NOT YET MARRIED by Marshall Segal (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)

On a cold January night in 2003, I was in Denver, Colorado, for a Campus Crusade winter conference. All the cool kids wore Abercrombie and had flip phones, and under the influence of Joshua Harris’s book about relationships, I had kissed dating goodbye.

After dinner that night, I spoke with a girl named Brooke about dating—I mean courting—and whether God had marriage in our future. He did, and we’ve been married for a dozen years.

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A lot has changed in the last 15 years. Crusade is now Cru. Having a flip phone might be cool, but in a retro kind of way. Yet for all the changes, much stays the same. Whether you call it dating or courting or something else, the “way of a man with a young woman” (as Proverbs puts it) is still a beautiful, mysterious thing, like a ship sailing across the sea (Prov. 30:18–19).

But like the high seas, dating can be dangerous, leaving people with bitter and broken hearts.

Christian Living and Christian Dating

That’s why I’m thankful for Marshall Segal’s new book, Not Yet Married: The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness and Dating. Segal, staff writer and managing editor for desiringGod.org, is newly married, but he isn’t just another married guy telling singles what to do. “I wrote a lot of this book, and learned almost all of the lessons before I married my wife,” he explains, establishing his singleness credentials (16).

Not Yet Married has two parts. The first is “the not-yet-married life.” Here Segal channels many of Desiring God’s hallmark themes—passion and purpose, joy in mission, and the glory of God—and applies them to singleness. In the second part, “when the not-yet-married meet,” he deals with the particulars of Christian dating.

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[To read the rest of this post, visit The Gospel Coalition.]

Reflections on The Bachelor

Our kids were misbehaving last night, so they got sent to bed early. It probably was not the best use of our time but since my wife and I had extra, we decided to flip the on TV. Among a few other things, we watched twenty minutes of The Bachelor. I had heard about The Bachelor, but it wasn’t quite what I had imagined… it was far worse.

On last night’s episode, the protagonist and Iowa farmer Chris Soules, had already narrowed the women down from thirty to just three. Now he was to take each on a final date in the country of Bali. Pretty exotic, right? And with these last dates came the famous overnighters in the Fantasy Suites, of course fitted with votive candles, four-poster beds, and bathtubs filled with rose petals.

At first, for me, there was a humor to it all. I couldn’t take it seriously. As Whitney talked with Chris on a massive sailboat on the Indian Ocean, and the camera repeatedly offered close-ups of Chris as he listened to her drone on and on about her sister’s reservations about their potential marriage, I provided my own commentary for what Chris might have been thinking.

But the more I watched, the more painful it became. I kept thinking to myself, how is it that this show is tolerated by women? It’s so offensive to them!

I felt this all the more because just before The Bachelor, we caught a few minutes of an Oscar recap show, and several times we saw a clip of Patricia Arquette passionately appealing for wage equality for women, to which the crowd—especially a few prominent women—enthusiastically applauded. I understood Ms. Arquette to be making the point that women should be honored and treated fairly. I’m not a huge fan of the celebrity soapbox, but to me this sounded like a noble enough talking point, and apparently the audience thought so as well.

Why do I bring this up? Generally speaking there are healthy, although sometimes overdone, voices in culture rightly challenging all of us to treat women with dignity. Which is why, I say again, I can hardly believe a show like The Bachelor—a show that denigrates women and turns their beauty and sexuality into a competition—is tolerated.

But then I realized something: The Bachelor is not tolerated, it’s loved. Case in point: if you count all the various renditions, the show is in its nineteenth season.

As television shows do, before each commercial break, The Bachelor kept showing upcoming scenes hoping that viewers would keep watching. The particular teaser that was on repeat last night was a short clip of Becca, the third woman, explaining to Chris as they were about to enter the Fantasy Suite that she was a virgin.

I was done. I couldn’t take it.

It’s common to hear people speak as though we in the modern world have the moral high ground on those in the past, particularly those in what we might call “primitive” cultures. I’m thinking especially of our tendency to learn about strange, cultic sex practices in ancient cultures and think that we have improved morally. But when I watch The Bachelor and consider its popularity, I say no way. It would seem to me that we can be every bit as far from God’s design as those of the past. Our culture, like those of other eras, has a schizophrenic view of sex: we both over and under value it. We say sex has tremendous meaning, even an ultimate meaning for our lives. And at the same time we say it is meaningless—something cheap and casual.

But it’s not that I’m so upset with culture at large; that’s not where my confusion is mostly directed. What I cannot understand is the show’s popularity among Christian women.

Perhaps, however, some of my sisters in Christ will object: Benjamin, you can’t possibly tell the quality of a show by just watching twenty minutes.

Maybe. But what if you saw me in a public place, say a Starbucks, reading the latest edition of Sports Illustrated, which just so happens to be the swimsuit issue with its typically provocative and demeaning pictures. Would it be appropriate for someone to say to me, as a Christian man, that what I was doing was wrong? Or couldn’t I object and say, But you’re only judging by a quick glance and that’s not fair; there are some good articles in this.

Here’s the deal: sometimes you don’t need all the context. Sometimes it’s the whole context that lulls us to sleep. Sex is a gift from God. And as such, we ought not to overvalue it as though it were a god, but neither should we undervalue it either. After nineteen seasons, I’m glad I’ve only seen twenty minutes. And thankful they’ll be, God willing, my last.

[Image: Craig Sjodin/ABC, from The Washington Post]

The Woman I Love, Denver Christmas Conference, and a Letter from the Apostle Paul

In my morning devotions yesterday, I finished 1 Corinthians. So this morning, naturally, I started 2 Corinthians. As I read verse 12, an unexpected avalanche of memories swept me away. All of a sudden, I was in Denver, Colorado wearing a blue shirt in the upstairs of a restaurant talking to a beautiful woman. That was a dozen years ago, but it might as well have been this morning.

It was January and unusually warm for Denver. I was there for a conference with Campus Crusade for Christ called Denver Christmas Conference (DCC as we called it). Over the semester break, a bunch of us had made the 14-hour road trip from mid-Missouri.

I was wearing a light blue shirt that had a picture of a buzzard on it—weird, right? It was my college flag football team jersey. We were The Scavengers, a name in “honor” of our team leader. And my shirt had the following written on it: “2002 All-Campus Champions.” I wore the shirt with pride. (It’s funny, I competed for 5 years in Division 1 college sports, yet the highlight of my athletic career occurred playing competitive intermural flag.)

And I was in the upstairs of a restaurant. Downstairs was the noise; upstairs was the quiet—the place to talk, to listen.

And a beautiful young woman was with me. Her name was Brooke. She held my hand and I held hers.

We were about to begin dating, or courting, or something. I’m not sure what we were calling it. But it wasn’t an ordinary relationship we were going to start, at least I prayed it wasn’t going to be ordinary.

I remember telling Brooke that I had never been in a godly dating relationship before, but that I was committed to figuring it out. Not much of a sales pitch, I know.

Then I read 2 Corinthians 1:12 to her.

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God’s grace. (2 Corinthians 1:12, NIV)

Paul said that his relationship with this church was characterized by holiness and sincerity, and not “worldly wisdom,” and all this by “God’s grace.”

I told Brooke that I wanted this for us: Holiness. And sincerity. And love. And by the grace of God.

I didn’t know what a relationship like that was like, not firsthand anyway, but I wanted to strive for it. And I wanted for Brooke to do that with me.

And she said yes.

I don’t know if she knew all that she was saying yes to, but she said it. We said it. And I am so glad. My bride and my sweetie and my friend, said yes.

That night in Denver, in January, in the upstairs of a restaurant, wearing a shirt with a buzzard on it, we prayed together. Then we went downstairs, and then back to the conference center where we went to a concert; Bebo Norman played his acoustic guitar and wore a red t-shirt and a stocking cap. Brooke sat on my left.

That was almost a dozen years ago.

This is what I mean when I say an avalanche of emotions and memories swept over me this morning as I read 2 Corinthians.

God has been exceedingly good to me in giving me Brooke—my wife and my best friend.

Thank you for saying yes, Sweetie.

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