.

And so, while we can still ask God to increase our faith, it is not simply a spiritual gift that some have and others don’t. It is not given by the Holy Spirit in the same sense as the others are. It comes equally to everyone through the reading of his Word. It’s that simple! It kinda blew me away though. It’s changed everything about how I used to view faith.

Do you want more faith? Read more of the Word. Then you will have the confidence you need to obey and follow him. Thanks for reading! Have a blessed week!

Hey everyone! I figured I’d let you all know that I won’t be writing an article this week because my family and I are having a lovely time together on vacation!! I’ll have something good next week, I promise I’m praying for you all! Have a blessed week!!

As I get older, repercussions of decisions that I made years ago have begun to creep back into my life–in a good way! The times when I was just doing my thing, living my life, and doing my best have had consequences over the past few months. It’s story time!

A few years ago, I attended Summit Ministries’ summer worldview camps in Manitou Springs, CO. It whetted my appetite for the knowledge these professors had to offer, so I jumped at the chance to attend Summit Semester and soak in three months of it. As I am wont to do, I spoke up in class… a lot. I loved dialoging with the professors, answering and asking questions. Recently, I’ve gotten an idea to do an internship of sorts with Summit, or just ask if there’s anything I can do to help, anything to get me back in that environment, so we started to pray and ask God for wisdom and guidance. One of my mom’s friends knows one of the new leaders of Summit Manitou, so he mentioned my name to him. Incidentally, this leader was one of the professors at the Summit Semester program, and he remembered me and how I loved speaking up and learning in class. He recommended me to one of the professors who works there, as he might need some help. It just so happens that this professor was the teacher’s assistant in the college Christian Worldview class I took online from Bryan College four years ago, and he remembers me too! He said that he remembers me because I put so much effort into the homework and really sought to understand the information, and he said he was impressed and would love to have me help him. He might have me work with him on rewriting their high school curriculum–how cool!  God is so great!

I guess the moral of the story is that, even when I thought it didn’t really matter, the decisions to put 100% effort into my interactions with these people have affected me years later. I never thought they’d come back to “haunt” me! As much as possible, I have tried to do my best and now it seems to be really making a difference. Of course it doesn’t always turn out this way, but I’d definitely advise you, out of these cool experiences I’ve had lately, to put 100% into everything you do! And if you have the chance to meet and interact with people in some kind of leadership or field you’re interested in–take it! Take every chance you get. Make an impression. Be confident. Speak up. Work hard. Good things come to those who are willing to step up and take them. Pray and ask God to guide you and bless your efforts. He will help you! Trust God with the results of your work. Aaaaand that’s my story! I hope you have lots of opportunities to make connections, and that all your hard work in anonymity will pay off! Have a blessed week!