Forgivable Turn Offs

There are a few small comments over the past, well, months or year that have made me change my "turn offs" from ladies. Given that my standards seem borderline impossible in the modern world (despite being kind of normal to me), being able to discard a few things is kind of a relief.

I always thought that I would have to end up with someone who was very quick-witted. Aside from it being a mark of intelligence, I consider it to be like an accent; I do not really know how to talk without it, at least not for long. But I mentioned that I liked someone who is not necessarily known for being funny, and a friend was confused as to why that was a requirement. And for whatever reason, that was when I reconsidered. For one thing, humor is perhaps the only realm where I can get competitive, even to the point of being childish. So being around very witty friends, while usually a pleasure, could become difficult from a relational point of view. Bearing this in mind, and the fact that less witty friends have become more witty by hearing me express my humor around them, has convinced me that humor perhaps does not necessarily need to be a particularly notable quality in a future spouse.

Another one came about when I mentioned to my mother that I liked a girl, but she kept posting pictures of herself hunting or some such related activity. This was a turn off for me, partially because it is a more traditionally masculine activity than any in which I have gravitated towards, and also partly because I struggle with the idea of killing a bug, much less a deer or other more noble creature. My mom explained that these hunting habits indicated that the lady in question spent time with her father. This to me translated to mean that she would be bereft of many of the daddy issues that tend to plague the attractive ladies in whom I am likely to invest interest.

So the narrow spectrum of perfect human specimens has widened ever so slightly. Maybe I will figure it out before I die.

Why I Ask

I am slowly remembering why I bother with the whole principle of asking God about a lady I like. The basic reason is that when it comes to any sort of commitment to and with another human, it is something that I do not wish to take lightly. In fact, I do not trust myself to make clear judgment in the area. After all, once the idea pops into your head that you like someone romantically, you are suddenly attempting to evaluate more than just their qualities and preferences against your own. You are trying to evaluate your own feelings, which tend to be thrown into a state of anxiety and fluidity at such a prospect.

In addition, my parents divorced. I do not believe that such an action should be contemplated, and their examples (and the fallout that still continues from the divorce) only affirm what Jesus had to say on the matter.

So thoughts have been creeping in as of late and planting their seeds. She is moving away. Even if she were not moving away, she is so much of what we (the various characters in my mind) have searched for that she is bound to go after some other guy if I refrain from making a move.

At this point, it is time to step back. Why did I ask God for His input on this? If it is because I trust in Him, then does it not stand to reason that He will instruct me as needed if she is the intended partner in this ministry called life? So the reality here is really the usual, that I should be focusing on God and what He is speaking, and if He wants something to happen here, He will make a way. If not, He will not, and there will be someone else. Or there will not, and I will go at this whole ministry thing like Paul, single until I die. So I need to rest in Him and what He has placed before me, because if I do that, I cannot lose. How can you lose if the one in charge of everything is the one telling you what to do?

Finally Went To Church Again

In my attempts to gain clarity to ask God about a certain lady, and in the subsequent overwhelming deluge of revelations (with little bearing on my attempts at a divinely approved romance) regarding a potential bar ministry to reach my own age group, I have ironically been avoiding the sauce. Well, I have at least refrained from purchasing alcoholic beverages for now. Drinking alone at night drowns out not only your own thoughts, but also the prayers that should be such a regular part of life.

In any case, I went to a wedding yesterday and began drinking in the late afternoon, not leaving until night was very much upon us. It was the wedding of a crush I had through junior high and high school, and it was genuinely nice to see them off. There were many delays in proceedings, but the bar was open for all of them, so I had consumed something close to five glasses of wine before the end. However, I was also there for a similar number of hours, so do not panic. The combination of that wine along with dancing on the exceedingly buffed floor resulted in me finally going to sleep at a decent hour and able to wake up for church.

So I attended church today for the first time in a long while. It is a small Methodist church just a few minutes from my mom's house (where I currently reside). It felt as if a quarter of the congregation was a part of the service in some form or another, and I am pretty sure that my voice was the only audible one off stage during worship, but it was still pleasant. People were impressively responsive to the pastor's impressions of characters from Finding Nemo, which he claimed was the best Pixar movie (even after mentioning The Incredibles, but I have hope that he chose the other option exclusively because of its relation to his sermon). At any rate, I was just content with the fact that they did not become political. The crowd seemed very much of the variety that would adore Trump, but as long as I do not know about their political leanings, I can still appreciate the place of worship.

Tricksy Lord

"Hey God, I think I maybe like a girl? What are you thinking?"
"Oh, we're talking again? Cool, 'cause with all of that traveling and living life as a human has given you some insights that could play into a ministry thing that could perhaps play a role in making sure that your generation goes to heaven."
"Oh wow, okay. I mean, yeah, once school stuff is out of the way, maybe I'll try some of that. But this girl seems in tune with how I think when I'm doing things right with you."
"Okay, so you're going to feel compelled to write all of this down."

God lured me back to actually listening to Him by using a pretty girl. Classic tricksy ol' Lord God Almighty.

Social With Studying

The way that I have heard medical school described, it seems as if life is on hold. That has felt true. But people also live a little. They have social lives. This is an aspect that has been notably missing from my journey. It was the same issue that I ran into after graduating from university, namely that I do not know how to meet people and be social outside of church or school. And since church has been unsure territory, and my schooling has been independent for the last year, I have remained without a method of meeting people.

Much of this has been due to the studying. Any time I spend going out feels like it takes away from my time studying. I really do not know how to balance studying with, you know, not. It tends to feel like it is all or nothing. I am back to living at home, and when family offers to go out to dinner, I tend to reply in the affirmative due to hunger, but then do lose hours of study time. But I also know that if I do not go out, that is detrimental to my studying too. I suppose that it is just a game of constantly relearning to balance and discipline oneself. However, I am afraid to jump back into the intense studying again. I was studying for 10-12 hours per day without much difficulty, but the stress hormones that allowed it made me lose weight (and a little eyebrow hair).

I suppose that I must attempt to finish getting some studying done tonight before I debate whether to have a beer or to have a sober mind to listen to God. We will have to see what wisdom lies within.

Young Adult Ministry Idea

New idea for a ministry to reach young adults: meet at a bar and focus on scriptures that challenge your faith, rather than just the ones that affirm it. Discuss how God told the Israelites to commit genocide with the command to kill all the Canaanites and not intermarry. Or mention that the very specific specifications for the temple somehow very much resembled that of polytheistic places of worship in the region, and bring up the idea that maybe Moses took a hint from his surroundings when he was divinely inspired to write about it. Or maybe an answer that we are less comfortable with. On that note, bring up how science and archaeology do not always back up what we read in Scripture, at least on the surface level. A city the size of Jericho did not exist, so how do we interpret that?

In the banter, compare our knowledge of the Jewish and Muslim faiths to our knowledge of our own. Though many of us have had personal experiences that reinforced our previous beliefs, it would be unwise to avoid recognizing that the aspects of other faiths which we are so quick to criticize actually share many similarities with our own. Struggling with that can bring about an intellectual maturity to replace the status quo of fairly blind faith, which by all accounts seems based more in the fear of our worldview being wrong than in a search for truth.

The thing is, if we want to reach the lost in this increasingly educated world, we need to challenge ourselves. When we share our faith with someone of intelligence who has researched enough to know the flaws in the Christian faith, we should at least be at a point where we too have recognized these discrepancies, and, at the least, have attempted to reconcile them.

Time To Return

I'm 27. My personality is starting to solidify. I had rules and boundaries for myself that I have pushed more than I would care to admit, particularly over the last few years while I have been outside of a Christian environment. Church was not a practical thing to keep up with while on the island, and I felt the Spirit telling me not to attend when I got back (this occurred after trying a visit my old church in an effort to reconnect), and I continued with that perspective afterwards. But the election time passed, Russian propaganda had fooled countless Christians into taking the side of the racist sexual assaulting bigot, and our witness as a community of believers was largely discredited. And few leaders seem to have grown a backbone to speak up against it since then either.

But now I think it is time to return. I pushed my own boundaries in order to understand and pursue what the Apostle Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.

"Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some. I do this all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings."

To my queer friends, I became white cis straight and tried to address others by their preferred pronouns; I tried being accepting, even arguing in favor of their lifestyle choices within Biblical contexts, because I would rather a gay friend who is going to heaven than one who is going to hell. And before that upsets anyone, it is also because my easy interpretation of those Biblical passages could be wrong, so I will assume so if it will bring someone closer to Christ. To Muslim friends, I tried to find common ground within our holy texts (and even purchased a Quran to read, though studying has made it hard to find the time). To atheist friends, and all friends really, I tried to be a good accepting person with a fun and self-depreciating sense of humor, always willing to criticize my faith (and race) as readily as anyone else's. I say this as if I have really accomplished much. Aside from friends suddenly wanting prayer before a major exam, I was doing far more in the way of making friends than I was sharing my faith. And given that I am still learning my faith and tend to assume that my previous understanding could very well be incorrect, I often played devil's advocate against my own assumptions. In any case, this has been training.

See, my time in the secular (or just "not explicitly Christian") world taught me some important lessons. For one thing, we tend to view Christian culture as a well-known faith, the basic knowledge of which is ubiquitous within all groups. This is not the case any more than the idea that every Christian has an appreciation of Muslim or Buddhist culture. My roommate in med school knew nothing about Christianity. He asked basic questions like why we have church on Sunday, and I had thought of such insignificant things so little that I could not even remember when he first asked. Given the bigoted rhetoric strongly projected by Christians against Muslims from many Christian leaders and friends, I spent much of my time simply correcting that false interpretation rather than actually sharing my faith. Jesus taught us to live everyone, even those whose beliefs differ from our own. Jesus was also against racism, as displayed in His interactions with Samaritans. For these reasons, I have felt the need to advocate for the rights of other peoples and faiths, as a demonstration of the love that Christ truly does have for everyone (even if they do not believe in Him).

Here is another observation. At the end of my three months of journeying through Europe, I was in Ireland. I made friends with a German guy and we went drinking first in Cork (southern), then met up again in Galway (west). He showed me the bar with the cheapest beer, and after attempting to understand the thick accent of the Irishman next to us, we cut our losses there and spoke to one another. It came up in conversation that I am a Christian, and he said "I don't like Christians". I asked him to tell me why, and maybe I could clarify whatever he did not like. Then he asked something so simple that I had no quick answer even though it was debated for centuries by church leaders. "How can God be three people and one person? That doesn't make sense." I gave some dumb answer, but it taught me that even with things that I readily accept about the Christian faith without thinking, sometimes the thinking is not for our sake; it is for the sake of those with whom we are sharing our faith.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from that conversation, and from many more to follow, was not how to prepare to share the gospel, but rather the setting in which to share it. Bars are magical places. Whether you meet someone for a drink or go alone, you are likely to have conversations with someone you have not met. I have tried to put coffee shops in a similar category, but that is comparing apples to oranges, caffeine to alcohol, a stimulant to a depressant. And it is far less common to start conversations with a stranger in a coffee shop than in a bar. Why did that buddy of mine tell me, after days of knowing me, that he did not like my kind? Because the initial reservations that we all share, that keep us polite and proper enough to hold back, those begin to crumble in the first wave of the effects of alcohol. As a depressant, it inhibits those inhibitors, those things that keep us from being as expressive as we might. Another important aspect is the knowledge that everyone there is under those effects. I do not expect everyone in a bar to be drunk (I myself have rarely been publicly intoxicated), but once a drink is in your hand, you and the other patrons find yourselves on common ground.

As the Christian faith seems to be on its decline among my generation in the States (statistically), I think that it is time to recognize both flaws and opportunities. I have many more examples of sharing my faith over a drink and a joke, but few instances in sober contexts outside of the mission field. In my view, God gave me standards and convictions, but I have no right to place those on others; that is the job of the Holy Spirit. Christians need some better PR work, and maybe I can drudge up enough lessons learned to actually let some community leaders know of a better approach.