Firefly and Dating...Continued
(Editorial note: For length control purposes, this has been split into two posts...the 1000-word target gets a little elusive sometimes... Also, I apologize if this post is less polished than some others - since my life is a "moving target", my thoughts aren't very well sorted on this subject)
Continuing my trend from two posts ago, I would like to continue explaining how God has led me through evaluating my beliefs and discarding erroneous misconceptions.
Last time, I touched on the fact that my upbringing was pretty conservative. My parents have always backed me 100% in all that I do, a fact for which I am very thankful. Not by any fault of theirs, but because of the community in the church we attended through my early teenage years, there was very much a list of "unacceptable behaviours" that was quite extensive. An anecdote that I found humorous includes the (multiple) times some parent would call my father because I was talking to their daughter. In church. Yeah, I thought it was a little draconian as well, but such were not the rules that I nor my parents made. I could say more to illuminate the period views on guy-girl relationships, but I think that the edification value would decrease inversely proportionally to the amount that I said. (Sorry...my Mines-ness is coming through.)
One of the books often cited when invoking the policy of "courtship not dating" at that time was Joshua Harris's landmark book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Mr. Harris stated very clearly at the beginning of his book that he was not out to prove dating wrong, but to offer a healthier alternative. He used an analogy that is very good and quite intuitive. We all have gone through the grocery store pushing a cart with a sticky wheel that swerves the cart off in a random direction once in a while. He compared dating with driving a "swerver" through a shop of shelves lined with china. If you're really careful, you can make it through without a big mess, but you have to be _really_ careful. He proposed that courtship was a better way to make it through the "china store." Some of the hallmarks of a courtship philosophy included an emphasis on not defrauding your interest (for lack of a better word-I'm trying to be gender-neutral), beginning a relationship with a clearly-stated intent (usually marriage), and complete (usually predetermined) parental consent on both sides.
Since Josh Harris uses a word picture, I would like to offer a few of my own. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. Here was my perception of "how to meet a nice girl", maybe about the age of 18. You walked the path that God had for you. One day you looked up and noticed the girl that was perfect for you. You both knew it at first sight, and the rest was history, happily ever after and all that good stuff.
It was as if my peer group were at A - young and single. At C was engaged and so on. Between the two points were some obstacles. One way of viewing the obstacle was the demilitarized zone - turrets, landmines, and other such niceties. The problem with a DMZ between guys and gals was what one family realized - their son was 20 years old and purportedly had no idea how to talk to girls. Hmm...I wonder how this happens.
Another possibility that I picture is a river (or insert your favorite body of water). Like the river at the end of Pilgrim's journey in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the current and the width varied on who you were. It was implied that the water of guy-girl relationships was murky, and you were never sure quite where the bottom was. Granted, I know the current could be strong; I saw a couple people get swept away into bad places by not watching where they were going. BUT, you know, the water is also full of sharks and pirahnas and other such niceties. (Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!) It was verboten to enter the water. At all. Granted, some people made it to the other side without being swept away. There was two possibilities. You could be perfect and walk on the water. I'm thinking of a couple who supposedly did everything right, blah blah blah. I don't believe that much. The other way was to take a running leap and jump across. A couple people did that, too - apparently their river was narrower.
The end result is that we had pretty much no "B" in our journey from A to C. Granted, I know the dangers of following a "cookbook": remember I grew up in the ATI (Bill Gothard) program. I know how to do the 7-step list to anything. It seemed, though, that we should at least have a framework within which to work. Apparently, that wasn't to be the case, though.
Last Christmas (2005), God brought me through what I viewed as a dark place in my life. Although I knew the concept of "guarding my heart", I must admit that I was pretty much lousy at it. Especially in this case, I let my heart get far ahead of my mind and God's plan. I was abruptly smacked upside the head by the edge of God's path for me and spent a week working through why/how I had gone so wrong. I remember having several very energetic discussions (read: raised voice arguments) with a good friend of mine about why life had to be so dumb. Probably near the end of the spring 2006 semester, I finally realized that I needed to let it go and put it all in God's hands. I think my thoughts were along the lines of "This is stupid and I'm done. I don't care, I'm just done. If God has someone out there, He's going to have to make it really clear, because I am done looking." Turns out that life works a lot better when you don't worry about it.
This semester, God called me to focus much less on rules and much more on "Loving God and loving people." (I think I may have mentioned this before - it sounds familiar) Last time, I talked about how God called me to reevalute my previously held view that all TV was bad. Another set of views that I've been re-evaluating has been my position on dating. Because of what I had absorbed as I was "growing up", dating was a "bad thing", and boyfriend/girlfriend was most often used as almost a term of derision.
(to be continued...)
Continuing my trend from two posts ago, I would like to continue explaining how God has led me through evaluating my beliefs and discarding erroneous misconceptions.
Last time, I touched on the fact that my upbringing was pretty conservative. My parents have always backed me 100% in all that I do, a fact for which I am very thankful. Not by any fault of theirs, but because of the community in the church we attended through my early teenage years, there was very much a list of "unacceptable behaviours" that was quite extensive. An anecdote that I found humorous includes the (multiple) times some parent would call my father because I was talking to their daughter. In church. Yeah, I thought it was a little draconian as well, but such were not the rules that I nor my parents made. I could say more to illuminate the period views on guy-girl relationships, but I think that the edification value would decrease inversely proportionally to the amount that I said. (Sorry...my Mines-ness is coming through.)
One of the books often cited when invoking the policy of "courtship not dating" at that time was Joshua Harris's landmark book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Mr. Harris stated very clearly at the beginning of his book that he was not out to prove dating wrong, but to offer a healthier alternative. He used an analogy that is very good and quite intuitive. We all have gone through the grocery store pushing a cart with a sticky wheel that swerves the cart off in a random direction once in a while. He compared dating with driving a "swerver" through a shop of shelves lined with china. If you're really careful, you can make it through without a big mess, but you have to be _really_ careful. He proposed that courtship was a better way to make it through the "china store." Some of the hallmarks of a courtship philosophy included an emphasis on not defrauding your interest (for lack of a better word-I'm trying to be gender-neutral), beginning a relationship with a clearly-stated intent (usually marriage), and complete (usually predetermined) parental consent on both sides.
Since Josh Harris uses a word picture, I would like to offer a few of my own. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. Here was my perception of "how to meet a nice girl", maybe about the age of 18. You walked the path that God had for you. One day you looked up and noticed the girl that was perfect for you. You both knew it at first sight, and the rest was history, happily ever after and all that good stuff.
It was as if my peer group were at A - young and single. At C was engaged and so on. Between the two points were some obstacles. One way of viewing the obstacle was the demilitarized zone - turrets, landmines, and other such niceties. The problem with a DMZ between guys and gals was what one family realized - their son was 20 years old and purportedly had no idea how to talk to girls. Hmm...I wonder how this happens.
Another possibility that I picture is a river (or insert your favorite body of water). Like the river at the end of Pilgrim's journey in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the current and the width varied on who you were. It was implied that the water of guy-girl relationships was murky, and you were never sure quite where the bottom was. Granted, I know the current could be strong; I saw a couple people get swept away into bad places by not watching where they were going. BUT, you know, the water is also full of sharks and pirahnas and other such niceties. (Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!) It was verboten to enter the water. At all. Granted, some people made it to the other side without being swept away. There was two possibilities. You could be perfect and walk on the water. I'm thinking of a couple who supposedly did everything right, blah blah blah. I don't believe that much. The other way was to take a running leap and jump across. A couple people did that, too - apparently their river was narrower.
The end result is that we had pretty much no "B" in our journey from A to C. Granted, I know the dangers of following a "cookbook": remember I grew up in the ATI (Bill Gothard) program. I know how to do the 7-step list to anything. It seemed, though, that we should at least have a framework within which to work. Apparently, that wasn't to be the case, though.
Last Christmas (2005), God brought me through what I viewed as a dark place in my life. Although I knew the concept of "guarding my heart", I must admit that I was pretty much lousy at it. Especially in this case, I let my heart get far ahead of my mind and God's plan. I was abruptly smacked upside the head by the edge of God's path for me and spent a week working through why/how I had gone so wrong. I remember having several very energetic discussions (read: raised voice arguments) with a good friend of mine about why life had to be so dumb. Probably near the end of the spring 2006 semester, I finally realized that I needed to let it go and put it all in God's hands. I think my thoughts were along the lines of "This is stupid and I'm done. I don't care, I'm just done. If God has someone out there, He's going to have to make it really clear, because I am done looking." Turns out that life works a lot better when you don't worry about it.
This semester, God called me to focus much less on rules and much more on "Loving God and loving people." (I think I may have mentioned this before - it sounds familiar) Last time, I talked about how God called me to reevalute my previously held view that all TV was bad. Another set of views that I've been re-evaluating has been my position on dating. Because of what I had absorbed as I was "growing up", dating was a "bad thing", and boyfriend/girlfriend was most often used as almost a term of derision.
(to be continued...)
posted by The student of life at 9:59 AM
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