I love my family.  I have two loving, supportive parents who have been married for over 40 years.  I have two older siblings, two older sibling-in-laws, a beautiful niece, and four rambunctious nephews (five, when you include my step-nephew).  We’re blessed enough to live within 20 minutes of each other - and even though we don’t see each other nearly as much as we should (given our proximity!), our family gatherings are fun, rowdy, stressful, and entertaining.  (This is where I should mention that my niece is 9, two of my nephews are 8, and the other two are 5ish.  That’s a LOT of kid energy!).

Growing up, our family dynamic was slightly different than most - I’m the youngest kid by nearly 9 years. My experience of growing up was a hybrid of being the “baby” in the family, while also feeling like the only child - since my older siblings were grown up and in college by the time I was entering 4th grade.  The glue holding us together though, were my folks.  Married young, my parents had a couple decades of marriage under the belt when I came on to the scene.  Though they certainly had their ups and downs, they stuck things out (and still do!) and I’ve witnessed their marriage grow and flourish because of it.

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Author, speaker, mentor Patrick Dodson talk about his new book 'Stuff My Dad Never Told Me About Relationships.'

Patrick Dodson | learning how to love... from ConversantLife on

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.

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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.  

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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.  

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As a marriage and family therapist, I see many couples who come to me for premarital counseling.  I usually encourage these couples to come back for several sessions after the wedding since, in truth, this is when most of the “theoretical issues” we discuss in premarital turn into real issues  that are causing problems.  (Sidenote: great post about this on Stuff Christians Like last week). 

So, what are some of the big issues?  You might be surprised.  More often than not, one of the topics newly married couples find the most troubling is uttered in a simple but frustrated phrase:  I can’t stand your friends.

Let’s take Amanda and Michael*, for example.  They’ve been married for one month.  They walk into my office frazzled with each other, and the subject they can’t veer from is their growing annoyance with each others’ friends.   Amanda is frustrated that Michael’s friends are all so irresponsible.  She thinks they are slackers, and is tired of spending her Saturdays at the beach with them while they surf, which she doesn’t like.  She feels that she is trying harder than Michael is with her own friends, but feels it is vitally important that he get to know them.   Michael, on the other hand, feels that Amanda’s friends are judgmental and prudish.  He thinks they are boring and claims he is done trying.  He suggests they start hanging out with their own friends separately, which Amanda finds hurtful and insulting.

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Oh the Church. You’ve been on all our minds at the Conversant offices this week… especially mine. I’ve always known that the Church was a good metaphor for marriage: Love your spouse as Christ loved the Church. Lately I’m beginning to think the metaphor is just as applicable the other way around. When you enter into the covenant of marriage you basically say I choose this person and all their junk. Wash off the make-up, come back from the honeymoon and eventually you’ll see the imperfection you made a vow to love. Difficult? Yes. Reciprocated? Hopefully. Rewarding? Definitely.

For someone who grew up working the church system, hip to all the marketing ploys, the politics, the hypocrisy, knowing when to raise his hands, replace his “ums” with “Lord Jesus”, and perfect his post-group-prayer-hand-hold squeeze (I’ve secretly always wanted to interlock fingers with someone I didn’t know), it’s easier for me to get on bored with the challenge of a lifetime commitment to a person then it is to an institution.

But I can’t seem to get away from the church. Whether I’m working for Conversant, consulting for a ministry, or having a conversation over lunch with a friend, this living, breathing, broken, backwards, beautiful, transformational, insecure, dis-unified bride refuses to release the chords of my curiosity, frustration, and imagination.

This past month I’ve heard church plants offer to pay people $50 to come to their service, mega churches urge people to donate towards their building fund because it was “God’s dream,” and televised churches adorn their halls with quotes and murals depicting their precious pastar.

Moreover, whenever I find myself in conversation with someone my age who doesn’t follow Christ, their beef ten out of ten times isn’t with Jesus, it’s with organized religion.

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately…
Where does this leave us as a generation? We’re a people with a kingdom imagination, a passion to see heaven gravitate toward earth… and a cynicism like a rhinoceros, unliftable and morose.

Back to the wife analogy. A friend of mine who is making tremendous progress in the city he lives in as a cultural architect said this to me recently in regards to the Church, “I may not always agree with my wife, but you call her a b**** and I’ll punch you in the face.”  I think that’s a pretty accurate description of how Christ feels when we talk smack about His bride. We need to remember that institutions don’t hurt us…people do.

So here we live in this tension. The tendency is to think we’re a unique generation scarred by big hair, shiny suits, cheesy marketing stunts, and front-page hypocrisy. But the truth is that brokenness, pride, selfishness, disunity, and dysfunction have always been a part of our story since Christ told Peter, “You’re kind of an a-hole but that’s just the kind of guy I’m looking for to build this thing.” (VLP)*.

This is our story. This is why Christ died. There’s a freedom in communicating that it’s never had great PR but we’re trying to listen closer, lean in harder, imagine more authentically the pulse of Grace until the heavens fully envelop earth like an unforeseen kiss…unannounced by a campaign, commercial, or crusade.

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I was working this morning (of course at a coffee shop) and got to talking to a 29 year old guy.  It was a good conversation.  Turns out he's divorced.  I listened to his story for about 20 minutes - probably more.  He talked a lot about his confusion and the difficulty of being in such an unstable time of life.  He, of course, never dreamed of his marriage ending this way.  His dream has now become a nightmare.  To make it even more difficult he has a child he barely sees now.

He talked a lot about his wife's decisions.  I listened for a long time and then asked him one question: "What did you do wrong?"  It's not just him, we're all really good at looking at the wrongs in others and failing to see where we failed.  The question took him back a little, but he did walk through some things he has realized.  Some were very general and ambiguous, but some were very specific.  I think he was really starting to grasp what it was he could've done differently / better.

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Eugene Cho, a second-generation Korean-American, is the founder and lead pastor of Quest Church in Seattle and the executive director of Q Cafe, an innovative non-profit neighborhood café and music venue. He and his wife are also the visioneers of a new organization to fight global poverty called, One Day's Wages.

You can stalk him at his blog or you can follow him on Twitter.

 

If I Were Jon and Kate's Pastor

 

Have you seen “Up” yet?  I just came back from my second viewing and just in case you are wondering if all the glowing reviews you’ve been hearing are true, well, the answer is an unequivocal yes.  This film works is enjoyable on so many levels, it is sure to become a Disney/Pixar classic.  

 

What struck be watching this movie the second time around are the many layers present in this movie.  It’s an adventure movie that (mini spoiler alert ahead) touches on themes of life, death, loneliness, companionship, abandonment, greed, friendship, perspective, and priorities.  Not bad for a film that features talking dogs!

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