Relationships

Dear ladies,

Danny Webster 7 Comments

Dear ladies,

I wondered how best to start this, how to address you. I thought about women, but that seemed too sterile, I thought about girls but that seemed too infantile. So I write to ladies everywhere. I want to give you the status you deserve, I want to honour you and encourage you. I want you to be better people, as I want to be a better person.

That’s not so hard an ask is it? But then it comes down to the task of working out how I am going to say this, because this is a little hard. I know most of the people who read this blog, and I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that when I publicise my introspection you read it.

Let me start with a bit about me. I’m not a ladies man, I don’t have the skills to charm the girls and lead them into my arms. My experience of relationships is equivalent to Neil Armstrong’s knowledge of moon walking before he stepped foot on Apollo 11. A lot of thinking, a lot of playing it out in the mind, but rather short on actual experience. So I write out of friendship and not as a response to bitter experience.

Here’s the thing, my fellow guys and I like you. And one day I hope that I will get to spend the rest of my life with one of you. That makes it all a bit scary. Because there we are, stood in front of this mass of femininity with the same dilemma you face and thought was perhaps the exclusive preserve of your gender. Which one is for me?

And if you thought it should be easier for us because there are more ladies than men, please think again. It just ups the pressure.

I think, and think again, and then tie myself in knots thinking about the thoughts that started it all. I play convoluted games in my head trying to work out what I want.

I want to be a good guy, but I hear that they come last. I want to be the person who everyone likes, but I find they get ignored. I want to be funny, but I struggle to make people laugh. I want to be wanted but too often I am all alone.

In the end I don’t know if I would be any better off if I got all that I wanted. I dream dreams, I conjure lofty thoughts of happiness and satisfaction and then they come crashing down to earth. I wonder if the girl of my dreams will ever walk into my waking hours.

And then I remember. I am to live in the day, not drift in my dreams. So the lady I really want should not be a figment of my imagination but a part of my life.

Ladies, there’s quite a lot of pressure on us, I don’t want this to be an excuse, but let me try and explain. What we hear time and time again is that there are many ladies who are just waiting for guys to step up to the plate and ask them out. Pause for a minute on this.

What if my heart is not stirred to affection, or there is no one in particular who has caught my eye? Am I to act anyway, pick someone and do my job, ask them out, wine them and dine them, and see where it goes?

That would cheapen and demean the hope I have for a lady to one day share my life with. It’s not the now that matters most; it’s the future that stretches out from this day. The years that are to come and the eternity that has already begun.

So what I do today really does echo in eternity. Even if I choose to do nothing. Choose not to raise a ladies’ hope. Choose not to pursue a romance that is not meant to be. And doing nothing is the surest way to come last. Being a good guy and not ruffling any feathers, being a good guy and not causing offence. Being a good guy because one day I might hope to be your best guy.

Ladies, you are beautiful people. And you deserve a guy who will commit to you and love you. But that doesn’t let you off the hook. It doesn’t leave you with nothing to do but wait.

If my heart is moved towards you I will let you know. I might not want to, I might wait a while, I might try and rationalise my way out of it but this is my commitment to you. I will tell you.

And if I don’t know you all that well I will try to. So if I’m hanging around you more than usual, or I turn up at parties where you are the only person I know, if I find time in a hectic week when a chance to see you emerges… well I hope you might see where this is going.

But I’m a quiet guy. I don’t do bravado very well. I’ve also taken to talking a lot about relationships recently, and a lot of you ladies have talked back. And that’s okay, but it also leaves it all a bit messy.

Passivity is not the answer: for me it’s okay for a lady to give me a nudge. If they are confused about whether I like them I’d rather they said something than contorted their emotions to try and fathom me out. If the guy does like you he should jump at the chance to get things moving. If he doesn’t share you affection then it might be a tad awkward, but we’ll work through that.

A while back I wrote about when friendship can get in the way, I know it has for me. I want to have female friends but here is a request: if you only want to be friends, hold back on the flirting. And I don’t mean the overt provocatively sexual behaviour, I mean the more casual signals that you send to guys.

You know what I’m talking about. When there are guys who will turn up when you text, who are the first to arrive and the last to leave. And these are the ones you choose to hang out with. They like you. If you like them, this is the right response, if you don’t: hold back. If it is just the attention we are giving you that you like, please be careful how you take it, and there maybe a time when for all of our sake you learn to live without.

I’ll be writing to the guys soon, they’re more confused than you are. If you thought that was possible. They generally want to do the right thing. We’re a fragile breed, not quite always the strong and emotionless creature we are sometimes portrayed as.

I hope we can make this work. I think it will be worth it. It might be hard but let’s try and give it a go. Let’s not find convenient excuses to stay in the comfortable track.

Your friend.

The dark underbelly of internet dating

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I know nothing about internet dating. So I’m not going to blog much about it, if anyone wants to write a guest post about why it’s great, or why it’s dreadful please get in touch. I’m sure it’s something people are interested in and a challenge for Christians to know how to engage with it. Otherwise you’ll just get my ignorant ramblings at some point in the future.

But that’s not what I’m writing about now. This is something that I do not need to know much about to be outraged. Advertising encouraging people to have an affair. It is wrong, it is immoral and it is a deeply disturbing aspect of our society that tolerates and perpetuates such damaging behaviour.

Jon Kuhrt has taken on this shameful type of advertising before, last year a website ran billboard posters encouraging affairs, Jon stepped up to the plate, took them on and won. But now they are back at it again, different name, different website, same horrific attempt to profiteer by ruining marriages. Jon’s written an open letter to the boss, Ross Williams, of the parent company, Global Personals. Read through his letter and I’d encourage you to give them a call and express your thoughts in a kind and considered manner. Also, join the facebook group for the campaign. For good reason the name of the site is being kept out of this, the controversy could just end up sending more traffic to the site.

And that’s almost all I would have to say on the topic.

If it wasn’t for www.justchristiandating.com which I stumbled upon while digging around the Global Personal website, which conveniently seems to be undergoing some redevelopment right now.

So a Christian dating website is part of a company which also runs a site which promotes unfaithfulness. It would seem so. That is, if you want to describe Just Christian Dating as a Christian dating website. Because it can’t be, unless you want to also call the mafia turning up for confession as the epitome of radical discipleship.

There are somethings which we shouldn’t accept. They may not be illegal, but the brazen attempt to make money by pulling people’s lives apart should not go unnoticed. And the thought that by putting ‘Christian’ into a dating site’s address could make it so.

Actually, that’s not so uncommon a problem. It’s not just online dating entrepreneurs who market their products to the church. We do it too. The books and the music, the conferences and the courses. If we call something Christian then surely Christians will buy. Sadly we are too often sucked into this lie.

I’m not convinced about Christian dating websites, but if we are going to use them, please make sure they’re not money spinners tied to an enterprise which Jon Kurht describes as “like a drug dealer who promotes what they are pushing as harmless when really they are trading in something deadly and destructive”.

Are women too mysterious?

Danny Webster 2 Comments

So I posted this question on facebook, and I got my first response within seconds, and it was something like this: deearry, deary, dear. Which was later clarified as the facebook equivalent of a sigh.

And the lack of an answer. It would be easy leave it at that, leave the question of whether women are too mysterious as, well, as one of life’s mysteries. But it’s a question which I’m not going to ignore, particularly since reading this blog over at the Guide to Women blog. And yes, I have been reading some interesting blogs over the past few weeks. Partly to know what other people are saying, partly to see what the current hot topics in the world of Christian relationships are, and just a little bit because I could do with a guide to women.

To paraphrase that post for those of you not heading over there to read it, it goes something like this: women act all mysterious to pretend there is actually something interesting about them. Women who are worth the bother don’t need to try and hide anything. But go and read the post and see if I’ve been too unkind.

But lets take a step back and think about why we want to remove mystery.

Is it that we want to know someone, or perhaps know stuff about them, or maybe we are just curious? Or is it that we find we have a need for certainty in who someone else is because we are unsure of who we are?

To the first question, it might help if we switch to French, they have two words for knowing. You can know information and you can know people. I’ve thought before that the way we talk about our relationships sometimes confuses the two. Via the wonders of facebook you can learn plenty of facts about a person, you can follow their life. But that is not the same as having a relationship with them, there is no feedback, no conflict, just you and your thoughts imagining something that doesn’t exist. You can live without mystery but only by crafting your own mythical storyline.

When you meet someone, and talk to them, and listen to what they have to say you begin to get to know them in a completely different sense. It can be so much more than you imagined, or so much less than you concocted. It can be the point when the myth is debunked and the mystery embraced.

After all, what is wrong with a little bit of mystery? Is it just our desire to have answers to all the questions, to have everything nailed down. With our relationship with God we might do just the same, substitute theological knowledge about God for the real hard work of building a relationship. And with God we get another glance at this thing called mystery. We get to see that we will not ever know it all.

When we want to know it all we are putting ourselves in the driving seat. We are insisting that unless we have the answers and know how everything fits together then we won’t play ball. Except that’s just not how life works.

I want to get to know one person above all others, I want them to be honest to me and not hide behind a false personna. But I am under no illusion that I would ever banish all mystery. Perhaps when we want to do that we are just showing how little confidence we have in who we are. Showing that we need affirmation from other people, and security in gaining understanding, and certainty in the removal of all doubt.

But doubt doesn’t go away. And nor does mystery, so maybe we are better off embracing it than worrying about it getting in the way. But what on earth does embracing mystery mean?

Games of attraction

Danny Webster 2 Comments

In the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ Russell Crowe’s character applies game theory to asking girls out. He explains why it is the best bet to ask out the second best looking girls. Because the best girls will be swamped with offers: guys will be fighting between themselves for a precious commodity and this will leave the way clear for him to go for the next best option.

This all makes sense in a world where beauty and attraction are objective facts, and rational choice prevails. But that is rarely the world we live in. Instead we live in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, of stunning beauty and waning attraction. We are designed to love beauty, and it comes naturally to seek it out.

So just how much weight should be given to our physical attraction to someone?

It has been said that true beauty exists on the edge of chaos, where something magnificent emerges from something that so nearly doesn’t work. The solar system finely tuned to sustain life, works of art that bring together styles, materials and forms.

It was Gustav Klimt that got me thinking about this. As I looked at ‘The Kiss’ I tried to wonder why this was such a magnificent piece. It is one of his most famous, and from the case in which it was housed most expensive paintings. But it shouldn’t be any good, it does not provide a likeness, the colours are all wrong; I don’t even think it holds any deep symbolic value: yet somehow this chaotic collage of gold leaf, silver and oil creates something quite incredible.

Some time ago Portsmouth University advertised its courses with the slogan, ‘What Comes After The Internet?’ Unfortunately the answer does not lie in any of their courses; innovation cannot be taught, only inspired. Likewise beauty is not located on a map, there is no guidebook, no ‘x’ marks the spot. Beauty may be captured, but it cannot be controlled. Something that is truly brilliant and beautiful, that exists on the very brink of chaos, has an equilibrium, it is so finely tuned that the faintest shift can lead to disruption and failure.

So when I find a girl attractive, what cue should I take from it? Is it the indication of a deep soul connection, or a momentary infatuation?

That’s why attraction alone is never enough. Because beauty does not always win the day. The search for physical perfection leaves us hollow, it suggests that we can attain something which will not last. I have no idea who first said it but, ‘Real girls aren’t perfect and perfect girls aren’t real’.

It also lets lust win us over. If we are guided by what we find attractive we will find ourselves liking something new. Novelty too often attracts us. We grow bored by what we have and want something new. I remember hearing Pete Greig talk about materialism, and how in fact materialism as we understand it deeply rejects material goods, because it always wants to move onto the next thing. To really value something is to commit to it, to stay with it, and not be sidetracked when the big new thing comes along.

It is preposterous to think that if we are married we will never be attracted to another person. That doesn’t mean that the person is not beautiful, but this thought should change the way we respond to attraction.

So we should also be wary of our attraction if we are single. The options are more open, but if we are only ever guided by what we find beautiful we will be drawn in countless directions.

But physical attraction does play a role. I might like to think that I am only attracted to someone because of their godly character, virtuous actions or biblical wisdom. It might be more convenient to sideline my thoughts of who is good looking and who is not, and instead choose a girl based on more holy criteria.

Except, God created all of me. He created my emotions and my mind, he created my brain and my heart, he created my spirit and my body. The task is not to be ruled by our body, and this is not done by ignoring it. If we shut off our desires we are letting them win.

There’s one other interesting thing in play here: avoiding complementing someone on their looks because you don’t want to appear superficial, or just interested in them because of their physical attributes. But then what are we trying to achieve by side-lining these feelings? Are we trying to deny something that is intrinsic to who we are, or are we appropriately managing a desire within us that needs to be checked?

When love and life collide

Danny Webster 2 Comments

Friends are the people we want to be around. But it is not always that easy, it’s not all about a smooth road which veers to our every whim. Because maybe, friendship is fundamentally about conflict.

I want to do something. Someone else wants to do something else. We search for harmony in our relationships, but the life we live pays testament that it is conflict and not harmony that usually wins the day.

It can be mundane, it can be trivial, it can be easy and it can be hard. It could be what to do with a final Saturday in the summer sun. Or maybe who we include in certain activities.

The practicalities will often be verbalised, the differences clear. But many of the areas of conflict will go unspoken, they will simmer under the surface. We will continue as though there is no disagreement, that everything is hunky dory.

But I am committed to getting through it. And I am determined to not let my tendency for isolation to let me flee from challenging situations.

I’ve been away with my friends a couple of times over the summer and each time the fun and harmony was sprinkled with a dose of conflict. And perhaps I was more to blame than most for the disruption. While I may not have handled the specific situations particularly well, they did cause me to think about how much space we allow for conflict in our friendships.

There’s a memorable line in the film “Good Will Hunting” when Sean is telling Will about his relationship with his wife: ‘The little idiosyncrasies that only I know about: that’s what made her my wife. Oh she had the goods on me too, she knew all about my little peccadilloes. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. Ah, that’s the good stuff.’

We think that the best a relationship can be is one with complete harmony and an absence of problems. This simply misses the point. We live in a world where relationships are broken and we are fuelled by selfishness and greed. If our pursuit of relationships, both romantic and platonic does not take this into account we will end up both disappointed and spurred on to build a facade of perfection that does not exist.

Maybe because we have a certain intentionality in romantic relationships we accept the need to ‘get through conflict’, but even this misses the point that it is a never ending challenge. Things do not get better once you’ve argued and made up once. But in friendships there is rarely the acknowledgement of the need for hard graft.

It also seems a bit too eager, to go into a group of friends and start off the conversation. And you can come across as the fun police, especially if you want to say something unpopular. But sometimes these things need to be said, there needs to be room for the dissenting opinion to be voiced. Because it is just in the circumstances that it is not given space that peer pressure takes its toll. When other people are doing something or saying something and you just go along for the ride.

There’s two different categories of conflict here, there are those which are based on subjective preferences, where some form of compromise needs to be found between people with myriad different opinions and views. There’s often not a solid right or a wrong thing to be done. Should we go to the beach or the park on a sunny day?

But there is a second category, and within the church sometimes we consider ourselves exempt from this. We live under the assumption that in our interaction with the wider world we have to be on our guard against temptation, but among our church friends all is fine.

I think I am more tempted to behave in a manner dishonouring to God around Christians. Maybe it is because I don’t take such care, but also because to suggest that something is wrong is not only about my beliefs and values, but I am explicitly questioning theirs.

So how do we create the space for these kind of conversations to take place? How do we let ourselves be challenged when we are behaving in an inconsiderate way, are we too protective of being in the right that we squash any challenges before they are spoken?

Friends with benefits

Danny Webster Leave a comment

Except, what sort of friends don’t come with benefits?

If they don’t are they really your friends? I’ve talked a lot about romance and relationships over recent weeks, but I want to pop across the fence to explore emotions of perhaps a more challenging, and certainly less spoken of, kind. Those you share with your friends.

I give a lot of time in my head to thinking about someone who I might be interested in and rarely a second thought about who I class as my friends. And while romance is a messy business at least it has a clarity and definition that is largely missing with friendship.

A romantic relationship can be clouded with confusion and aching with fragile emotions, but the emotions are identified and the parties to the relationship are hopefully limited. And although people talk about falling in love and stumbling into something as though it happens by accident, I suspect there is always an element of intentionality involved.

I recently read “Safe People” by Henry McCloud and John Townsend. I was slightly suspicious as it is what I would class as a ‘counselling book’. And it is. But all the same they make some very challenging points. How much thought do we really give to the affect the people around us have, do they help us grow, do they stretch us, force us to be better, do they cause us to love ourselves or love each other? Do they ask for our service or help us serve?

I’m aware that I’m probably not what they would describe as a Safe Person. I am too self centred, I am too concerned about getting everything right. I use friendships for what I can get out of them rather than what I can give. On occasion I want to rescue, and on others I am the one in need of help.

But then again, I’m not sure any of us are completely safe. I think each of us tend towards narcissism at times. Each of us lack the strength of character to love completely and selflessly.

Friendship is too accidental, too often it’s just the people we happen to be around. For me it sometimes comes down to who will have me. And that’s not left me feeling able to be picky.

I don’t think it’s about dumping our current crop and trading them in for better models. Otherwise the scrapheap would be overflowing.

So how do we grow safe together?

We write a story together. We learn that we are not just living for the moment, that it’s not just about the enjoyment of now, but about the place where we are heading.

I want my friends to make me a better person. I want them to call me out when I am an idiot, and love me when I am falling to pieces. I want to laugh with them, I want them to cry with me, I want to know that even when my worst sides turn to face the world they will not walk away.

But what is the destination? What is the script of the story we write? And perhaps most challenging of all, who are we letting do the writing? Throw me your thoughts, we’ve got a little way to travel with this topic. Next time I’ll pick back up on the idea of conflict, and how this comes into play.

So guys like girls…

Danny Webster 3 Comments

I’ve discovered something remarkable in the course of writing about relationships. It has sparked a lot of interest and a lot of conversations, I’ve found myself in the absurd position of offering counsel and hearing stories that range from the comic to the heart warming. I’ve heard from guys who have no idea what they should do and girls who know exactly what the guys should do.

But I’ve learnt one immutable fact, guys like girls and girls like guys.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it, that this is what I’ve learnt? Sounds like I’ve been on another planet for the past 27 years. Except we often think that we are the exception. That we are experiencing something that no one else is. So when we hear from others that they face the same challenges and feel the same, it wakes us up that something is going on.

And I have come to two conclusions. The first I’ve already mentioned, and that is that this is a big issue, it gets people thinking and talking, and considering, it evokes lively emotions and painful decisions.

The second is that we have to get talking about it. I speak only for my situation, in a church of 500-600 people, most of whom are young and single. And in that situation I’ve taken a bit of a straw poll. I’ve inquired as to people’s dating experience, who they’ve asked out, who has asked them out. And I’ve tested a little hypothesis, and I didn’t expect to get as much agreement as I did.

The hypothesis is this, speaking of the single people in my church, most of them at most times are interested in someone of the opposite sex. And usually the person they are interested in is likely to be someone who they spend time around. So take any group of people from the church and it is to be expected that there are a lot of emotions lingering in the ether. Some of these feelings will be tentative, others will be unrequited, occasionally they will be obviously reciprocated. But all the time they will affect the group.

Except that’s not how we act. We act as though we are all just friends, and we push the romantic attraction below the surface, sometimes to preserve our own frail facade, sometimes to steer clear of awkwardness, but I think most of the time because we are happy living in the now. We are happy with what we have got, and we want to make the most of it. In a crowd of singles we share a common bond, an unspoken rebellion against the cultural norm.

It’s never that intentional, most would say they are looking for a partner, it’s just they don’t say much about it. It exists as a backdrop to our community and it affects it in two parallel ways, it inhibits the formation of strong non-romantic friendships and it stifles the open pursuit of romance. So back to my little straw poll, how much dating goes on, not much. It does take place and it usually happens quietly and discreetly in a most respectful way.

But go back to my premise, if most people like someone most of the time, and the people I surveyed had asked or been asked out between zero and three times. That leaves a lot of affection that goes unspoken.

I’ve also been asked for some solutions as I’ve written, the truth is I’m all out of those.

So let me offer one other consequence if we repress our feelings too much, we are living double lives.

Harsh? Yes.

But if we like someone and continue to act around them as though we are just friends we are deceiving them and deluding ourselves.

If Jesus is my girlfriend, does my girlfriend become my god?

Danny Webster 7 Comments

You know that ‘it girl’? The one with the long legs, glamorous looks and stylish make-up.

No, neither do I.

She rarely exists except on the TV screen or the fertile lands of our imagination. But the image is pervasive, it is what we think we are supposed to want.

Lust is love gone wrong. It is when we become a slave to our desires. Yet lust is usually the lens through which we try and assess love. We are drawn to those we are attracted to, and want more what we cannot have. Lust objectifies our desires. It makes what we want abstract and generalised. It means that we want something, and the nearest fit will do.

A little bit of philosophy

It turns what I want into an it. I-it, as Martin Buber would put it. We place ourselves in relation to an it. What this does is to ignore the complex reciprocal emotions that are in play and turn relationships into what ‘I’ want. I do what I can to possess and obtain, I perceive myself as alone with a universe of objects orbiting around me.

The obvious upshot of this is that we treat people as objects. We use them for ourselves. Every time we interact with people thinking only of our our needs, wants and desires, we are removing a little of their person hood. This fundamentally misses the point and it turns a them into something less than a person, it denies the self. But it also affects the ‘I’. Because I am not a solitary individual living in a world of my own creation. So when I define myself in relation to objects rather than people I settle for less than what I am made for. In my effort to personalise my life around what I want I have in fact depersonalised myself.

In contrast Buber suggests we adopt a posture towards one another as ‘I-thou’, we should accord dignity to those we relate, we must accept that we live in a conflicted space with tension and mystery and the magnitude of emotions that flow between people exercising freedom. And that freedom means that we cannot always have it our way. But as Alan and Debra Hirsch put it: ‘Through my relationships, in which I give of myself, I will become real, more alive’

The ‘I-thou’ relationship is at its most critical as I relate to God. If I treat God as an it, then I relate to him for what I can get out of him, but if I let him be Thou, then I allow him to change and transform me, and I realise that the world does not exist to serve me.

Relationship idol

Lust is bad. That’s what we hear, me must flee from it. We must remove every trace of immorality from among us. And within the church there can be a slightly sneering attitude to a world enthralled by sex, and we say that it is worshipping a false god.

I think it’s time to check our back yard. While we can be loquacious in our criticism of the world’s sexuality, we sometimes seem to be equally obsessed. As Tim Keller puts it: ‘If you are so afraid of love that you cannot have it, you are just as enslaved as if you must have it.’

We can slip into idolising relationships in two ways. Firstly, we build up a picture of a perfect relationship, or often a perfect partner. We treat the other half as an it. Because we are afraid of falling short of this standard we steer clear, we circumvent the contested space where we may discover that a relationship does not match up to our illusion.

The second, and I think bigger problem is that we pray for a girlfriend, (or boyfriend). Bear with me a moment, as that probably sounded slightly heretical. In my last post I criticised the tendency that at least I have of compartmentalising my life and leaving God out of some parts of it, and here I am saying that praying for a partner is somehow wrong. The problem is that this is often the only place we give to God in our relationships, certainly if you’re single.

If we are praying for something constantly, if it is the cornerstone of our prayer life, and importantly, if our trust in God is lessened if we do not get the response we want, then we have created an idol. So if I am praying for a girlfriend and one does not drop out of the sky, or I seek God about asking a girl out and then she turns me down, and if this causes me to doubt God then I am placing what I want above Him.

What this also does is remove our faculties, we are deferring to God when really he wants us to do it ourselves. If a guy ever says to a girl that God has told them they are to get married, I’d suggest hitching a ride on the nearest thing passing. This is not because I don’t believe that God can speak into every situation, including who we will marry, but if this is our reason for asking a girl out we are hiding behind God. We are depersonalising ourselves.

The rescue

The myth of the perfect couple is pretty damaging. It is also not countered with sufficient honesty and transparency. For those of us who are not married, life beyond the veil and the vows is a shrouded image. There is not enough acknowledgement and recognition that the problems of life are not solved by marriage. Too many people approach relationships thinking that either the institution of marriage, or the person they are looking to marry will rescue them.

Maybe I seek perfection in a girl. I look for something that is so right, beyond reproach, without anything that I might not like. Until recently I have never given much thought as to the details of this. I have not pondered what the cost of it all is, how much I might have to give to stay in love.

I have thought of love as a one off endeavour, the satisfaction at the end of an infatuation. I have rarely concerned myself with the hard work that it must entail, the dedication and the commitment, the forsaking of so much else, the constant pursuit.

What if true beauty does not ignore the blemishes. What if it is through the cracks of the broken that the light begins to shine?

My autrocious conception of love is brought into stark contrast when I realise that love does not require perfection. In fact it almost demands its absence. How easy would it be to love something that had no faults, what kind of love would that be. If God made us all perfect and unstintingly obedient there would be nothing audacious about his desire and determination to love us every moment of every day. It is that model of love, that he loves us no matter what which must make me look again at how I love, it must force a smile on my face as I realise that just as God loves me, I can love others, and perhaps, most surprising of all, others can love me.

Do I want a rescuer, do I want a girl who will save me from myself. Am I looking in the wrong place for the solution to my problems, investing far too much hope in the ways of a fellow human who I know is also covered in cracks, fragile and close to breaking point. Do I think that I could be her rescuer? That this might be my way in.

There’s an old motivational maxim, don’t let the good get in the way of the best. I think it’s time to turn this on its head. The search for the best can blind you to the good that is right in front of you. And the best you search for, the perfection you desire? Well it’s there, just not in the girl that you’re looking at. That’s God’s job. He has a monopoly on best.

God lives in all our boxes

Danny Webster 1 Comment

One of the strange side-effects of taking up blogging is navigating the segues between what I say online, the people who read it and those who I know in real life. I’ve been told off for talking like this in the past, with the insistence that online relationships are also real. Maybe so, but my relationships with those I see in the flesh will, and I would argue should always, take priority over those I only have contact with over cyberspace.

The difficult part are those who fall into both camps. Walking into church at the weekend was a little strange, I’ve written 4 pretty lengthy posts offering my thoughts about relationships, and in small group settings over the past few days talked quite a lot about it. But this was a large gathering with people I know well, those I know a little, and many I do not know at all. And quite a few of them will have read my thoughts. I would really rather keep them in separate camps, as many people can read the blog as they like, but please not those I meet in my daily life (unfortunately I think the ship has sailed on that one). As a side note it’s interesting to see comments from people I haven’t seen in a few years, the internet can do some wonderful things.

I’ve always had a slightly insidious predilection for compartmentalising my life into little boxes, and not really being very comfortable when the edges blur. It lets me determine which picture I paint of myself, specific to the situation and I find it hard when friends, family or colleagues cross from one setting into another. The truth is the boxes we build are always porous, and they have to be, but we often construct them for our own convenience to let us present our best face, which may be different to different people.

Sometimes we forget that God lives in all our boxes.

He is there when we sing songs of worship, when we read the Bible, he’s there when we struggle to get out of bed and when we stagger back in smelling of pilchards. God is there when we love him and when he forget him. God is there when we nervously reach out a hand to touch the palm of the girl before us, he is there in the tears and the heartache. He is there in the ecstasy and the intimacy.

And we do none of these things separate from our relationship with God. A really key contribution to this subject is a chapter towards the end of Alan and Debra Hirsch’s book Untamed called ‘Too sexy for the church?’.

The church has been criticised for taking the language and behaviour of romance and using it for our relationship with God. Particularly stinging criticism has been levelled at some contemporary worship, as ‘Jesus is my girlfriend songs’. What we have not done as much of is consider the depth and the extent of our relationship with God and include within that our romance and relationships.

We deal with sexuality outside of the context of spirituality. And often the only place that it has within discipleship is its prohibition outside of marriage. It is often skipped over with uncommon haste the fact that we are sexual beings. That we have a sexual nature, which while often corrupted, is not in and of itself sinful outside marriage. Let me state this clearly, sexuality in singles is not sinful.

In Untamed the activities of several of the early church fathers is considered as mistaken; Origen, Augustine, and Simon Stylites went to pretty extreme measures to deny their desires because they felt they were incompatible with God’s holiness (including self castration and living on a pole for 40 years).

In the contemporary church there is often a lot of talk about the wonderful gift of sex that married people can enjoy. Following the Hirschs I want to suggest that the marriage covenant in which sexual relationships flourish is the high water mark of the second half the great commandment. To love the lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself. We are to grow in relationship with God, and in relationship with people.

Too often we box up the little bits of our life and apply our beliefs to them in isolation, we ensure that our faith is sufficiently malleable to fit our context. So we might talk about marriage in church, we might talk about discipleship and the Lordship of Christ. But we don’t do enough to connect the dots.

While we talk openly and honestly about loving one another in church the purpose of it is a platonic, or perhaps agape, love, it is about building community, about knowing each other deeply. We don’t just leave things to chance, we set aside time, we meet together, we ask tough questions and aren’t satisfied by pat answers. It is not always easy, and often doesn’t work like this but at its best it is deliberate and it is clear.

We show no such clarity or intentionality in how we pursue relationships. It might best be characterised as a hazy fog. As well as the duality that often characterises our handling of sexuality, and detaches it from discipleship, there are a couple of other issues at work here. I’ll mention one briefly now, and the second deserves a post of its own.

We get sucked into a vortex of secrecy and uncertainty. And while we kind of guess that others experience similar dilemmas, we act in our own isolated world. An upshot of all this thinking and writing on relationships is a number of pretty frank conversations about it. I’ve started to try to put together, in my head at least, a definition to what this blog will be about, and if I want to achieve anything, I think it is to get people thinking and talking about areas of their faith which too often go unspoken.

I’m all for discretion in handling sensitive issues, where passions and emotions are in play, but don’t let privacy be an excuse for secrecy.

And the next one, well that would be relationship idolatry…

The art of availability

Danny Webster 1 Comment

Don Miller’s two posts on living a great love story has sparked quite a lot of debate across the internet. Maybe it’s because I’m new to this blogging malarkey, or because I’m reading people who write on the topic, but everyone seems to be talking about it. Everywhere I turn I see another post about dating, singleness, knowing whether he/she is the one. This is a topic that interests people, and one where people have very different views. It was these posts that got me going, and its taken a while to properly engage with the issues raised. If you haven’t read the earlier posts, please take a moment to, I started off with The church kissed dating goodbye, then Why guys don’t ask girls out, and yesterday posted When friendship hurts. This is a long post, I am sorry about that, I’ve included some pictures. Tomorrow comes the theology.

As in all things context matters, and by taking account of this hopefully we can clear away some of the debris and make headway through the midst of misunderstood machinations of the heart. I write in my situation, and that it is probably different to yours. I don’t think there are many things I could say which would apply in every circumstance. I live in London, I am 27 and I am single. I go to a church where most of the congregation are of a similar age, living and working in central London and neither married nor in a relationship. I think that while the problem is found all over it is particularly acute here, one friend from the other side of the world said there were few single people over 25 in her church.

As I read through Don Miller’s posts I was slightly uncomfortable with his approach. Perhaps I was a bit circumspect because an earlier post of his on dating a few months back had sparked widespread ridicule when I parroted the advice which he in turn had taken from Henry McCloud. Don Miller is a great author and out of respect I felt it appropriate to wear my Blue Like Jazz t-shirt as I write what I intend as a gentle critique.

When I first read his posts I skipped over the comments. Then I picked up from other blogs and tweets that a sense of growing outrage was spreading, in particular over his depiction of women, and use of the label ‘slutty’. I then took time to read through the lengthy thread of response and saw repeated comments venting fury and claiming betrayal. It is worth remembering that this wasn’t a hostile audience, in most cases people cited the positive impact his books had on their lives, before putting the knife in.

So where did he go wrong? And what do we do when we characterise relationships in a way that makes them harder and not easier?

I think Don Miller made two mistakes, firstly he painted a picture of women who have less than perfect pasts using crude and derogatory language. For an author who has a reputation for using words and phrases and sentences on pages to winsomely communicate important ideas, this was a surprise. It also conveyed a sense that girls who had perhaps gone through a more promiscuous period were some how tarnished. The redemptive options were underplayed, perhaps to emphasise his point and encourage more chaste behaviour.

But the second mistake he made is the one I want to focus on. He proposed a model that is idealised, even romanticised, and therefore hard to translate to reality. And when it can’t be transferred, is open to abuse, because, dare we need reminding, we all get most things wrong most of the time.

It’s not just Don Miller that thinks like this. I do, you do, we all do. We all have hopes and dreams that are infused by Hollywood on how we should fall in love. Don Miller even points this out in his advice to girls, he explicitly tells them not to fall for the romantic version of life. And I think this is crucial. Because life and love is a lot more than infatuation. It is not about the swooning over someone who has just taken your breath away. It is about car maintenance, mortgages, and projectile vomiting.

Love is hard, and I should know, I’ve spent enough energy avoiding it. We should not sanitise it or idealise it.

And the way the church often does this is by promoting the guy as the conquering hero: that women need men to lead them into a love story.

This places unrealistic expectations on guys, and too easily disenfranchises girls.

If I were to caricature the gender roles in this ideal type relationship, the guy pursues and the girl makes herself available. I’ve asked a couple of girls what it means to make themselves available and they weren’t sure. And this was reassuring to hear because I certainly wouldn’t have been able to spot a girl ‘making herself available’, at least not in the restrained Christian sub-culture.

There is the intention to not make the girl’s role entirely passive, but availability seems a rather nebulas concept which when contrasted with pursuit as the male preserve looks like a rather limited option.

Here are a couple of thoughts for what it might mean for a girl to make herself available:

  1. Don’t hang out too much with guys you are not interested in. If they like you they will think it’s reciprocated, and for other guys who might like you it will look like you’re taken (see yesterday’s post).
  2. Tell them 

I could have thought up a whole schema of other signals a girl could send, and how much they should flirt, what they should wear, how often they should sit next to the guy in church. But really, most of that just magnifies the confusion. When I notice something in a girl’s actions I clock that it might mean she is interested, but have no static reference point to measure it against. And when I sought some elucidation from a girl on this, she shrugged and suggested it was mostly intuition.

And of course it is, because I am not the same as someone else. I communicate in different ways to different people, my words, actions, even my presence varies from person to person, from guys to girls, and from girls I am interested in to those I am not. But it’s not an easy distinction to make. So I think we need a remarkable degree of honesty and integrity, and I know that I am a hypocrite I write these words because so rarely have I been honest about how I feel.

The whole notion of pursuit conjures up an image of a guy catching a girl who is playing hard to get, or winning over her heart despite her initial intentions. I know of couples who started out like this, where the guy liked the girl, and she did not, I recall hideous being the moniker used in one case. But he persisted, I thought he just wasn’t getting the hint, but in the end she turned around and they are now husband and wife. But I think this is rare, and if guys get too much encouragement to pursue it can make it hard for girls who have bad experiences of aggressive and abusive relationships.

For many couples the opening stage is nuanced and confused and often more than a little bit messy. So being open about how you feel, rather than waiting for the other person to initiate something is really important.

I’m not a particularly perceptive person. I don’t always realise what’s going on around me, I’m often the last to notice that a couple are together. So it’s useful to have friends and to use them. They will see things you don’t, even the most perceptive people often have a blind spot. If you are interested in someone you are likely to interpret their actions in a certain way, if you’re an optimist everything re-enforces the idea that they like you back, if you are glass half empty type then they could be throwing themselves at you and you would still be convinced that they are just being polite.

A lot of this comes down to us caring too much what other people think of us. We are reluctant to put ourselves on the line and run the risk of people, or a specific person, seeing us as we really are.

Post script: In the comments of an earlier post it was pointed out that guys do ask girls out, often discreetly, and they deserve credit for doing so. Yes they do.