Birthday Introspection (abridged)

Another birthday.  The childhood excitement of seeing friends, eating cake, getting presents, eating cake (you get the idea where my priorities lie) is now a fond memory, sharing space with the memories of most of the friends who ate cake with me.  (Well, some ate the frosting and ran off leaving their cake otherwise untouched, but that is beside the point!)

If I am honest, I have to admit that I don’t like birthdays much and I’ve started to understand why some folks don’t bother to celebrate them.  A birthday is a sobering reminder of all the things I’d expected to do well before now: find a job I love, buy a house and a yard and make them my own, learn to love a woman and get married, perhaps even begin raising a family, and run off and join the circus.  (Okay, so the last one was never on my list!)  It is discouraging to see where my life isn’t what I planned or hoped and too easy to stop there.

It is clear; however, that birthdays must be about hope for what is to come than regret for things which have (or have not) been.  I’ve had another year to gain wisdom (though the desire so seldom keeps up with the need!), acted upon opportunities to learn to love others better (even if I still have a lot of improvement to go!), and grown in my understanding of personal and professional leadership.  I know that I am here on this earth with a purpose. (even if I don’t always understand or remember it!)  I take comfort in knowing that I am more than who I was last year on this day and I thank so many of you who have made it so.

The Paradox of Control

I don’t normally commit myself to a series of blog posts-even a short one-because it never seems as much fun to write on a topic you selected that was on your mind weeks ago.    Other things of interest always come up.  Well, with that out of the way, I said I’d write this, so here goes…

I last wrote about men being passive and detached from their relationships.  If you've not read that post, you may want to skim the two previous posts as they set up the context for this one.  Admittedly there is more to say on that topic but I kind of lost interest and need to move on to something that is perhaps a direct result of men’s passivity, especially in the church.  When men are passive, especially when they should be strong, women feel that they need to take control.  And who can blame them? 

Unfortunately, when women become accustomed to passive men, they may feel the need to take control.  Too many men are willing to forfeit their biblical leadership role.  It is, at least at first, easier for them to do what they are told rather than butt heads with yet another person in their lives.  Women, and I’d hazard to say men aren’t much different in this respect, don’t respect people they can control.  That isn’t to say that some women don’t enjoy controlling the key men in their lives, but the reality is that someone you control can never be an equal.  To control someone, they must submit to your authority.  And that is a hard realization to stomach.  Sure, we will submit to our bosses at work (at least when we have to) and we will submit to the authority of law enforcement (at least when an officer is present) but submitting in any relationship is rarely easy.  For a woman in a marriage with a passive or detached man, there is no authority to whom to submit!  In those instances, control is the option she must take if she wants her man to step up and lead… or so it may seem.

For a lot of people, “submit” has a profoundly negative connotation.  I have a fierce dislike to submitting to authority that I don’t respect.  (Sometimes that is because the authority is inept and other times it is because I am off-base.)  The church, and I suppose the Bible, is oft-criticized by those who say that “wives submit to your husbands” is an outdated, patriarchal, way of thinking that has no place in a modern society.  (And those are the people who are being diplomatic!) I suppose that if it weren’t for the part of the passage that states “submit to one another in reverence to Christ,” the critics would have a good point!  Unfortunately the criticisms are given credibility by insecure men in church or other leadership positions who dismiss women’s opinions as less important than theirs.  I don’t have time, or patience, to get into a discussion on women in leadership but I will mention that there are times when the Israelites were led by female judges in the Old Testament…

Men, if you haven’t experienced the tension between a woman’s desire to be in control and her desire for you to lead in a relationship, you’ve either not been in a relationship or you prefer more passive women than I.  Take, for instance, the awkward dance of selecting a place to eat: a woman may know exactly where she wants to go but that is classified information so far as you are concerned. Very rarely will a woman actually say where she wants to go.  She wants you to be decisive and pick …with the caveat that it is the place where she wanted to go but wouldn’t tell you.  She’ll either keep saying no until you pick the place she wants to go or will go and be displeased. (Does that tension of control seem any more familiar now?).  Here are some other examples that come to mind:  “Are you going to wear that?”  “Fine!” (said emphatically of course.) “You always (fill in the blank)!”  Of course there are many methods but the point of this post is not to detail them.

The big problem with women controlling the relationship is that either the man is passive to begin with, becomes passive to keep the peace, or there is a lot of fighting!  Typically the man begins to resent the controlling woman and the woman no longer respects the passive man.  If this occurs in a dating relationship it will soon end; if it occurs in a marriage it may continue for a long time and the damage may be irreparable.

Phil Knauer provided a less potentially divisive way of explaining the tension that women feel to control or submit by stating that women have a desire to “be loved but be independent, simultaneously.”  Not being a woman, and understanding women rather imperfectly, I could be off-base but from what I’ve observed from my female friends, I think Phil’s statement is on point.

Today some men and women seem to have reached the conclusion that being loved and independent are mutually exclusive.  There are compromises to be made in any healthy relationship but I would argue that a relationship of two equals cannot exist without each person maintaining some autonomy.  Unfortunately many men (and women) equate independence with doing things my way.  That leads to self-focused relationships which cannot mature.  After all, if I am always looking at me, how can I really love you?

I recently told someone that I tend to be interested in women who don’t need me.  It isn’t that I would prefer to date a woman who wouldn’t care if I disappeared.   I like women who are doing what they are called to do and wouldn’t need my help (or another man’s help) to accomplish their work. That is not to say that many of them do not want to be in a relationship; instead I would say that they have taken control of their lives to carry out their mission.  Many of them are, at least to me, the model of independent women who have taken control of their own lives in a positive manner.  Sadly, I also know that some of them have let men into their lives who weren’t interested in having an equal partner.  Others settled on a guy who seemed great because they perhaps thought that a better man wasn’t going to come their way.  Perhaps most disheartening were the candid admissions of women in relationships where they felt that they didn’t deserve the guys they were dating.  Most sacrificed some of their independence to be in a relationship, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some sacrificed too much and still didn’t feel loved.

I am struggling to close this posting as there is so much to say on this topic so I’ll close it with a pair of quotes which I think summarizes much of what I’d like to say if I had only a few words to say it.  Jean Anouilh succinctly noted that “Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.”  To love someone else you must be sufficiently autonomous to have a self to give.  

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Merton as I think it speaks more eloquently to the struggle of loving people who are unique beings.  “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Rejecting Passivity and Detachment

If you've not read the prior post, it is an introduction to this one and may be worth a read.

Two weekends ago, in simultaneous sermons at two different churches, Pastors Phil Knauer and Kelly Harrison spoke to tensions created in marriages from men detaching from their marriages to focus on the work of providing for their families and men being passive, respectively.  Though I am not married or in a relationship, I was reminded of instances in my own life and observations I’ve made which relate to this problem.

At some point in most every young man’s life, he dreams about being a hero to at least one woman.  I certainly dreamt about rescuing more than a few of my first crushes from dangerous situations in elementary school and that continued later in middle school and even into high school.  In elementary school, where my popularity in grade school peaked, I even had a group of boys who would run around the playground attempting to “rescue” women from other buys who were picking on them.  I should perhaps even admit that I’ve definitely imagined being a hero to women I’d hoped to impress as recently as this year.  

There is a point, however, for most men where reality sets in and we realize that we aren’t always going to be able to run in and rescue the woman of our dreams-or perhaps even the woman of our current interest. Perhaps we’ve finally learned that most of our childhood superheroes are just comic book creations or perhaps, like me, they’ve learned that the women they’d hoped to rescue have someone else in mind for that role!  Pastor Phil said that most women are looking for Prince Charming, and regardless of the veracity of that statement, I’d think that most men have lost their thoughts of being Prince Charming by their 30s.  We all fall short.  Sadly because of failed attempts at relationships, or perhaps worse, failure to even try due to lack of confidence or fear of failure many men lose hope that they will rescue anyone.  Too many of these men check out of the relationships in their lives, and many become detached or passive in the relationships that persist.

I should pause here for my female readers to address something I’ve hinted at above that greatly offends some independent, godly, women I’ve had the opportunity to know over the years.  When I speak of a man rescuing a woman, I am not implying that without that man’s help she would be lost.   I am certainly aware that there are many strong women and there is certainly Biblical precedent to women coming alongside other women and supporting them.  Furthermore, godly men I know have shared times of their wives’ strength and support in difficult times, which helped them get through.  Perhaps a better way of explaining what I am trying to say rather than coming to the rescue was that the man was able to put his strength to her service.  Whether that strength is physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual is not really the point.  

With that disclaimer behind me, I will attempt to get back on the topic of detachment and passivity.  Phil spoke of the biblical responsibility of men to provide for their families.  While I realize that in today’s society, this view is often misconstrued to say that men should be the primary breadwinners but let’s table that debate for now as this post is already becoming longer than planned.  Phil went on to explain how many men need to detach from their family and marriage relationships to focus on their careers and the demands of work.  As most would agree that men are not particularly adept at multi-tasking, it is a necessary detachment.  The problem, I would argue, arises when men put far too much of their strength into their work and become detached or passive in their relationships outside of work.  I don’t make any claim to be representative of my sex but in my own experience, I prefer to focus on my strengths.  Frankly, I’ve far more experience in my profession than I have in dating.  (Being single, I of course have no experience in marriage.)  Unfortunately, though it is too easy to focus on our work to the detriment of our other relationships.  Society tends to measure success for men more by their influence in the boardroom or their prowess in the bedroom than in their ability to serve and love their families and wives.  Meaningful, sacrificial, relationships may even be viewed as a distraction from their true purpose, which is ostensibly to work hard and make money to provide for their families and accrue lots of fancy toys so they can play hard when they aren’t working.

Not surprisingly, many hard-driving, career-minded men who are extraordinarily successful in their work are barely present in the lives of the people they’d profess to care about.  They leave early, come home late, and may even bring work home with them so they are rarely present even if they are physically with their families.   It may be accurate to describe them as married to their work.  They may be successful but at what cost?  Some become detached because they give their all at work and have nothing left, others detach because they come home to controlling wives and they aren’t willing or able to fight another battle. (more on this in a future blog.)  Some simply become passive, being present but never really engaging those they claim to love.  Love does not endure passivity.

As a single man, I can focus on my career without the struggle of balancing my work with a marriage or family.  (I am sometimes reminded of this by my married friends as part of well-intentioned advice.)  The reality is that I cannot allow my work to supplant healthy relationships with friends and family if I wish to have a wife and family of my own.  On a base level, I will not take the risks required to enter into a relationship that could result in marriage if my greatest risks are always in the workplace.  I cannot expect to have the type of relationship I hope for if I remain passive and wait for God to bring me the right woman.  (I do not hope she will fall from the sky because I’ve not been to the gym recently and I am doubtful I could catch her.)  All joking aside, if I detach and remain passive in my relationships, I forfeit the chance to demonstrate my strength and serve the people who are in my life. Engaging and taking risks may never be comfortable and it most certainly will result in failures that could leave greater scars than marketplace missteps.   

It is this realization, then, that forces all men to make a decision.  Do they wish to expend their lives to build themselves up or do they hope to have lasting, positive, impact on the lives of others?  Will they only carve their accomplishments into marble or be active participants in the formidable task of writing truth on hearts through love?  It is a decision with eternal significance but it must be made every day.

Post Valentine's Day Reflection (An introduction)

I had planned to write a Valentine’s Day post this year but was pretty tired for shoveling snow on Thursday and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. The blog posting scene on Valentine’s Day is typically more than a little oversaturated with material, whether it is comical, cynical, optimistic, pessimistic, hopeful, or bitter.

I was moving a bit slower than usual today and failed to get to church this AM so I watched an online sermon given by Pastor Kelly Harrison at Way of Life Church last week. Most years, around Valentine’s Day, pastors focus on messages of love and marriage-or perhaps it just seems that way to this perennially single guy. This year was no different with my church campuses focusing on a family and marriage-based series and Way of Life giving a series called “Mr. and Mrs. Betterhalf.”   

Admittedly, my first reaction to a relationships, marriage or family-focused series is usually to cringe and consider taking a hiatus to somewhere else until the series is on a topic I feel is more suitable to my needs. (We can unpack the attitude behind that statement some other time!)

My gut reaction to marriage series notwithstanding, I do hope to be married someday so I did my best to listen attentively. I was struck by the similarities between the key points of Kelly Harrison’s teaching and the key points that my church’s pastor, Phil Knauer, made at the same time last week.

The key points made by both pastors spoke to tension between the biblical gender roles described in Genesis and how those roles further break down when they are put into practice by imperfect people. Kelly spoke on women’s tendency to be controlling and men’s tendency to be passive, using the illustration of King Ahab and Jezebel.  Phil spoke to the tension between a man’s desire to serve his wife and a need to detach to focus on work so that he can provide for the family, and tied it back to Adam and Eve. He also mentioned that tension of a woman between the desire to submit to her husband and yet maintain control. 

Phil noted that Ephesians 5:21 & 23 basically say that a man is to love his wife and a wife is to respect her husband. That sounds pretty simple but since Adam and Eve chose a different path, it has been easier said than done.

As a single guy these messages helped me understand a bit of that disappointment and perhaps will help me improve some things in my singleness that will hopefully benefit a future marriage.  I’ll be trying to unpack of few of those things in my next few blog posts.  At present, I’m planning on wrestling with “rejecting passivity and detachment (men),” and “respect and the paradox of control (women),” and perhaps others depending on what thoughts come together.  I'll even take requests but I may authorize the right to decline to write on some topics!