Seeing Differently
Have we not power to lead?
[As for] my people, children [are] their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause [thee] to err, and destroy the way of thy paths. – Isaiah 3:12
I was having a discussion about relationships with a lovely friend of mine, and something she said really caught my attention:
It’s the man’s job to pursue the woman. I’m looking for a spiritual leader and how can I find that if I take the lead and pursue him?
Now, the snarky side of me would respond, “No no no, that is not true, what you want is a spiritual PARTNER. Leadership presumes you are inferior to men, and thus for a man to presume to be a leader over you makes him a disgusting pigfaced misogynist pigball. And I personally would NEVER believe that, for I, enlightened awesomeness that is me, have now seen the error of my misogynistic ways, and bow to the superiority gender that is woman!”
She also said that men have become lazy and rarely do the pursuing, to which my snark again says, “No no no, when men pursue after women, that is considered sexual harassment. Men are simply being gentlemen by respecting women’s boundaries here, doncha see?”
Thank God she has a enlightened, equal yet inferior person of the slightly male persuasion like me to set her straight, amirite?
Or… snark aside, maybe she has a point?
I’m recognizing the extent to which today’s feminist-crazed culture had been so ingrained on men today that they have abandoned the power that God granted them: the power to lead. The mere idea that men are innately made to be leaders is a thought so repugnant to mainstream Christians that any verses clearly reinforcing this is swept under the rug or glossed over. Instead, we talk about equality, how men and women are partners in a relationship/marriage. They mutually submit to each other, so neither is greater than the other. That’s how it works! (Never mind the voluminous evidence to the contrary as contained in the Bible, it’s all anitiquated anyway!)
Most men I reckon just go along with this because it sounds enlightened and kinda makes sense. We’re all equals right? So they take that thinking into a relationship, not realizing the utter illogic of it essentially makes the relationship a 2-vote democracy. So who gets the veto power?
Not so cut and dried as it seems now, is it? SOMEBODY has to make the final decision, but because men fear offending their female counterparts, they start conceding everything just to keep the peace. By abdicating their leadership responsibilities, they have now placed the burden on women to make all the decisions. Even worse, they can’t understand why this act of supplication seems to infuriate the women they love even more. Aren’t they merely doing what women (read: feminists) have been telling them to do? What gives?
The reason is because most women are not built to be leaders. But more importantly, they don’t WANT to be leaders. They rightly recognize it not as a glamorous position of power and authority, but as a tremendous BURDEN to bear. A burden that would be saddled on them on top of everything else in life they’d have to deal with. A man who fulfills his responsibility as a leader is actually REMOVING that burden and giving women what they so earnestly desire, despite the crowing of the godless feminists who insist otherwise.
We need to ignore what the cultures of today tells us, and stick to what God has been telling us for thousands of years.
Rise up men, and be leaders again.
I’m so awesome I even keep heaven’s angels gainfully employed
Is the LORD among us, or not? Believing God for the impossible
One of the things that I’ve been doing lately was reading the many articles and blog posts about the state of marriages and relationships today. While Christian singles have been all but abandoned by the churches, we also face a deteriorating culture that has ingrained poisonous ideas about masculinity and femininity into us, causing men to behave more like women, and women to behave more like men.
The net result is that our western world has become a veritable wasteland for any well meaning Christian who is seeking to marry a decent spouse equally devout in the faith. To personally address this, I’ve read and received much advice about what I could do to make myself more attractive to women: how to talk, how to behave, how to dress, how to be more like a man, along with advice on where to look: dating sites, singles groups, volunteering, going abroad and meeting foreign women, who to date, who not to date, what age range is acceptable, what age range is not acceptable, and on and on.
Most of it constructive, much of it sensible, but in all of that I kept wondering: Where is God in all of this? Is there an unspoken assertion out there that the LORD is sitting idly by while we continue to grope in the dark looking for that elusive pearl of great price? Is He not a God of love and mercy? Is it not in His power to make that search easier, especially as we draw nearer and nearer to the end times?
In my mind, I knew the truth of seeking God first before I could seek “her,” but it’s one thing to know something intuitively, it’s quite another to actually LIVE it.
And while I was given a word and a vision, certainly enough to believe that there is indeed someone out there who would be my wife, the truth was, I didn’t really believe it.
I may have wanted to, but nothing I did afterward reflected this. I simply did not live my life under the expectation that I would be meeting her soon. Instead, I wallowed in unbelief.
Many sins God will forgive, but unbelief is the sin that ultimately keeps us out of the Promised Land. (Hebrews 3:12-18) If He made a personal promise to me, then how can He reward me if I don’t believe it?
I was putting the cart before the horse. I wanted to see something first, then I would start believing. I needed some morsel of evidence to indicate that all was not lost, that despite the harrowing prospects of a single man my age, I could still end up happily married. Just give me something, LORD, a little something to convince me she was real.
But the thing was, He did give me something: His word. That should have been enough.
And that’s when I finally understood: there’s a greater issue here than merely trying to find a wife in today’s climate, and learning to be more masculine. I needed to believe God for the IMPOSSIBLE, and I’m sure you’d be hard convinced to find a more impossible scenario than the prospects of finding a godly mate in today’s world. And yet this wasn’t about the impossibility of finding a mate and achieving a happy marriage anymore: this was about my faith.
And our God, even our God is able to perform the impossible. Even if I didn’t FEEL like it was going to happen, I still needed to ACT in faith that it would. After all, faith isn’t about what you feel: it’s about what you DO.
And while I feel my heart agonizingly ripping in half and sinking into the depths of despair, I have decided that I am not going to let my emotions dictate my actions. Instead, I’m going to walk in faith, and trust God to do the impossible. I will live my life as if she were just around the corner, so that when she finally does come, I’ll be ready to receive her.
Walk by faith, not by sight.
Getting ready to cross the line. Yep, I am THAT awesome.
Why do I keep running across the same people within a population of MILLIONS?
So I’m checking out all the local groups within 50 miles on Meetup.com to see if there’s any that might hold my interest, just to get myself out there and meeting new people. First group I look at, and there’s a photo in it of one of my coworkers.
Not just any coworker either, a batballs cuckoobags whacky NUTS coworker.
Really? Just… really?
20 million people within a 50 mile radius here, and yet it’s like I’m just recycling through the same 100 people over and over again.
Man, talk about having a whole gym to yourself…
