Looking for contentment

If we’re searching for something we can find justification or even validation for it most anywhere.  I did that searching for contentment this week.  It’s always been one of those things that’s been elusive.  I wasn’t raised with much materially, so I’ve always thought I was trying to compensate somehow. I still don’t have much.  Sometimes I secretly wish a close friend or relative would win a PowerBall or MegaMillion and throw me a bone or two.  After all, it’s illegal for a Bapticostal to gamble, right?

So I’m preparing a talk for this weekend and the topic I was given was “the family as the primary disciple-maker.”  No problem.  Deuteronomy 6 was a good starting point.  Plenty of material there.  After a little study, I just seemed like I needed to go to the Ten Commandments.

I became transfixed and distracted from my subject matter.

I read the Decalogue and reread it.  I had already read it like a thousand times.  I even had most of them memorized.  (You may be able to quote them all without a lot of mental gymnastics, but I’m not you, OK?)

For the first time I saw the Ten Commandments as a statement of how to be content as a human being.  Adam and Eve weren’t content.  We haven’t been content since then.  In God’s infinite wisdom he knew we needed something to show us how to live as the human beings we were created to be.  The radical minimum standard of human behavior included, even if inferred, our need to have a character that includes contentment.

Be content with a Creator God alone.
Be content that I can’t successfully craft Him in my image or any other image.
Be content with a God that is indescribable instead of throwing His name around loosely.
Be content with completely unplugging and spending time with the Creator one day each week.
Be content with my parents and I’ll actually live longer.
Be content and I won’t get angry enough or careless enough to kill someone.
Be content with my wife.  Discontentment here just causes a lot of pain and misery for a lot of people.
Be content with your BlackBerry Pearl and PowerBook G4.  Contentment keeps me from getting arrested.
Be content to keep my mouth shut.  Let other people make themselves look stupid with gossip, lies, and slander.
Be content with my house that doesn’t have a media room.  I’ve got HDTV and a PS3. A servant or two might be nice…sorry.

It was a good study for me.  It wouldn’t get an “A” from my hermenutics professor but he’s probably already content.

I’m still working on it.  I’m content with being a created being, but I’m getting an iPhone 3Gs when my contract rolls over in November.  Just sayin’…

We salute you, Mr. Semi-Permanent Food Baby Guy

Today, we salute you Mr. Semi-Permanent Food Baby Guy…keeper of the double standard.  You want your wife to look like Halle Berry but it’s okay if you look like Larry the Cable Guy.  You wonder why your wife lost her girlish figure but you can’t figure out why you just ate your fourth Krispy Kreme.  While your wife is at least thinking about losing weight, you’re at the “All You Can Eat Buffet” telling the cashier, “I’ll take two of those, please.” That’s right, Mr. Double Standard, go ahead and get your semi-permanent food baby on.

Let’s think about this real men of genius…

Guys, how about we take a long, side-view look in the mirror?  We complain to the each other that we’ve lost a step playing softball, but it’s hard to admit that we don’t exactly look like we can pull off the cover of Men’s Health.

Let’s be completely honest.  We put too much emphasis on the physical part of being married.  It’s what guys do.  It’s time for a reality check.  Very few of us look like we did in our honeymoon pictures.  It’s sad, but we want our wives to still look like they did back in the day…before three kids, two C-sections, and hardly any time to slow down and eat a balanced meal.  Sure, my wife doesn’t look like she did in our honeymoon pictures, but neither do I.  I weighed a buck twenty-nine when we got married.  Let’s just say I weigh more than that now….

So before we get all stupid, how about us guys doing something about the semi-permanent food baby we have strapped to our waist?  Start walking.  Join a gym.  Eat less and eat healthier.  Just say no when the “hot light” is on.  How about being a leader instead of a whiner.  Man up.  Who knows what will happen when you start losing those pounds?

So, how about it?  What are you willing to commit to do to look better right now, in writing, for the entire Internet to see?  Well….?

Marriage stats that will blow your mind

One of the most interesting sites on the Internet there is to survey the popular view of American culture is at SoulPancake.com.  I

follow the site on  Twitter as well as Rainn Wilson, one of the site’s editors and Dwight on “the Office.”  It’s not a mainstream Christian site, so if you visit it and start asking me why I frequent the site I won’t respond to you.  It’s designed for dialogue, not for Christian devotion.  Anyway…

SoulPancake.com asked the question, “WHEN DID MARRIAGE BECOME AN OUTDATED CONCEPT?”  I personally thought it was a great question to ask.  I’m pretty interested in the whole marriage thing anyway.  So I put my two cents in.  I did so with the help of a really great document that’s chuck full of great statistics.  One of the stats that absolutely blew me away was how cohabitation has become a norm in American culture.

Major props go out to The Association of Marriage & Family Ministries.  They twittered the doc so I’m guessing they wanted to make it public.  I have an email into them asking permission in order to be ethical and all.  I’m taking the liberty of posting it for your viewing pleasure/displeasure.  You can download it here.

It was time for a change.

Thanks for stopping by the new site. It’s a transitional site while I get my WordPress feet squarely under me. Props to the dudes at Elegant Themes for making things easy.

The new site’s main purpose is to bring the Holy Freaking Matrimony site and my old SimplyKen blog under the same “roof.” Secondarily, I want to begin moving toward a “Ken” brand for use when I finish my MFT and become wildly famous.

On a more serious note, thanks again for stopping by.

The posts here will be a mix of marriage, spirituality, culture, and other stuff to waste your time when you don’t want to work. The RSS feed should work, and Twitter integration will come soon. Maybe. Thanks to Sociable for a great social network plugin for comments. Can I get a w00t up in there?!?

Almost forgot…the comments are ON. Speak your mind, just don’t hit below the belt.

Sex to die for

Preface
I get asked to speak to college students/young adults once in a while. Last week I was invited to a college group to do a talk on pre-marital sex. Not how to have it, how to respond to the inevitable urges we have as human beings and how manage those urges from a Christian worldview. Like I told them last week, if you take nothing else away from the talk/article you need to take away the “one big question.”

If you’re a parent, use the info below to talk about sex with your child. It’s too bad that it’s something most parents leave to self-discovery. In the words of Crosby, Stills, and Nash…”teach your children well.”

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Sex to die for

If you grew up in the Southern religious culture that I grew up in, sex as a subject was treated more as a sin than as a gift from God that a husband and wife share. The word “sex” was never even mentioned by any pastor that I ever heard preach. Okay, my Dad (a pastor) did talk to me about sex but it was pretty much “don’t you ever get a girl pregnant.”

So I grew up thinking abstinence was the best way to handle pre-marital sex. Mainly because I thought my Dad would kill me if I did anything otherwise.

Southern religious culture, and I’m guessing most other Protestant and Catholic religious cultures, talk about sex from a sexual immorality point of view as their default setting. We pound out the virtue of abstinence with a sledge hammer of “don’ts” and “thus saith the Lord.” Okay, fine. It’s a sin to have pre-marital sex. The problem is, when you mix humans and religion, one tends to get a legalistic view of things when the subject is charged with social tension.

When God says something is a sin, I usually think that there’s got to be a good reason that he’s giving us a warning. He’s infinitely smarter than we are, right? So why not look at his command that tells us not to go there, to not have pre-marital sex? Let’s do…

If you’re not religious or a Christ-follower and you’re reading this, humor me for a bit and keep reading.

Humans were created in the image of God. There’s a lot to unpack there. Suffice it to say that we were created to be spiritual beings with a physical existence. Then God says to have sex. When God told us to “be fruitful and multiply” he didn’t mean eat healthy and score high on the math section of the SAT. To make more humans, there had to be sex. So God created human beings to have sex. In the perfect setting of the Garden of Eden, God saw that everything was good. (You can read the whole story in Genesis 1.)

Humans damaged our relationship with God by being prideful. That, in turn, damaged our spiritual connection (Gen. 3:1,7,23) with God and our emotional (Gen. 3:15) and physical existence (Gen. 3:16-17).

When God introduced himself in human form, we were given the opportunity to be healed spiritually, to enjoy more emotional health, and to understand and live with our physical maladies. (This is a long post so to find out how Jesus Christ came to make your life better by reading this book and this book for starters.)

Since human beings were created to be with both God and other humans, we crave being connected. When we’re missing a healthy spiritual and/or emotional connection we try to connect the only other way we know how…a physical connection. We often try to fill the spiritual/emotional need by connecting physically, often with sex. The results end up being an epic failure. It’s a crappy part of life in a world damaged by pride and selfishness.

When pre-marital sex happens, affairs happen, babies happen, abortions happen, divorces happen, STDs happen, and lack of trust between humans happens. Small wonder that God says that sex before marriage is unhealthy and dehumanizing.

By the way, there’s a screwed up belief among Christian teenagers and young adults: That you’re not having sex (and therefore not committing sin) if you don’t have intercourse. They would rationalize that anything leading up to intercourse is perfectly fine. Don’t be stupid. Read Jesus’ human ethics discourse in Matthew 5. Saying it’s okay to go past “third base” as long as you don’t go “all the way” is just a different twist on the legalism most young adults hate…making the Bible say what you want so you can manipulate people and get away with something. Read the previous paragraph again. Then read the next one.

Sex isn’t just a sensual, physical thing. It’s tied to the emotional and spiritual parts of us as well. From a Christian worldview, there’s no way to extricate sex from being a spiritual occurence. The unity of spirit, soul, and body are clear (1 Thess. 5:23). To live as redeemed humans we should guard our lives and others by refraining from engaging in less than human behavior (1 Peter:13-25). If anyone wonders why they still feel empty after pre-marital sex, that’s why.

Sex, in all of it’s pleasure and goodness, was designed to take place between a man and a woman that are married (Gen. 1:27; Mark 10:8). That’s why sex was intended to be shared as a physical, emotional and spiritual union with one’s husband or wife. Since the Scripture teaches we have spiritual/emotional/physical unity and a husband and wife become “one” (Mark 10:8) when they’re married, the clarity of sex only inside of marriage emerges.

The “one big question”
When I was reading that a husband should love his wife like Christ loved the church (like, he should be willing to die for her), I came up with the one big question that I think people should ask before they start having sex…especially pre-marital sex.

Christians need to honestly ask themselves if the person that they’re going to have sex with is the person that they’re willing to become “one” with for the rest of their life. Before they start getting all hot and bothered and taking off too many clothes, maybe they need to ask the “one big question”:

“Am I willing to die for the person I’m getting ready to have sex with?”

Question: Anyone have a better question/technique they use?

Two great books to read:

Sex God by Rob Bell

From Eternity To Here by Frank Viola