Category Archives: recommendations

How to Serve Singles

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Carolyn McCulley, author of several books and blogger at Radical Womanhood, was recently asked to write a guest post for John Piper with advice to leaders on how to serve singles. Although it was written especially for pastors, I think it’s applicable to anyone in the church who wants to serve their spiritual family.

I’m sharing the main points of the post, and a brief parts of their explanations. Do yourself a favour and read the whole post.

You are not shepherding a dating service — wait, yes you are.

Churches should have a high view of marriage and uphold it without apology. But church leaders also need to recognize that when marriage is devalued in our culture, that brokenness comes into the church, too.

The church should be proactive about facilitating what God prizes in Scripture. That said, there’s a huge difference between being nosy busybodies and facilitating relationships among single adults.

Marriage is not the ultimate prize.

While I believe all churches should prize marriage and family, I also believe we have to be careful about the unintentional messages potentially conveyed about marriage and family. Both are gifts for this life alone.

The Singles are actually unmarried men and women.

It’s important that unmarried men and women are discipled as men and women and not a generic lump of singleness. Unmarried men and women are no less masculine or feminine because of being single.

Single men need leadership responsibilities.

When church leaders ask unmarried men to take on significant responsibilities, they demonstrate a belief that godly singleness is a tremendous asset to the Body of Christ.

Single adults are not workhorses.

Understand the challenges of endless opportunity.

A wise pastor once told a singles group that because he was a pastor, father, and husband, the boundaries of his day were fairly well-defined from the moment he woke up. He knew his responsibilities and the priorities given to him by God and he didn’t have to spend a lot of time deciding what he was supposed to do. But single adults can think they don’t have those same clear priorities and can be tempted to drift through their days.

Single men trust God by risking rejection and single women trust God by waiting on him.

Encourage single men and women to read Ruth. Not because it’s a matchmaking book (it’s really not), but because we all tend to be like Naomi. We survey our circumstances and think we know exactly what God is doing. . . or not doing.

Don’t be afraid to challenge bitterness.

Extended singleness is a form of suffering.  Don’t minimize the cumulative years of dashed hopes for unmarried adults.

That said, we single adults need loving challenges when we have allowed a root of bitterness to spring up and block our prayers to God, our fellowship with others, and our service to the church. Deferred hopes cannot be allowed to corrode our thankfulness for the gift of salvation.

It’s not self-improvement, it’s others-improvement.

Too often our advice to unmarried adults stems from worldly thinking that infects us all. We give advice to improve and equip the unmarried adult to attract better relationships, rather than reminding them they are stewards of whatever relationships they have been given.

It’s not whether boy gets girl. It’s whether we can look Jesus in the eye and say, “Thank you for the time you gave me with this person. I did my best to encourage and pray for this individual while I knew him/her. I loved without fear of loss because I wanted to be like you. So by your grace, I did my very best to build up this man/woman and return him/her to you with thanks for the gift of this relationship.”

I don’t see my blog becoming a place to discuss singleness because, although I have experience there, it’s not the only thing that defines me and my interests. Still, I have a voice to singles, and an ear for young single ladies. With that in mind, I recommend that single women read this post, “Why Pray for a Husband?” also by Carolyn. It’s one of the  most succinct, honest, wise articles I’ve seen on the subject.

Excerpts from ‘The Yearling’

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Not being so fond of animals, I never considered picking up The Yearling. I wasn’t interested in a story about a deer.

But my friend recommended it to me after she read it, and she was right. I loved it. It’s much more than a story about a deer. It’s about people struggling in harsh surroundings.  It addresses loss and grief, love and loyalty, and how each colorful, real character responds to those. It even has a wandering sailor character, which made me smile.

Several places in the book made tears creep out of my eyes. I still don’t like the inevitable ending, and when the most dreadful thing happened at the end, I skimmed over it because I didn’t want to know the details.

Like all good stories, it gave insight to how people think and feel and talk and respond to life.  I think that’s why I liked the story so much. It seemed so real. Simple, but deep, and beautifully honest.

I laughed aloud when Jody threw a potato at a girl and his dad lectured him. His justification: “I jest hate her. She made a face at me. She’s ugly.”

“Well, son, you cain’t go thru life chunkin’ things at all the ugly women you meet.” I don’t know why that advice made me laugh.

This is from gentle, wise Mr. Baxter’s prayer when they were ready to bury Fodder-Wing, the crippled boy:

…Now you’ve done seed fit to take him where bein’ crookedy in mind or limb doesn’t matter. But Lord, hit pleasures us to think now you’ve done straightened out them legs and that pore bent back and them hands. Hit pleasures us to think on him, movin’ round as easy as ary one. And Lord, give him a few red-birds and mebbe a squirrel and a ‘coon and a ‘possum to keep him comp’ny, like he had here.  All of us is somehow lonesome, and we know he’ll not be lonesome, do he have them leetle wild things around him, if it ain’t askin’ too much to put a few varmints in Heaven. Thy will be done. Amen.”

Then the Baxter dad and son went home. The dad was talking about the burial to his stern wife who’d buried five babies:

He said, “I never seed a family take a thing so hard.”

She said, “Don’t tell me them big rough somebodies took on.”

He said, “Ory, the day may come when you’ll know the human heart is allus the same. Sorrer strikes the same all over. Hit makes a different kind o’ mark in different places. Seems to me, times, hit ain’t done nothin’ to you but sharpen your tongue.”

She sat down abruptly.

She said, “Seems like bein’ hard is the only way I kin stand it.”

He left his breakfast and went to her and stroked her hair. “I know. Jest be a leetle mite easy on t’other feller.”

Look Over My Shoulder

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It’s a most delicious, replete feeling: I don’t need anything right now, so I can even keep away from second-hand shops. Except that it’s nice to look at the books. Several in town have English books, and recently I found The Boy in Striped Pajamas.  Which is a good read even if it’s an awful, sad story, so of course I bought it for one zloty.

You can always use more books. And chocolate.  I can, I mean. Right now my reads are: A Meal with Jesus  as well as The Yearling, and always, interspersed at odd times so as not to get too tired of it: Polish grammar and vocabulary.

Recently it was The Secret Life of Bees for the umpteenth time. I’ve recommended that book to probably 100’s of  people. Someone took me up on it once and then asked me how I could read something that had so many swear words in it. I don’t know. I don’t remember any swear words. But maybe if you’re sensitive to that, don’t pick it up.  And don’t believe the pish-posh that’s on the jacket–something about divine female power. Their religion was strange, but I read the story for the wise words from August, and for the way that Lily expresses herself in such human, honest ways.  Most of all, I like the way August loves and guides and mentors this mother-less girl in such an exquisite way.  She’s my hero.

I’ve followed Ali’s African Adventures for several years, but now it’s more interesting again, because she and her husband are back on the Mercy Ship, after a year’s break. I love her way with words, the medical details, and emotive stories she writes about the broken babies and women she gets to care for. I once had the privilege to go on board the Logos ship, (no, they’re not sister ships) the one that takes books all over the world, so I can sort of picture the kind of community they live in, the size of the ship, and the international camaraderie and family that happens there.

Sometimes I wish that I would read more high-brow books like classics  or even be more informed about things like Occupy Wall Street. But being of average intelligence and being most interested in real people, I spend most of my time reading and following simple stories that are connected with what it means to live in a beautiful but broken world that is held and healed by scarred hands. It suits me. I don’t need anything more heady.

Connect the Dots isn’t a Game!

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My English student is a graphic designer and once showed me how she uses that Apple gizmo to make these amazing professional advertisements. This is the lady who’s my age,  studied artistic dance in university, and is a most creative student in the way she describes a word she wants to use but doesn’t know.   She loves all things Apple. From her,  I first heard about Steve Jobs, and afterwards, promptly found his famous Stanford commencement address, and liked it. Liked it very much, really.

I especially liked how he showed how demotions and perceived failures can actually turn out to be good. They can even benefit you sometimes. Such as when he was fired from Apple which pushed him to start Pixar Animation Studios.

Last week I was meandering down the street, licking my last ice cream cone of the season, celebrating the sunshine and my free afternoon. I wheeled around when I heard my name shouted behind me–something that pretty much never happens here–, and it was my graphic designer student! I’d not seen her since early summer, since she had a baby last month, and I’d been missing her, and I shouted her name and hugged her delightedly.

We walked across the street to her parked car to admire her baby and touch his cheeks, and talk about how her life has changed since his birth. Standing in the sun, licking a cone, talking with a student/friend, I somehow felt incredibly rich.

The next day, Steve Jobs died. Not that the two events are connected, but for me, these two people are connected in my mind: Steve Jobs and my student.

In that Stanford speech, Mr. Jobs talked about how one choice affects a million things later.  Maybe that’s why one of the most useful prayers for anyone is for wisdom for them to make good choices.  And maybe that’s part of the fun we’ll have when we’re old and can see how the dots in our stories connect to make something meaningful and beautiful. God did say it would all fit into a good pattern, didn’t He?

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.       –Steve Jobs

 

What is Real?

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“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

 

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

 

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

 

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

 

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

 

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

 

“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real, you can’t become unreal. It lasts for always.”

 

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

–Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Be Real

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To thine ownself be true–what does that mean? What does it mean to be yourself, no plastic ways, no personas, but to be authentic?

I don’t have final answers about it, but it seems to me that being authentic is connected to aligning ourselves with the way God intended for us to live and I know  His design is perfect and beautiful, not self-serving or muddy. I think that to be authentic means walking toward His design, living in simplicity and honesty, not needing props to hold up our image.

An article here on Her.meneutics gives some food for thought:

…my entire life has been a struggle to get out from behind the faces I put on: I want to be perceived as having it all together, as being the perfect wife, as being an intelligent Christian woman, as being compassionate, kind, and inspirational. I have justified my slavery to these goals because they are mostly noble, but the method is entirely wrong. When rooted in a desire to be liked rather than in the spirit of Christ, each one of these “fruits” is an illusion, a fake.

This leads me to my second point about authenticity: It can only be had in Christ. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. . . . The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. You real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. . . . Christ will indeed give you a real personality.”

Lewis makes this statement as one who understands the deceptiveness and destructiveness of sin. Only God knows who we really are — that is, who he created each one of us to be. Sin leads us to construct alternative versions of ourselves, selves we prefer, selves that are more comfortable, selves that bring us the most glory. We may try to construct selves that will honor God, but even our best intentions will be perverted when working off a manmade blueprint.

In Christ, however, we become our true selves. God opens our eyes to our sins, to the self-deception, to the things in our lives that are not of him. Then he transforms us, conforming us to the only perfect human being who ever lived. In Christ, we stop operating according to the constraints of social expectations, personal insecurities, and lies. Rather than live in ways that are subhuman, we finally live in a manner worthy of God’s vision for humanity.

That is authenticity. It is a “human being fully alive” (Irenaeus). It is not built in a day, nor is it maintained easily. Like humility, realizing we are closer to it ensures that we will lose it. Yet the nature of authenticity is also good news. Because authenticity cannot be faked, because it does not, ironically, rest in our natural selves, our only option for being truly authentic people is to lose ourselves, casting ourselves on Christ’s mercy, joyfully acknowledging that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness. The more we realize our desperate state and need of God’s grace, the more authentically human we will be.

What If I Miss My Life Calling?

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My wise writer friend Dorcas wrote an article here that is both simple and profound. All of us can go round and round, wondering if we made right decision yesterday or last month, wondering how we should make the next decision, wondering What Is God’s Will.

Today’s decisions do make a difference for tomorrow, and we need to think about consequences. That’s part of wisdom. But being finite, we will go crazy trying to do all the mental gymnastics of “What if…”  God tells us to ask Him for wisdom because He knows we could never be big enough or wise enough to figure it out alone. My goal is to live so that His peace is the umpire, calls the shots, and I can make decisions based on whether He gives peace about it.

Until heaven,  no one can plumb the depths of the question about  God’s sovereignty vs. man’s free will. Meanwhile, His peace is perfect, and His wisdom is great. And His virtues are always the right thing to choose.

Maybe what we see as the big life decisions of career and education and location are actually the small ones. The big decisions are the ones that transcend every place and relationship and job — integrity and kindness, mercy and generosity, love and joy and justice.

–Dorcas Smucker

A Curious Blogger

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The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?” and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.  — A. A. Milne

I’m most decidedly not an Eeyore, but blogging can carry its own kind of angst. I’ve learned to be pretty ok with what I put out here. I basically know what I can’t do, what doesn’t feel authentic, what isn’t ‘me.’ While I like to see the hit counter go up, that’s not what motivates me, because I’m not out to rope in new readers just for the sake of more eyes reading this. I don’t have the mod gushy, glossy lingo that lots of bloggers do, and I don’t care. It feels good not to have to prove anything. I don’t post pictures even though all the good bloggers do, because in this visual era, I like the challenge of trying to make words work for me.

There’s a lot of things I could write, but choose not to, because while I don’t have much (!) to hide, I value modesty, discretion, and mystery. I can keep secrets. I take joy in living a wonderful moment and savoring it in real time with real people without compulsively sharing it with the world.

I think it’s true that the blogging world has a gazillion narcissists (that’s a funny word to spell) and I don’t think that I blog just to talk to myself about myself, but neither am I looking for lots of dialogue and Q&A. I don’t ask readers for feedback, because I figure they’ll let me know if they care enough to say something. Although I really do love comments, even negative ones. Maybe someday I’ll want more interaction, but not now–even though my book needs publicity–because I don’t have the energy  to be an MC on a virtual stage.

But in describing my blog and its goals, it’s not fair or accurate to define it by what it’s NOT, and for a long time I didn’t know how to  verbalize what this blog IS. Finally, yesterday, I think I found it. It was when I was reading Mere Orthodoxy which referred me to Trevin Wax’s post about curiosity in a blogger that the penny dropped, and I said “Hey, that’s me! That’s why I blog–because I’m curious.”

I’ve seen some things, and heard a lot of stories, but I like to think that I’m not jaded, and that I still can be easily surprised, and that I won’t lose a sense of wonder about whatever’s around me. I want to keep asking why, and wherefore, and whither to.

I’m a pilgrim on a narrow road, with nothing to prove about myself, but now and then the exhort-er in me wants to say “Hey–look what I found! I wonder why–” to  other pilgrims. And I think that’s why I blog.

Announcing: Hope Singers Concert!

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Everyone is cordially invited to a reunion concert by the Hope Singers at 7:00 pm on Saturday, August 20, 2011, at Martindale Mennonite Fellowship Center, 352 Martindale Road, Ephrata, PA 17522. The program will include information about Anabaptist International Ministries (AIM) and their work in Poland. Opportunity will be given for a free-will offering in support of this ministry.

Beginning in 2004, and every two years since then, the Hope Singers have traveled and sung throughout Poland. As an extension of Anabaptist International Ministries in Minsk Mazowiecki, Poland, the Hope Singers strive to bring encouragement to believers throughout the country and to bring an awareness of an Anabaptist presence in Poland. The choir is directed by Lloyd Kauffman of West Jefferson, Ohio, and includes about 30 singers from the US, Canada, and European countries.

The focus of Anabaptist International Ministries is pointing people to Christ and a lifestyle of wholehearted obedience to Him. Besides operating an English language school for all ages, the AIM team does private tutoring, Kid’s Klub, and Bible studies, holds weekly church services, and distributes the Seed of Truth magazine (in connection with Christian Aid Ministries).

For more information, please
~attend the above-mentioned concert,(and say HI to all my friends who are singing!)
~contact a board representative at homeoffice@aimpoland.org or 814-789-4394, or
~visit us on the web at www.aimpoland.org.
_______________________________

Yes, Lord

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Yes, Lord. Yes, to anything You ask of me, anytime, anywhere.

When I was much younger, one of my aunts loaned us a recording of Ann Kiemel. The title of her talk was “Yes, Lord” and I must have listened to it about 500 times, folding the towels, mopping the floor, whenever.

Later, I found her delightful books. Ann’s books break the capitalization rules. They’re written in a kind of blank verse poetry, telling her simple stories of how she sang to taxi drivers and took children out for ice cream, telling them that Jesus loves them and together, with Jesus and love, they could dream and change the world.

I could never quite place her accent, but it fascinated me, and I liked her stories and her raspy little voice singing little songs at any time. “Something beautiful, something good, all my confusion He understood…”

She grew up in Hawaii and never fit into that world, but her pastor dad kept telling her “It pays to serve Jesus” and she’d say “Why, Daddy? I’m nine years old and ugly and hardly anybody likes me. Why does it pay to serve Jesus?” Then her dad would say “Give God time.”

When she was a junior in college, she was asked to be an administrator at Cornell University. They’d never offered the job to someone so young, or to a woman. It sounded so glamorous, her chance to be somebody, but she felt God saying “No.”

I remember kneeling by a little couch and opening my hand and putting into my hand all the things that I really loved: my family, good health, ambition, dreams for a husband and a home. I put them all right there. ‘Yes Jesus, you can take anything out or put anything in that You see I need. Yes, Lord.I want to be your woman more than I want anything else in the world.’

But dreams are made from mountains, and her dreams led her through dark valleys. After the years she had been a teacher and youth worker and dean of women at Easter Nazarene College, she was a speaker and writer. She found herself unable to keep up with demands and said, “I can’t go on. I can’t be a dreamer. I’m just not cut out for this. I can’t handle the criticisms. People don’t even know me and they make judgements about me and it’s harder than I thought to change the world, and I’m not strong enough.”

At 3:00 in the morning, weeping in my little apartment, again I opened my hand. ‘Jesus, I give all of this to you. I just started out to dream for my neighborhood. I didn’t ask to be a messenger to the world. But Jesus, here it is. Here’s my future, here’s my loneliness, all the pressures, the criticisms, the books, the dreams. Take me again. And I will try to make Yes, Lord the continuing motto of my life.’

Ann has written over a dozen books but these are the ones I’ve read:
I’m Out to Change My World
Yes
I Love the Word Impossible
I Gave God Time (the story of her marriage at 35)
Taste of Tears, Touch of God (the story of many miscarriages and adopting 4 sons)
Search for Wholeness

I found her “Yes Lord” speech on the internet today, and loved how all the stories came back to me as I listened. Now, as an adult, I hear her differently, with more understanding and empathy, not so much with the wide-eyed wonder of a child. I know she put me on a path to living with a ‘Yes, Lord’ motto, and with His help, I intend to keep my hand open.

Yes, Lord. Yes, to anything You ask of me, anytime, anywhere.