This one is bound to be somewhat controversial, but here are five (not necessarily necessary or sufficient) reasons why I am not too quick to exclude pursuing a college-aged gal. I'm open to feedback and/or correction.
1) Most people never guess me to be over 25, and some think I'm joking if I tell them otherwise. I'm sure my wife wouldn't appreciate it if people always guessed her to be older than I am! :-)
2) Isn't it better for a man to be more mature than his wife (e.g. leadership). Most girls seem to be more mature than guys their same age.
3) If I'd prefer to have more than 1.8 children, better to marry younger than most women today do, after establishing their careers and such. Shouldn't she be more interested in supporting my vocation than starting her own anyway?
4) In the OPC, age gaps are not too unheard of. Perhaps so in your church demographics?
5) What do you think the age gap was between Joseph and Mary?
(An excerpt from Understanding Human Nature, p. 52)
Empathy occurs in the moment when one human being speaks with another. It is impossible to understand another individual if one cannot at the same time identify oneself with him. Drama is the clearest expression of empathy, since through the playwright's skill we readily identify with the characters on stage and act the most varied roles within ourselves. Examples of empathy in everyday life are those cases in which we have a strange feeling of uneasiness when we notice another person in danger. This empathy may be so strong that we make involuntary movements in self-[defense], even though there is no actual danger to us; for example, we all know the involuntary movements people make when someone has dropped a glass! At a bowling alley, one may see certain players following the course of the ball with movements of their body as though they wanted to influence its progress by these gestures. Similarly, during football games whole sections of the crowd in the grandstand will push in the direction of their favorite team. Another common example is the involuntary application of imaginary brakes by the passengers in a car whenever they feel they are in danger. Few people can watch without a shudder of fear a window cleaner worker at work on a tall building, and when a public speaker loses his thread and cannot proceed, the audience feels uncomfortable and embarrassed. Our entire life is very much dependent upon this faculty of identification. If we look for the origin of this ability to act and feel as if we were someone else, we can find it in every human being's inborn empathy with others. This is a universal feeling and a reflection of the oneness of the whole cosmos of which we are apart; it is an inescapable characteristic of being human. It gives us the ability to identify ourselves with things outside our own direct experience.For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. -- Hebrews 2:16-18
Last night, I went out with a handful of guys to see the Dallas Stars play hockey at the American Airlines Center. I'm not big on huge, loud pro sports events (OU college football is a completely different matter), but I thought it would be good to go out with the guys who work or study at the International Linguistics Center. I discovered it was "Christian" night at the hockey game which, as far as I could tell, means they have a Christian band play during intermissions and several church groups come. (I wonder if they consider that evangelistic outreach?)
A few phenomena ('fanomena', henceforth) struck me as a bit peculiar. One is that they'd have such a thing as "Christian" night for an event where the crowd gets most excited over the fights. Secondly, I saw several 30+/40+ men wearing Stars jerseys with some player's name and number on the back. Wearing a sports jersey as a symbol of allegiance is one thing; having a favorite player on the back just seems more appropriate for adolescents or teenagers who are clearly younger than those whom they admire. Furthermore, wearing an individual player's name seems to communicate intra-fan competition: "My favorite player is better than yours!" Thirdly, during the national anthem, the crowd liturgically shouts "Stars" whenever the word occurs in the lyrics. Now, I for one will admit that ever since becoming a Christian, I have struggled with how to sing the national anthem from the heart, because it so resembles the corporate sentiment of a worship/hymn. Perhaps for that precise reason, I found the sports cheer intrusions to be distasteful, a breaking of national corporate sanctity, for the sake of a local entertainment event. I wonder if such a thing could only occur in a culture that has so watered down church worship, that even lesser 'holy' realms of life are sacrificed to the alters of our local entertainment deities.
That said, I did have fun with the guys and the game was suspenseful, though no one lost their teeth or got a black eye. The Dallas Stars won over the Chicago Blackhawks in sudden death overtime, 3-2, winning the spoils of free Taco Bueno tacos for all the fans. Yeah, Stars! :)
A man speaks his mind, but the woman gives it meaning.
I can't help but laugh when a lady seeks clarification for a something the guy has told them (or vice-versa). We forget that the problem is often not so much in what was said, but in the people present in the communication situation. We may after much effort come to formally "agree to disagree", but in the case of actually resolving miscommunication, how do we really know that even when our heads are finally knodding in agreement, our minds are not still spinning [off in their own directions]?
To what shall I compare a man and woman seeking clarification from the other? They are like two scientists who agree to recalibrate their instruments for better focus: the first his telescope, the second her microscope.
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man..and he built into a woman the rib he had taken from the man (mind you, this was no brain surgery). -- Genesis 2:21-22
The wisdom and insight of The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies is attractive because it is a secular re-interpretation of God’s story for the problem of greedy behavior in children and its parental solution. In a world that has forgotten God’s parental authority over all parents, parents will tend to fear, above all, the social embarrassment caused by the greedy and rebellious actions of their children. In a world that has forgotten the gospel of Jesus Christ, parents will tend to judge their children’s misbehavior, without first considering how their own responses and actions contribute to shameful public behavior. They will naturally first attempt to employ quick pragmatic solutions to alleviate the embarrassment of children who rebel against their God given authority (cf. Papa Bear’s wisdom). When that doesn’t work, parents will tend to respond in an unloving authoritarian fashion, out of anger or fear, banning children from the environment in which greed becomes the occasion for temptation, or grounding them from enjoying anything fun. Parents, at best, might finally try to not give in to the their children’s wishes, to be more preparatory and proactive (cf. Mama Bear’s wisdom), giving pithy lectures to their children of why it’s not right to be greedy, expecting it all to just “make sense” and alter their future behavior. The book rightly critiques these approaches as falling short of wisdom that can actually work for children.
But the book’s critique makes the same basic false assumptions about human life as the positions it criticizes, and so ultimately only offers another pragmatic solution to solving the problem of public embarrassment: a magical mix of all the different pragmatic solutions that parents will by nature tend to try (cf. grandparents wisdom). The solution may have solved the problem of feeling embarrassed in public, but it never actually solved the problem of greedy behavior in the children. It simply redirected and transformed greedy behavior to a more sophisticated socialized form. In the end, the children are learning to try to get what they want through contractual agreements, even if they must compromise a little. Even worse, the children learn to take pride in their new form of behavior that they look down upon other families who do not exhibit their wisdom. This boasting in the achievement of their family contract, and their own adherence to it, basically hoards pleasure in their special family insight, above any desire to share their wisdom with other families who do not have their wisdom. Thus, their family contract actually gives rise to greedy behavior of a higher more sophisticated form, but now they have become blind victims to it.
As Christians, we are painfully aware from our own story how such forms of socially accepted, sophisticated greed are the most seductive and deceiving form of greed, and the most intolerable and shameful form in the eyes of God. The Messiah, after all, was crucified by such religious hypocrisy, and the nation of Israel rejected the gospel due to their “own [greedy] righteousness”. Thus, Satan sought ultimately to destroy God’s image, not through overt ugliness of Gentile ‘sinners’, but through the sophisticated boasting of a blind, hypocritical form of ‘godliness’. The book exchanges the worship of things for the worship of family.
As the book suggests, parents need to learn that they are responsible for disciplining their children, so that they do not give into the temptations of the world and get what they want through greedy behavior. But the problem is both far deeper and far greater. Parents need to accept that children’s misbehavior is a form of heart rebellion, not just against parental authority, but God. The book seems to suggest that the [greedy] heart of children is something that belongs to their nature, which no one can change. The best parents can do is promising to give them what they want before they see it, and play on their fear for not getting anything they want, in hopes to avoid a family scene in public. Children need to learn that their parents also live under God’s authority. Parents who confess the sin of their anger against their children’s misbehavior, will model before their children’s eyes how they should also live under their parent’s God given authority.
The solution of the family contract in the end shares a distorted resemblance of God’s covenantal resolution for human sin in the story of redemption. A family contract after-all is a form of covenant. The children are promised to receive something they want, before they see it, but they will lose that promised blessing if they fuss to receive something other than what they agreed to. Thus, submission to the terms of the family contract by the parents and children helps to secure a shame-free experience before the eyes of world. Unfortunately, this family covenant has no power to change sinful nature, and as a result becomes a vehicle for greed in the form of family boasting, which results in shame before God. In the economy of salvation, God has made a new covenant for the redemption of God’s family and to bring an end to cosmic conflict, putting an end to all forms of greed and reason for family boasting and complaining (“none is righteous” and “let him who boasts, boast in the Lord”). In Christ, God promises to provide for his family, not the things we see in this world, but a glorious family inheritance beyond what we would ever choose, hope, or imagine for ourselves.
The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies makes several observations about the problem of greedy “gimmie” behavior in children. The first observation is that children are only partially to blame for their greedy behavior. Their greedy behavior has an environmental factor: exposure to a market full of things appealing to children gives rise for the occasion of greed. That’s not all, however. Greedy behavior is primarily the result of a parental factor: parents tend to give their children too much of whatever they want from these things, whenever children throw a fit about not having them. Thus, the behavior of children under these circumstances depends largely upon the behavior of their parents. Parents who try to alleviate a social scene by giving kids what they fuss for are effectively training their children to be greedy and to fuss in order to get what they want! The parental quick-fix actually recycles and perpetuates the very social embarrassment they are hoping to alleviate themselves of in the public eye! Ultimately it is not the greedy behavior of the children that is the main problem, but the resulting public shame that behavior brings to the family.
The book presents two basic competing parental philosophies (thesis/antithesis) through the plot’s character development of Mama Bear and Papa Bear. First, Mama Bear in the story represents the voice of law and social order, restraint and education, who desires her children to grow up and act like mature adults. Papa Bear, functions as an antithesis, a mediator for the children (“you’re only young once” and “cubs will be cubs”). When all else fails, like a good pragmatist, he even tries out his wife’s education philosophy. Neither the father’s philosophy of childhood nature, nor his wife’s philosophy of maturity bring resolution to the family conflict. In the end, only the wisdom of the grandparents provides the synthesis that actually saves the family from shameful greedy behavior. The synthesis addresses the environmental factor: it suggests that the children decide upon one thing they want to get ahead of time in order to remove the decision making from the hostile environment. The synthesis also combines the two parental philosophies: it restrains them from getting too much, but still allows them to get something they want. If they break this family contract and fuss, they return empty handed. In this manner, peace, harmony, and love are restored to the family so that they might occupy space together in the public eye without disgrace or embarrassment.
But that’s not the end of the story. The family gains something it didn’t have at the beginning of the story: family pride. No longer are they victims of their environment or under shame in the public eye, but can together despise that shameful “gimmie” behavior when they see it occurring in other families, and can leave as a family triumphant.
Well, in case you haven't given up on me, you may been wondering why I haven't posted in a while. I discovered a few weeks ago I couldn't log into my blog system due to administration issues. So, I used the opportunity to upgrade my blog software to Movable Type 3.2. We now return to your regular broadcast. Onward Passing-Thought!