Married

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Seargent Pepper Told the Band to Play

Derek Webster — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:29:04 -0800

Today is my 20th wedding anniversary.

I married at a beautiful 21 year old girl when I was just 19 and we are still married today. In Hollywood years, we're the equivalent of Methuselah. I've spent more than half my life hitched.

As I look back and reflect, I realize how incredibly blessed I am. I dated a lot of girls and had a completely different version of the "girl I'm going to marry" in my imagination at that time. I think I was aiming for combination of Julie Andrews and the girl from that "Cherry Pie" video...but in a Christian version.

What I wound up with was surprising and beyond my wildest imagination.

I married a girl who twenty years later still surprises and interests me. I married someone with whom we don't need kids or context to talk. (We know everything there is to know about the other person, and still enjoy each other's company). I married a beautiful girl who loves me. She's gives me unparalleled support, encouragement, and patience.

And twenty years later, I'd still do anything for her.

People ask what the secret is: how is it that we've been faithful to each other? How has our marriage thrived in spite of moving to different countries, having economic stresses (highs and lows), ministry, and our somewhat opposite personalities?

The answer is that we're very intentional about our relationship to God and to one another. When the Bible talks about "one flesh" it's not just talking sex, but in the context of marriage, it's about unity. Melissa and I hate drama as a form of "keeping the relationship alive". I know that some couples love drama in their relationship because they believe it keeps things interesting.

We don't.

Our life is plenty interesting without it.

Our energy is unified. It's not directed against the other. I also think that a key is Melissa and I aren't trying to "out-Christian" the other person. Each of us has our flaws and is in process. What we find in the other is support during that journey and not judgement for being in transition. And we're still attracted to the other person.

That's right: I still think she's hot. Hotter now, even, than she was when we met.

I guess what I'm really trying to write is that after twenty years, I'm more in love with my wife than ever before. Neither one of us is worried about losing our individual identities - we lost those years ago when we said, "I do." Instead, we've discovered that marriage has freed us to be the individuals and the couple God had in mind.

I look forward to the next twenty years, especially when I look back on the last twenty. I think we've got a head-start on making the next couple of decades even more special than the previous two. We know more. We're not as neurotic.

And besides that I'm really, really well trained.

Smile.

Happy Anniversary, Melissa! I love you.

One Flesh: Committing For Life

Adam Stadtmiller — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:58:23 -0700

Seven years ago, my wife and I were struggling. Things were dark and getting darker. The dance we had created during the first ten years of our relationship was no longer working.

Things were magnified by the fact that we had just begun our life as missionaries in Australia. Ministry was thriving. Everyone was counting on us. That was part of the problem.

That's when my wife hit me with one of the hardest, yet most life giving statements I have ever heard. It is in large part what saved our marriage. Karie said this, “You are my soul mate. You are the man I have committed my life to, I’m just not sure I can live with you.” And with that, Karie began to pack her and Lily our two-year-old for home.

The thirty days I spent closing up shop in Australia were some of the loneliest of my life. They were days filled with focusing on the wounds of Christ, knowing only they could heal us—my tricks and manipulations no longer working.

Karie’s statement helped save our marriage in that she reassured me that she was not going anywhere. She wanted it to work, she had committed her life to making it work. Still, she needed space—she needed room to breath. So did I.

My wife’s willingness to remain single for life is one of the Godliest things I have ever seen a woman commit to. It was a commitment to suffering for the sake of a vow, for the sake of Christ. This type of commitment swims upstream in a culture where commitment and vow are tossed about like chaff for the next opportunity at greater happiness.

For Karie, one flesh meant one flesh forever. Our story tells me that this extreme commitment is one of the foundations of the marriage we have partnered with God in creating. His grace has surely been sufficient.

(Photo used with permission from: Salvatore Vuono)

A Distinctly Christian Marriage

Rick Bundschuh — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:21:32 -0700

It’s almost June, the month where Bridal magazines fly off the shelf and thousands will show up on our shores, a few friends in tow to have their long dreamed of wedding on the beach in.

I could make a lot of money just by performing wedding ceremonies for these people. After all, I live near the major tourist destination on Kauai and the inherent romantic beauty of the place begs to be enfolded into vows.

In fact, in the twenty years I have been performing weddings (that, I ask no fee for I might add) I have only done two inside of a church building, all the rest were on the beach or in some lush outside location.

To get into the economic gush all I would need to do is to make sure that I was on the list of the hotels and wedding planners, set a “price of paradise” going rate and ba-boom! my kid’s college tuitions would be paid for.

But I haven’t and won’t be doing that.

Here’s why.

By going this route I would be obligated to marry anyone who wants to get married and has filled out the appropriate legal paperwork. This was a problem for me even before civil unions and gay marriage became another more troubling component.

I don’t want to be responsible for pronouncing a blessing on some of these clearly shaky couplings. I don’t want to be told that the couple would rather I did not bring God into the vows. I don’t want to be leveraged into being part of the marriage business and to start thinking of making money out of what ought to be a holy privilege.

I feel this way as do the rest of our staff who are licensed by the State of Hawaii to perform marriage ceremonies. (None of us asks for money for our services)

I do know some solid Christian Pastors who are very, very busy doing these kind factory weddings. They see spiritual opportunities where I see conflict and make it a point to share Christ with each couple they are asked to marry, and of course it helps them to make up for the paltry salary they often receive as a Pastor.

But the times they are a’changing and like frogs in a kettle, the heat is turned up so gradually that we may cook in our complacency.

And right about now I am having a bout of draconian thinking

I am now contemplating a not too distant future where I will turn in my State license and only do underground Christian weddings.

C.S. Lewis first prompted my thoughts on this many years ago when I first read Mere Christianity.

Lewis said “There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, and other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man know which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”

I read recently of a wedding photographer who turned down doing a wedding of a gay couple and was prosecuted for his refusal by the State he lived in.

A portent? I think yes.

It may be just getting nutty enough out there that we must do exactly what C.S. Lewis suggested over 60 years ago – make the “sharp” distinction between a Christian marriage and a State marriage.

Naturally this raises all kinds of questions. Would a Christian even need to bother with being married in the eyes of the State? What would be the benefits and penalties? Would Pastors who repudiated State licensing be required to call their ceremonies something other than marriages? Would the Church really be willing to enforce the spiritual rules of marriage on their members?

None of the answers are easy to figure out at this junction, but perhaps it is time to do some hard thinking as the water in the marriage kettle is coming to a boil and this frog, for one is thinking of hopping out rather than being lulled into the dangerous temperature of the culture.

Where To Find Grace In Marriage

Chris Tomlinson — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:02:41 -0700

Anna and I have been reading John Piper’s recent book on marriage, entitled This Momentary Marriage. The premise of the book is simple: that marriage is the doing of God and is meant to be the display of God.

Piper looks to two amazing descriptions of marriage in the Scriptures to develop this thesis. The first is in Matthew 19, where Jesus reaches back to quote and explain the first statement about marriage in Genesis 2.

“[Jesus] answered, ‘Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate’” (Matthew 19:4-6, emphasis added).

Jesus is telling us that marriage is the doing of God—that we come together to make covenant vows, but it is God who joins a man and his wife together. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul cites the same passage as Jesus did, but he adds another element to the purpose of marriage:

“‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32).

Paul is telling us that marriage is the display of God—that the covenant of marriage, joining two into one, points to a higher, eternal covenant between Jesus and His bride, the church. What Paul is saying is that the purpose of marriage is to display the glory of God as seen by Christ’s sacrifice for, love of, and eternal commitment to all of His people.

As Anna and I read last night, we considered what it means for our marriage to be a display of God’s glory, as rooted in God’s work. Marriage is unbelievably joyful at times, and it’s frustrating at other times. I am learning to see the depths of my own sin—selfishness, pride, self-righteousness—and nothing has revealed this to me more than marriage.

Part of the encouragement we read in one of the chapters was the notion that a man and woman are to view each other in marriage as God views each of us—as righteous as Jesus. This isn’t easy, because we know, and have to deal with, each others’ faults and sins all the time. But being justified by God means He has applied, or imputed, Jesus’ righteousness to us, so that when God sees us, He sees us as righteous as His Son.

This is astounding, and it has enormous implications on how we all treat our spouses in marriage. If we see each other in this way, that the other is perfect in the eyes of God, specifically because of Jesus, then we’re going to find grace to forgive and the freedom to make allowances for one another’s faults.

This is where we can find grace in marriage: the sins of our marriages can be overcome with grace because of the greater reality of God’s grace triumphing over our sin against Him. May we be the kind of husbands and wives who receive grace from God so that we can share that grace with others—all so that the world may see the work and display of God in our marriages.

Question: Have you considered marriage to primarily be a display of God’s glory in Jesus?

Cracked Fairytales, Divorce, and the Holy Bible

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:02:30 -0700

Even that hideous ogre in Shrek finds love. With no instruction manual except for a donkey-as-therapist and the twists of fate, the guy still manages to create his own fairytale.

Some Christians aren’t so lucky.

Like many children’s picture books, our American marriage myths are often more about pretty illustrations than straight talk. Christian marriages take the folklore even further, promising mythical wedding-night pay-offs in exchange for chastity, or automatic monogamy that comes free with pastor’s signature on the marriage license. But the tales of love often betray us, leaving authentic followers of Christ with a cynicism they weren’t expecting.

The real question is not whether marriages are in trouble (they are). The more important question is whether the Bible’s principles are trustworthy enough to still hold up under the cynical weight of all those broken, banged-up, and unfixable fairytales. The best answer is not the easy one that we learned at Junior High Camp (God said it, I believe it, that settles it), but the answer that still holds true when the prince has left the story.

Many years ago, I believed I found my soul mate, that trendy-sounding label for all things romantic and unexplainable. This young man, this storm-of-a-love, was by no means a miniature of my conservative, common sense father. He was deeply imaginative but theologically shallow—my postmodern prince who changed all my rules about love and marriage. He discovered that loving me demanded a quick conversion to Christianity. So he complied.

But let’s get to the point. My journey toward understanding love and marriage found its abrupt detour in the form of abandonment and divorce. Three short years and a secret double-life later, the Wonderland of my marriage was over. I had fallen victim to what sociologists tragically call a "starter marriage." I crawled into a deep depression and felt betrayed—not only by this man (I could actually handle that)—but also by the entire American “love matrix” that had duped me.

There is nothing quite like devastation to re-position our thinking. But it doesn’t happen quickly. There is a balanced way I’ve come to reflect on the understanding of divorce and the concreteness of God’s word on the subject. It has taken years.

I believe my journey was not unique. At the beginning of such tragedy, our reaction travels in wide arcs of emotion. Whether it’s our own divorce or even our parents’, we swing between moments of great relief and great sorrow—especially since most divorces don’t simply sneak up on us. The long shadow of divorce starts to show itself for many hours before it blends into complete darkness. So when the light finally goes out, we are almost grateful for the crisis. Instead of having to keep painfully squinting in the dim light, now it’s pitch black, and we know we have to at least go get a flashlight. Finally.

But after that, the hard work begins.

One of my unexpected challenges grew out of pride. How do I articulate to strangers why this had happened, so that no one would think me wayward, shallow, a flake? In my former Christianity, divorced folks were not able to persevere like the more stalwart Christians. I didn’t think them less worthy of salvation, but they were the losers, for sure. Less holy. People who wanted to parachute out of the burning airplane rather than “hang in there.” Divorced folk just hadn’t waited long enough for God to perform a miracle at the right weekend marriage conference. They must have been gone that Sunday when the back table was selling Romance Box: Ideas for Keeping Your Marriage Alive. Now I was one of them, and I hated it. I wanted to pull everyone to the side and whisper, “Can I tell you that I really do believe in marriage? I didn’t want this!”

In the old paradigm, I had subconsciously been taught that there was a thin line separating the good Christians from the bad. Certain things kicked you onto the other team: poker, not reading your Bible daily, keeping your hands down during worship. Oh yeah, and divorce.

I also struggled with the concept of “destiny”—the secular term that masquerades as “God’s will” in any romantic textbook. I had been taught parallel—but rather separate—ideas that God was both completely sovereign and I was completely free. The first scenario meant that God had somehow ordained first the marriage and then the divorce. Ordained this? The same divorce that God clearly hates in the Bible? This made no sense to me. Equally confusing was the idea that if I had everything to do with the success and failure of this marriage, then God had either failed to rescue me or I was at best a horrible judge of character or even worse, a wife incapable of keeping a man happy. What a predicament.

So, if our experiences over time bring clarity and light to God’s plans for us, then my clarity came in the form of a new relationship. Another dilemma, indeed. If divorce seemed confusing, then remarriage even more so. Did God orchestrate my divorce from Man A just to help me meet the much better Man B? This interpretation was worrisome. That had the absurdity of buying a new car you don’t really like just so God can crash it and then provide you with the model you really wanted in the first place.

Did God just mercifully single me out and say, “I really like Caroline, so I’ll create a biblical loophole for adultery, help her keep her dignity intact, and then give her what she really had hoped for.” No, I didn’t like these angles. They made God seem random and circumstantial. I wanted a God like the one I saw in the Bible: unchanging, purposeful, a God with a water-tight set of principles.

The real question became “Had I been letting the circumstances drive the eternal principles or the other way around”? Ah, now I was on to something.

After many years of grappling with such questions, I am not content to let my experience drive the principles. That approach simply invites me to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl where my questions pull the center wheel in different directions. First, you sort of like the spinning feeling; then you vomit. No, the principles of God’s word are direct and clear. After studying the principles of marriage in chapters like Ephesians 5, I Corinthians 7, and Matthew 5, and Genesis 2, these were my answers.

Principle One: Once I had entered into the sacred covenant of marriage, it became God’s will for me to stay in that covenant. Two, marriage finds its best example in the love-and-respect model. Three, each partner has certain rights and certain requirements borne out of love.

Yet I know there are endless circumstances that might alter these principles: What about physical abuse? Sexual emptiness? Loss of love? Mental illness? I suppose God could have addressed every one of them in a scripture for America’s verse-a-day flip calendars.

But He didn’t. And since He didn’t, I have only the principles to cling to. The irony of progressive thinking is this: We assume that because God didn’t address all of the permutations of modern society in the Bible, then the only other choice is to distrust the Bible as having the “right answer.” Modern life is too broad and complicated to be stuffed into a 66-book manual! Therefore, let’s bust out of this joint!

We can’t have it both ways. If we’re saying that the only way to trust Scripture as having absolute truth is if it is explicit in its instructions for every situation, then we know we have doomed absolute truth. Isn’t that secretly our goal? As long as I can’t find a scripture verse for it, then I’m off the hook. You don’t think that the Old Testament chaps wondered about it, too?

Tabernacle Contractor: Gee, do you think we can add a green silk panel to the outer sanctuary?

High Priest: I dunno. God didn’t tell us.

Tabernacle Contractor: Crap. He must be a fraud.

Here is the hardest conclusion I have had to accept about absolute truth. It strips it all down to the barest fact about my fallen condition. My exterior goal is frequently different from my interior one. If I’m honest with myself, my interior goal is to find a comfortable way to reconcile my personal desires with a fixed biblical truth. Please, God, show me the scripture that tells me I can leave this marriage. My exterior goal, however, is to seem as though I’m searching for a right answer. The older I get, the more it’s a pretty sure bet that if I had to choose between me and God, I’m the one to distrust.

This seems precisely why God sent the Holy Spirit—a part of the Trinity notoriously suspect to us overtime thinkers. The real question of marriage started to become clear: Has my thinking been transformed yet? Is my relationship with God so intimate that I can actually feel the bending of my will in line with his? Do I question because I want to find my loophole, or do I question because I want to know the character of my creator? This is what I desperately wanted. To not just get a logical and satisfactory answer to my personal dilemma, but to know—deep in my soul—that His principles about marriage are true and good because he loved me. Not sometimes true, but unequivocally so.

And so, as it relates to marriage, here it is in its simplest terms: Whether I am divorced, re-married, happily single, reluctantly single, celibate, promiscuous, or married-and-miserable, God hates divorce, has provided for us a love-and-respect model, and ordained marriage to be a sacred covenant. All because He loves us. Why is that so hard?

These days, I’ve pretty much forgotten the fresh taste of panic or grief that used to mark my days and nights. I have both a rock solid marriage and lots of questions, which tend to surface on rainy days when the house is quiet or when I get a call from a desperate friend who can’t figure out why love went south. But on most days I allow the the Holy Spirit, a gentle yet unwavering guardian, to slip in silently and keep watch. I'm finding it's better than fairytales.

A Case for Marriage

Richard Dahlstrom — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:46:55 -0800

I’d like to spend a few words building the case for marriage, because this institution, like all institutions (it seems) is increasingly regarded with both suspicion and cynicism by younger generations. For this reason an increasing number (of both Christ followers and the general populace) are forsaking marriage, choosing instead to simply live together.

I understand the cynicism, but disagree with conclusion. The cynicism makes sense because people are looking for something more substantive than some sort of ‘legally binding’ arrangement. If that’s all a couple has, and they stay together for propriety, or reputation, perhaps even ‘for the children’, then they enflame the notion that marriage is meaningless. After all, when a couple stands before God and their friends to make a vow, they don’t promise to live together; they promise to love each other through all the seasons life – and let me tell you, the latter is much harder than the former.

My wife and I have been married thirty years, and I don’t think I’m speaking presumptuously in declaring that we love each other deeply. We’ve built a storehouse of adventures, laughter, child-raising, and braving challenges together. Each of these marvelous moments seems to add a brick to the solidarity of our marriage, and each brick makes the notion of walking away from our commitment to love, all the more difficult.

God knows, though, there are moments when we’ve both wanted to walk away. Between us, we know all the tricks – stony silence, careless disregard, hurtful words, manipulation, a fear of truth or confrontation that leads to perhaps the worst thing of all: the pleasantness of relational death. We’ve never strayed very long into any of these arenas, falling in unwittingly, and then crawling out – but we’ve been there, and when one or the other of us is there, the grass suddenly looks greener elsewhere. After all, we’re both competent and capable individuals, right?

I’ve a feeling we’re not alone in this. But, in spite of the fact that our eyes have looked longingly at freedom once in a blue moon (ok, maybe twice), staying in the arena of working on the promises we made has always been the obvious choice. And because of this, the bricks have continued to accumulate, until we’ve now, not a wall with a marriage contract tacked on to it; but a home of love and gratitude.

There are many reasons we chose to stick with the vows, but one of them is pretty simple: We made a vow – and we made it before God, our friends, and our family. It carried a weight for us (as I both believe and teach that it should for anyone who makes it), and this weight has always been lurking in the background. But recall, as we have, that our vow wasn’t a commitment to stay together – it was a commitment to love each other. Choosing to simply stay together, without comitting to the hard work of learning to love does two things: 1) It displays our obsession with appearances and our desire to please people, both of which lead to the charges of hypocrisy in the Christian community. 2) It helps create the disillusionment that leads young adults to avoid marriage completely, opting instead for ‘authenticity’. That marriage and authenticity are thus juxtaposed reveals how wrong headed we’ve become.

The value is found in declaring a commitment to love one another. Sometimes love might call for consequences, such as temporary separation or intervention. But always, love is working for the good of the other, and the union, rather than retreating into a cage of selfishness in order to preserve one’s own fragile and wounded ego. But beneath it all, there’s a commitment to love that was public, personal, and had the effect of creating a sense of accountability

Ironically it’s that sense of accountability that is largely missing in the generation that’s must hungry for authentic intimacy. Intimacy without accountability is a mirage, and boatloads of heartache and woundedness are waiting for those who try to create it. Better to keep the accountability ingredient in the mix; and how is that done?

Simple: marriage.

I welcome your thoughts.

The Thick of Pain

Jim Farmer — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:16:46 -0700

In church a few weeks ago, my pastor talked about what happens when a person dies within a Jewish community. The friends and family of those left behind travel to the grieving’s house and simply sit with them. They don’t make pat comments, they don’t swoop in and try to fix everything, and they don’t come in armed with an array of distractions. They respect their grief and just sit in silence.

Earlier today, I was watching the movie “Sunshine Cleaning” - a story about two sisters that form a bio-hazard clean up business, cleaning up the messes often left behind when people die. In one poignant scene, they arrive at a house and find the frazzled widow waiting to give them the house keys. Amy Adams’ character senses the grief of this old stranger and offers to simply sit with her. She reaches over and clasps the old woman’s hand - just as I imagine occurs in those grieving Jewish homes.

Both stories reminded me of my own journey through pain. The night my wife said she wanted to leave, I needed space to think and process. For reasons at the time I was not sure of, I called a friend of mine I hadn’t spoken too in months, and had never really had deep conversation with before. But, I knew he was a believer and I knew I needed a friend that could pray for me. We went out for coffee (the elixir of any grieving situation, I’m sure) and for hours simply sat. At times, I needed to babble - to voice my frustration, voice my anger, voice my confusion, voice my fears. Other times, I needed to just weep. If I wanted to converse, I could. If I wanted silence, there was silence. Through it all, he just sat with me. And his presence truly showed me His presence.

It is difficult for us to slow down in today's culture. Nowhere is this most needed than in those moments where life causes us to grieve. Grieving is an inevitable part of life - whether it's a death, terminal illness, or divorce. In the process of grieving, God simply wants to sit and grieve with us.

And He may look uncannily like your best friend.

How To Survive My* Divorce

Jim Farmer — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:04:04 -0700

Step 1: Trust God.

Immediately, I fell on my knees, sought Him, and went back to church. My sense of failure sent me there -- love, forgiveness, and restoration kept me there.

Step 2: Find community.

Family support was key, as was friend support. Stepping into community with fierce protectors, of me and my marriage, kept me strong. And fighting.

Step 3: Remain hopeful.

I remained hopeful, first for our reconciliation. Then, for my own restoration.

Step 4: Be honest.

There was a period of time early on where I couldn’t share what was going on at home. But hiding that anguish never felt healthy. I needed to discuss how I felt to get to a new level of honesty about me, about us.

Step 5: Don’t date.

New relationships exploited temptation to “compare”. Besides, how healthy and fair would it have been to my new girlfriend?

Step 6: Seek wise council.

I don’t know everything. And, neither do my friends. Divorce is emotional for everyone. Friends and family wanted to protect me, keep me safe. That served it’s purpose in restoration, but I also needed the calm voice of folks emotionally detached from the situation.

Step 7: Be sad, angry, joyful, happy, confused.

Often in the span of 5 minutes. Don’t worry, it’s normal.

*Certainly, I’d never wish my divorce on anyone. And I suspect every divorce circumstance is different. Your mileage may vary.

Love Is For Losers

Jim Farmer — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:43:35 -0700

Love is for losers.

Losers fail to recognize the needs of their significant other.

Losers avoid confrontation and bury the problem.

Losers have high expectations that do not match reality.

Losers cut themselves off and figure the relationship out alone.

Love is for losers.

Losers sacrifice their needs for their significant other, placing their needs above their own.

Losers willingly tackle confrontation, even if they may be wrong.

Losers are willing to let go of their expectations, settling instead for the beauty of reality.

Losers are humble enough to seek wise council from the community around them.

Everyone is a loser when it comes to love. You are either losing the relationship or losing yourself in the relationship. I don’t know about you, but I identify with both sets of losers. The first set of losers explains how my marriage died. The second set of losers paints a picture of what my next relationship will be. Either I’m seeing my wife through my own personal needs, or I am setting those needs aside to humbly meet her needs authentically.

God has placed a number family, friends, and opportunities in my life over the past two years to help teach me what it means to be in relationship. One such opportunity has been the work I’ve done for an independent film, Coyote County Loser. In God’s amusing sense of humor, he opened a door for me to work on a film where the main purpose is to demonstrate what strong, healthy relationships look like right as mine was falling apart.

Funny, God. Really funny.

But, I trusted Him, and I trusted the Producer of the film, Jacob, as he is a dear friend of mine. In the end, it was a beautiful way for me to process why my marriage failed, while also doing something productive to share a message to others about the true beauty of marriage.

The film is an honest, sweet, romantic comedy and *SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT* is coming to a theater near you! (Well, if you live in or near Orange County, CA anyway). I’d love for you to come and check out the film - more information is available at www.coyotecountyloser.com.

And when you’re watching the film, think about which type of loser you are. (I mean that in the nicest way possible!).

PS - For a great review of the film from fellow ConversantLife blogger Carrie, Ngangngang, click here.

No Longer A Believer

Jim Farmer — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:30:30 -0700

I am no longer a believer. I haven’t been for quite a while, actually. I think it started when I was going through my divorce. So much I had understood about God prior to my divorce was completely turned upside down, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I lived a good life, I went to Church, I prayed, I did all the things young Christians are supposed to do - and yet, when I got married my life fell apart. I believed that God would reward me for my good behavior. I believed that because I trusted Him, everything would be all right.

What I believed was wrong. But He wasn’t the problem - it was me. I succumbed to the typical American brand of Christianity. In the United States, our consumerist culture wired me to expect God to behave like a vending machine.

For a Snickers, press “A8”. For a happy marriage, press “A4”.

The truth is, my belief in God was not truly tested until my marriage fell apart. Sure, life threw challenges my way before then, but I always seemed to be able to navigate through them with ease. Sure, I accredited it to God - and He certainly played a part - but I’m pretty sure I was the one reaching over and grabbing the steering wheel. The happy optimism I had developed over the years even sustained me during the first few weeks when our marital tension reached a boiling point. I was convinced God was using this time of trial to ultimately make our marriage stronger. It was a Biblical perspective for sure, and may have been exactly what God placed on my heart to keep me “in the fight” so to speak, but the expectations tied to that thought were wrapped up in personal fear, not an innate trust in God. I was in the fight with Him, but I was still the one calling the shots.

So I went back to the vending machine.

For marriage counseling, press “B6”. For increased church attendance, press “D2”.

Eventually, I resorted to pounding and kicking that stupid vending machine out of sheer frustration. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted, even though I was doing all the right things. The pounding soon turned to sobbing, and the sobbing turned to prayer. Finally, I had reached a point of brokenness. I had reached a point of utter dependence. And it was there, in that moment, things changed.

I was no longer a believer. I was a knower. I knew God’s presence. I knew He died for my sins, I knew He was resurrected, and I knew He would return. I also knew that because I trusted Him, everything would be all right. It had nothing to do with whether I believed it to be true - it simply was true, whether I believed or not.