Tag Archives: marriage

Infidelity is Not “For Better or Worse”

Posted on by April

There’s some serious planking going on here.

I wasn’t going to write about the Ashley Madison scandal. I figured enough bloggers were doing that.

But the reaction I’m seeing from some Christian leaders has my blood boiling. For people who passionately tout the sanctity of marriage and denounce the evils of the sexual revolution, you’d think they’d be at least somewhat livid at the scores of Christian men who were caught spending hundreds of dollars on a website to elicit an extra-marital affair.

Instead, it’s all, “We should forgive them” and “What about grace?” and “Let’s examine our own sins first.” And when the wives–who have been horribly deceived and betrayed–come forward to seek a divorce, the same leaders have responded with, “Hey. You pledged to marry him for better or worse.”

But infidelity is not “for better or worse.”  Continue reading →

When I Carry Him

Posted on by April
When we were young and enamored.

When we were young and enamored

A couple of nights ago, I had a dream about my husband. In this dream, hubby was trying to help me with chores around the house. But he was very tired and, out of his exhaustion, kept doing nonsensical things that served only to frustrate me and add to my workload. At the end, he stood next to the stove talking to me as I prepared dinner.

Suddenly, his eyes closed and he slumped facedown toward the pots of boiling liquid. I caught him just in time and guided him safely to the floor. But what to do now? I needed to get him upstairs to bed, but in real life, he weighs about 100 lbs. more than I do. I can barely lift our 5-year-old, who weighs only 50 lbs.

But in my dream, I decided to try anyway. Continue reading →

Complementarian Crimes: Erasing the Needs of Women

Posted on by April

For a while now, I’ve wanted to do a review of the marriage book Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs. But that assumes I would actually have the time to read it. It may still happen one of these days, but it might be when my kids are in college. 🙂

However, I often see the book whenever I’m browsing shelves at the local Barnes and Noble, and it always sets me off. I just KNOW this book is a prime example of the typical complementarian diatribe that shames and oppresses women through twisted scriptures. How do I know? Because of what appears on the cover: Continue reading →

The Best “Youth Pastor” I Ever Had

Posted on by April
pastor-micah-marshall-THE-REFUGE

He was the complete opposite of this guy.

You might be surprised to learn that the best youth pastor I ever had was not a youth pastor at all. At least, not in the official sense. He was simply a church deacon who taught the teen Sunday school class.

Don would have never been hired to lead a high-profile youth ministry. He was not what today’s church administrators would call hip, cool or “relevant.” He didn’t wear skinny jeans. He didn’t play guitar or have a tattoo. He probably couldn’t pronounce the words ‘latte’ or ‘espresso,’ let alone tell you what they mean. He couldn’t name a single contemporary Christian band. He had never set foot on a college campus, Christian or otherwise. His wife wasn’t a former cheerleader with a perky personality or a Cover Girl smile. In fact, the man himself was in his early 40s, rotund, with a slow Southern drawl and neatly trimmed beard. He wore the same clothes every Sunday: a white dress shirt, black or brown pants and plain black shoes. He didn’t own a cell phone, an iPad, or even an email address.

Yet this extremely reserved, humble, down-to-earth deacon of a backwater Southern church uttered seven words that likely saved me from a lifetime of pain and poor decisions: Continue reading →

Why I’m (Functionally) Egalitarian

Posted on by April

Yesterday, I stumbled across an interesting post on the Gospel Coalition Voices blog. In it was the following quote by Russell Moore, dean of Theology at the Southern Baptist Seminary:

What I fear is that we have many people in evangelicalism who can check off “complementarian” on a box but who really aren’t living out complementarian lives. Sometimes I fear we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian, because they are within the structure of the larger society. If all we are doing is saying “male headship” and “wives submit to your husbands,” but we’re not really defining what that looks like . . . in this kind of culture, when those things are being challenged, then it’s simply going to go away.

I hate to break it to Dr. Moore, but…duh! Because when you practice the kind of complementarianism outlined by the Bible, that’s what you get: something functionally egalitarian. Continue reading →