Part Two

I want to really drive this idea home, so I'd like to read a story from -- yep, you guessed it -- Lauren Winner's Real Sex.

I recently attended a women's retreat where one of the workshops was about singleness. The speaker, whom I'll call Myrtle, encouraged the single women in the audience to think carefully about what type of guy they're looking for. "You want a Prince Charming," Myrtle said, "and Prince Charmings are attracted to modest women. You might attract certain men by sporting skimpy skirts, but you won't attract the kind of man you really want to be with."

It's encouraging to think that mature Christians are more interested in character than cleavage; yet there is something unsettling about this assurance that chastity will be the erotic mystery that will lead Mr. Right (or Miss Right) to our door. Prince Charming can begin to rival God as the object of our attentions. Myrtle ended her talk on this note: "What we single women have to do is no more and no less than faithfully pray that our perfect guy is out there. We don't need to hunt him down, we just need to wait for the Lord to deliver him to us. [Is he a pizza?] We don't need to worry about him. Instead we need to focus on ourselves, becoming the pure, modest woman that our Prince Charming will be on the lookout for. We need to devote ourselves to prayer, humility, and grace. We need to continue becoming godly women, so that when the time is right, we will have those godly characteristics that the godly man we dream about will love."

[And that sounds right doesn't it? I mean, that does sound like what we ought to be doing: focusing on prayer, humility, and grace. But this is the point:] I'm not disputing the desirability of the chaste woman or man. It may well be that one of the benefits of practicing chastity is that you attract friends and admirers that admire chastity. But attracting others is not the goal of chastity. Indeed, if Myrtle is focused on catching the eye of the guy who likes chaste women, she may not be inhabiting chastity at all.
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Myrtle seems to be working toward becoming, principally, the kind of woman Prince Charming wants, which incidentally may be the kind of woman God wants. Her priorities, I would suggest, need to flip-flop. We are to become the persons of God, and this may bear the incidental fruit of attracting a great partner. The point of chastity is not that you turn your attention away from other people to make you more attractive to them, but that you turn your attention away from sexual and romantic entanglements with other people, and orient yourself toward God. (129-131, bracketed parentheticals mine)

What does it mean to “orient our lives toward God”?

Right. It means we align ourselves to God’s ways. Why would we do that?

[Silence.]

It's a tough question, I know, but an important one. Why does it matter? Why should we bother? Let me help you put words to what I suspect some of you know in that deep, unspeakable way. God’s way is the way it’s supposed to be. We talked last week about the physical reality of sex being evidence that God’s creational intention for sex is good and right and true; how sexually transmitted diseases evidence the fact that when we misdirect our sex-lives, something isn’t right. Look around you. Look around you and you’ll see things aren’t the way they're supposed to be. There’s so much hurting in the world. There’s so much hurting sexually; things are no longer true -- or straight -- they’re bent. Jesus came and he began the process of righting all the wrong and healing all the hurt. Those of us who believe are called to continue the work Christ began until he returns, when everything will be made right at long last! We do this by orienting our lives toward God.

Here’s where I get back to why it’s important to have standards concerning who you will and will not date. Because purity, sexual purity, is bigger than sets of dos and don’ts, rights and wrongs, standards and judgments; it’s about shaping our lives to the themes of the Gospel, themes such as love, mercy, justice, healing, forgiveness; themes such as defending the oppressed and supporting the weak; themes that express God’s way. Learning how to do this is a life-long process. Jesus promises in Matthew 6 that if we will orient our lives toward God’s kingdom, everything else will work out. In light of this promise, let me challenge you to commit the rest of your lives invested in communities dedicated to learning what it means to pray and live out, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth...” Marry the man who has oriented his life toward God and journey toward the Kingdom together… for as long as you both shall live.

Part One

Below is a talk I gave recently to our high school girls. I thought you all might appreciate it.
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Today we’re going to talk about boundaries and expectations. Both of which cause us to be selective.

I have to thank Brad Paisley for a song of his which has provided me with this metaphor: dating is a lot like shopping for new clothes. The line from the song goes like this:

When you go out shopping, you try on brand new clothes.
To see if something fits or not, there's just one way to know.
Why's it any different when someone asks you out?
You might as well just try me on before you turn me down.

I appreciate this metaphor. I walk into a store -- even ones I frequent -- and sometimes I don't know how something is going to fit until I try it on. Other times I can tell simply by looking at a piece that it isn't my style or is too big or too small. You know, there are some stores I don't even have to go into because those clothes aren't for me: they might be too trashy or too preppy or whatever. Also, having friends with me whom I trust is helpful. They're honest with me and will encourage me to try things I might not otherwise; items they know will look good on me when I may be unsure -- and they're almost always right! I also depend on them to tell me, "No, Renea. That dress doesn't do you right; that color is not for you. Renea, seriously; put that one back." :)

You see where this is going don't you? Okay, so dating, well, living really, is about risk, but it's calculated risk -- more or less. To say that it's important to take risks... in any relationship, dating or otherwise, is not to say we should be uncritical or haphazard. Not being selective about who you’ll date is like letting a perfect stranger pick out all your clothes for you; whatever that person brings you, that is what you have to buy, take home, and wear. You don't do that. Why would you be unbiased about who you date?

Okay. So let’s talk about dating non-Christians. How many of you think it’s probably okay to date unbelievers? You can be honest. Come on. Forget for a minute that you know what the right answers are supposed to be, or that you think you know what I want you to say. ‘Cuz let’s be real, if you’re unconvinced about what the church has to say about dating unbelievers, chances are we’re dropping the ball in some way. And hey, we aren’t right about everything; that’s impossible; maybe we’re wrong about this. So if you think we are, let’s talk about it.

Worldview. Whole persons. Intimacy. (Sorry, I did this part extemporaneously.)

The author of our book puts it this way: “If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it. Is that how you want to aim for your husband – with an open, blank slate? Or do you want to dream of someone who is just right for you, who complements your weaknesses, and who fulfills your hopes and desires” (63)?

And the point she’s making is the same one Brad and I were making with the shopping illustration. If we don’t have certain standards, goals, ideas and expectations for our lives, including our love-lives, we’ll be directionless. We’ll zig and zag here and there following any story about sex and romance that’s compelling in the moment. And that makes us incredibly vulnerable to believing the lies and distorted views the world has about who we are and how we should live, distorted views about who we are sexually and how we should live our romantic lives.

I’d like to take this thought a bit further, if you’ll let me. I’d like to suggest a bigger target. That instead of aiming for a husband who will fulfill the hopes you’ve pinned upon him, we aim for the Bridegroom of the Church, Jesus, and put our hope in him. As you release your arrow in the direction of the Kingdom, if you happen to snag a husband by the shirt collar, GREAT! More to the point, if your arrow becomes intertwined with another going in the same direction, WONDERFUL!

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Stay tuned for part two, and see where we go from here.

Communal Sex

To borrow from Lauren Winner's Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (who is building upon Wendell Berry), "Sex is communal rather than private, personal rather than public."

It's time for another shout out to my community, both among those who meet together with me in the same building on Sundays, and those in the Body spread out near and far. Being 27 and single -- and chaste -- is not easy. I certainly couldn't do it alone, so fortunately, I don't have to. I'm surrounded by married and unmarried, young and old, very young and not old, but not... well, you get the idea. And these people invite me into their lives (and I invite them into mine). And so, I have community; community with other single believers who take the exhortation to live lives worthy of Christ's sacrifice and calling seriously, which includes, for various reasons, chastity; community with married Christians who live with a likewise intentional desire to align themselves wholly to Christ, which also includes chastity -- instead of abstaining from premarital sex and all that includes, abstaining from extramarital sex and all that includes. Even being in community with my 1st graders impacts my calling for this time of celibacy: conversations like, "How do you liiveee!?", but also simply serving, so I'm not constantly thinking on myself. Furthermore, living at home, with Mom and Dad, is helpful -- not living alone, and not simply sharing space (house), but sharing life (home); the same was true of L'Abri.

So, it's easier.

My church doesn't do everything perfectly. The sermon illustrations are still about marriage and family 99 percent of the time, which despite my belief in the skills of transference, can still be largely alienating. People -- married people -- still ask me things like, "Well, do you want to get married?" and are baffled when my answer is "yes and no" and not one or the other: like, "Come on, Renea, it's simple, either you're called to be single or you're called to be married; either you want to marry and will make choices accordingly, or you don't, and won't." I want to be like, "Really? How long have you been 'called' to retire, rather than 'called' to work?" But I can't help but smile to myself about how funny and fatalistic we get about romance; we forget our vow to one another in marriage is "until death do us part," not "happily ever after;" that even marriage is seasonal, just like the rest of life, "not because of divorce, but because of death" (139), and ultimately, because of our New Life upon Christ's return.

But they do a lot of things well. They don't ask me upon first seeing me, "Are you seeing anyone?" They ask after weeks, months even, usually as the conversation lends itself, rather than out of the blue. I appreciate that. I appreciate it on two levels: one, it's a tiresome question when it's always the first one you hear, no matter how much I try to tell myself, 'They just think you're cute and likable, and want to know, naturally, who you're dating.' :) and two, I like being asked about my life, even the really personal stuff, by people who've earned the right to do so. I mean, OK, when it comes to confessing, I don't always like it, but who doesn't thrive on feeling the vested interest of others who love them? (By the way, this derives in part, no doubt, from a sermon exhorting non-single folk to think of other questions to ask. Bravo, Pastor.)

They do ask me about the hard stuff: What am I watching? How have I been imaginatively virtuous today? How have I been vicious? How do I treat the men with whom I interact while dancing, or at the library, or at Starbucks? This could probably be done more, but we're slowly overcoming the trappings of our over-individualized, over-privatized society. If I were seeing someone, I am confident they'd ask about what we do behind closed doors. To borrow again from Winner, when I was baptized into the Body, what I do with my body becomes your business to a degree, not in explicit detail, but insofar as we all have been unified with Christ's bodily burial and resurrection. Since, "what we do with our bodies, what we do sexually, shapes our persons" (50), sexuality is a communal affair; it matters; and we have, not only the right, but the obligation to ask each other what we did last night, not in a policing way, but as an extension of Grace.

They invite me to dinner, but more than that, they invite me to life: dinner with the kids going crazy, dinner and games and talking, dinner and working together -- preparing for and cleaning after. This kind of doing life together keeps us from being boxed into separate packages of block cheese over there and Kraft Singles over here. Which brings me to a similar point, the "life classes" at church, or whatever they're called these days, aren't split up demographically either. Or at least, that's the intention. It may take several years for people to change their ways, but God promises to honor the vision -- and the works -- of the church when they align with his. We gain perspective from each other. I have insights that my family-focused friends need but can't get without help of an "other," and I too gain glimpses of Truth from their married lives which can be gained no where else!

So I just wanted to say thanks, because there aren't many un-married Christians over the age of 23 (in the South) who feel content, or as valuable members of the Family. It's a two-way street. I make myself available; I involve myself in the women's biblestudy at church, even though there's no one else there my age. I try to be vulnerable and open and "authentic," instead of complaining that no one is being "real." I ask if we can get together, which often leads to doing life together, rather than sitting at home, growing bitter about never being asked. And I admit, these things may be easier for my personality, the last in particular, but there's responsibility on the part of single Christians and non-single Christians alike to foster holistic community, so let's keep on working on it together.