Feeling overwhelmed?

Crystal Payne has written a good post titled Help for the overwhelmed. Crystal suggests several reasons why we can feel overwhelmed, and offers solutions.

In regard to time managment, I have listened to the CD "24 Hours is All You Get" which Crystal recommends. This CD offers many good thoughts about prioritising and scheduling. Susan Bradrick encourages listeners to decide on those things that are truly God's priorities for your family at this time, and ensure that you put them into your schedule first. She also argues that many things we do are not God's priorities, and we need to leave those out of our schedules unless everything important is being done consistently. It is inspiring to think that one really could fit all the truly important things into life! However, it is very hard to set up a regular schedule unless life is very stable. At the moment, what I need to do is changing from week to week.

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Good traditions

Carmon has written a post about Traditions, pointing out that "For many Christians, “tradition” is a four-letter word". Carmon goes onto note that everyone has traditions, whether they acknowledge it or not. Pentecostal or contemporary churches have their own rituals. Carmon also has some sweet thoughts about wedding traditions.

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One Flesh: a practical guide to honeymoon sex and beyond

Despite the risk that Net Nanny will block my website indefinitely after this, I am going to review the book One Flesh: a practical guide to honeymoon sex and beyond by Greg and Amelia Clarke. I am reviewing One Flesh because many people at my church highly recommend it for pre-marital reading. I cannot offer the One Flesh the same commendation. Before stating my reasons for this, I’d like to draw your attention to the book’s many good points:

The authors . . .

• Love God
• Aim to base their thinking upon his Word
• Aim is to help Christians to have godly and happy honeymoons and marriages

The book . . .

• Encourages couples to communicate about their expectations for their honeymoon and their sexual relationship in general
• Encourages couples to communicate about contraception and to do their own research.
• Could help readers to understanding the differences between men and women, and communicate openly about these.
• Promotes the importance of expressing love rather than achieving the “ultimate” sex life. Describes problems that can occur and offers ideas for solutions.
• Points out that sexual behaviour includes activities such as passionate kissing and even, in some situations, holding hands.

My central reason for offering a cautionary word about One Flesh is that it goes into explicit detail about sexual positions. This may be helpful after marriage, but it is the opposite of helpful beforehand. As one of my engaged friends said “I don’t want to spend the next five months thinking about sex”. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I know that reading explicit information about sexual enjoyment makes me even more prone to have lustful thoughts. I need to kill those, not give them more to dwell upon. If you are going to read One Flesh before marriage, and you struggle with your thought life already, I recommend that you stop before the chapter about the first year of marriage. I completely disagree with the authors’ belief that it is helpful to discuss these things in detail prior to marriage. Isn’t there enough time for that afterwards?? Personally, I deeply regret reading this book and I would not want anyone else to have to deal with similar consequences.

I also have problems with One Flesh because it contains at least two serious factual errors. Firstly, the book indicates that the Bible’s first mention of sex is Genesis 2:24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”. In fact, the Bible first mentions sex in Genesis 1:28 “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion”. I don’t see how this could be talking about anything but sex, since prior to IVF there was no other way to be fruitful and multiply. Reproduction means sex unless, as Dave pointed out to me, you are an amoeba. The authors’ minimisation of the importance of procreation as well as pleasure in the marriage union may be a result of the fact that they ignore this passage.

The second error relates to the combined Pill. The authors recommend it and state that if conception occurs no harm will be done to a developing child. I currently have two secular books on birth control on my shelf which state that the combined Pill acts partly as an abortifacient. This information is widely available. Since one of the authors is a doctor, there is no excuse for the statement that if conception occurs on the Pill "implantation in the uterus will occur normally". I have written to the authors about this, but they have not provided any scientific evidence for their statement. It is a very unfortunate case of misinformation in a generally good section on contraception.

These two errors alone would not stop me from recommending One Flesh. If I thought the rest of the information in the book was essential, I could simply tell people about the errors and offer my wholehearted endorsement to the rest of it. However, overall I think the book is more unhelpful than helpful for pre-marital reading material. I would rather simply encourage other engaged couples to talk about their expectations and about the Bible's teaching. After marriage, if couples are looking for "manuals" on the bedroom, there are other books on the market at Christian bookstores that would probably be more appropriate for their needs.

Soon, I'll post on some pre-marital reading material that I do recommend.

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Sleep

When I consider the future, one of the things that I want most is to have time to do simple things like harvest the things I grow in the garden, have people over for dinner, and teach my own children. Choosing a lifestyle that allows enough time for sleep also sounds like a good idea! Perhaps if I have young children who keep me awake at night it would be a good idea to try to have a nap when they do, so that I don't struggle as much to be self controlled during the evening. When I am very overtired, it is so much easier to cry or get angry! Pop over to Felicity's blog for a great reminder of the importance of sleep. As Felicity says, sleep is God's gift to us. Even though the Bible warns against slothfulness, we should never feel guilty for making the time to get an appropriate amount of rest that enables us to give our best to God's Kingdom when we are busy and active.

Psalm 127 indicates that sleeping may be related to our trust in God:

"Unless the LORD builds the house
They labour in vain who build it,
Unless the LORD guards the city,
The watchmen stay awake in vain.

It is vain to rise up early,
To stay up late,
To eat the bread of sorrows,
For so he gives his beloved sleep."

If we trust that God is taking care of the world, we should be able to sleep peacefully.

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Profile photos

For a long time my blogger profile has not allowed me to update the photo. I have tried to update it through the means I used to use: putting the photo into a post and then taking the url from that. Does anyone know how to update profile photos with the new version of blogger?

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9/7/07

Last year on this date I wrote 9/7/99 in the providence of God. This year, on the eight anniversary of my car accident, I am also grateful. This time, I am especially thankful that God spared my life. He has enabled me to live to . . .

Attend my brother's engagement party and look forward to his wedding to the lovely Jen in November . . .



Watch my friends Christina and Peirce practise for having fun with their hypothetical 12 children, and look forward to being a bridesmaid at their wedding in December . . .


Hug my mother, and pray with her . . .


Enjoy my twin nephews and their sister, develop a stronger relationship with my sister Janelle and her husband Lyndon, and attend the dedication of the twins on June 30. . .


I am also grateful that God answered the prayers that I was praying as a result of the feelings I described in my post On marriage less than a year ago. In that post I described how I was less than content with singleness, and shared my ideas about courship and marriage. I am now willing to acknowledge that my struggle was partly because I already had strong feelings for Dave! I am amazed at the way God enabled Dave and I to live out so many of the principles I described in that post . . . and the way he proved it is most definitely not impossible for him to provide a husband for someone as weird as me! In less than six weeks we will be married, and it is a great blessing that God spared my life so that this could occur.

Last week one of my school friends lost her sister in a car accident. I cannot imagine how agonising this would be. So even as I am thankful today for my life, I am also praying for those who mourn. I have suffered a little, but it has never been so enourmously shattering. May God truly comfort the family, and help them to mourn fully for the one he has taken to be with him in heaven.

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Convictions

Beliefs about how to live, examined or unexamined, are inevitable.
People either choose to examine their beliefs and base them on the Bible,
or they make decisions on the basis of unexamined beliefs.

I have spoken with people who believe it is best not to have “convictions” about things related to the Christian life, such as schooling or courtship. They believe that these convictions lead to pride. Usually, they are referring specifically to more conservative convictions that can lead to attitudes of superiority toward those who choose a different course. For example, a family that home schools for biblical reasons may look down on those that choose to send their children to public schools. Or a family that believes that the Bible’s teaching on children means that it is a good idea to have lots of them may look down on those who choose to have two children.

I agree that convictions can be an excuse for pride. It is also true that some people think that more conservative = better and holier. However, my observation is that avoiding conservative views is not a guard against judgmental, prideful attitudes. In fact, “conservative” is usually quite radical. Therefore, many Christians are very judgemental about conservative views because they go against the status quo. For example, this morning I heard several people discussing large families. One woman announced that her friends had eight children because they thought “God told them to have a lot of children”. She went on to give the opinion that “God wants them to use their brains”. This woman made the assumption that it requires more thought to hold to the status quo of two or three children per family than it does to rethink those commonly held beliefs and make decisions that are frowned upon. She also displayed a contemptuous attitude to people who thought differently.

People are perhaps most in danger of being judgemental when they simply assume their views are right, without giving them much thought. They have never been through a process of considering the reasons for the views of others, so they cannot appreciate why others choose differently. Beliefs about how to live, examined or unexamined, are inevitable. People either choose to examine their beliefs and base them on the Bible, or they make decisions on the basis of unexamined beliefs. The solution to judgemental attitudes is not to abandon the process of thinking about topics and coming to convictions. Rather, it is to draw everything back into a full-orbed Christian worldview. If people truly understand God’s word, they will take seriously what it teaches about pride as well as about children or education.

If Christians have a sense of proportion, they will realise that an understanding of the gospel is the most important conviction we can have! Therefore, they will not elevate other matters to a level that is disproportionate. Douglas Wilson has said that if the first thing you want to know about someone is whether or not they agree with you about a certain issue, whether it be dress standards or rock music or natural birth, you are making that issue into an idol. The first thing we should want to know about another professing believer is whether or not they truly love Jesus Christ and have a passion for the gospel. The death and resurrection of Christ, which paid the penalty of our sin, is a humbling and awing reality. The internalisation of these truths, and the power of the Holy Spirit, is all that will be effective in putting pride to death and giving us a true love for other Christians. Thoughtlessness and following the Christian status quo will not help.

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