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!