Mar. 20, 2009
(If you haven’t already, see Part One.)
I want to really drive this idea home, so I’d like to read a story from — yep, you guessed it — Lauren Winner’s Real Sex.*
I recently attended a women’s retreat where one of the workshops was about singleness. The speaker, whom I’ll call Myrtle, encouraged the single women in the audience to think carefully about what type of guy they’re looking for. “You want a Prince Charming,” Myrtle said, “and Prince Charmings are attracted to modest women. You might attract certain men by sporting skimpy skirts, but you won’t attract the kind of man you really want to be with.”
It’s encouraging to think that mature Christians are more interested in character than cleavage; yet there is something unsettling about this assurance that chastity will be the erotic mystery that will lead Mr. Right (or Miss Right) to our door. Prince Charming can begin to rival God as the object of our attentions. Myrtle ended her talk on this note: “What we single women have to do is no more and no less than faithfully pray that our perfect guy is out there. We don’t need to hunt him down, we just need to wait for the Lord to deliver him to us. [Is he a pizza?] We don’t need to worry about him. Instead we need to focus on ourselves, becoming the pure, modest woman that our Prince Charming will be on the lookout for. We need to devote ourselves to prayer, humility, and grace. We need to continue becoming godly women, so that when the time is right, we will have those godly characteristics that the godly man we dream about will love.”
[And that sounds right doesn’t it? I mean, that does sound like what we ought to be doing: focusing on prayer, humility, and grace. But this is the point:] I’m not disputing the desirability of the chaste woman or man. It may well be that one of the benefits of practicing chastity is that you attract friends and admirers that admire chastity. But attracting others is not the goal of chastity. Indeed, if Myrtle is focused on catching the eye of the guy who likes chaste women, she may not be inhabiting chastity at all.
Myrtle seems to be working toward becoming, principally, the kind of woman Prince Charming wants, which incidentally may be the kind of woman God wants. Her priorities, I would suggest, need to flip-flop. We are to become the persons of God, and this may bear the incidental fruit of attracting a great partner. The point of chastity is not that you turn your attention away from other people to make you more attractive to them, but that you turn your attention away from sexual and romantic entanglements with other people, and orient yourself toward God. (129-131, bracketed parentheticals mine)
What does it mean to orient our lives toward God?
Right. It means we align ourselves with God’s ways. Why would we do that?
[Silence.]
It’s a tough question, I know, but an important one. Why does it matter? Why should we bother? Let me help you put words to what I suspect some of you know in that deep, unspeakable way. God’s way is the way it’s supposed to be. We talked last week about the physical reality of sex being evidence that God’s creational intention for sex is good and right and true; how sexually transmitted diseases evidence the fact that when we misdirect our sex-lives, something isn’t right. Look around you. Look around you and you’ll see things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. There’s so much hurting in the world. There’s so much hurting sexually; things are no longer true — or straight — they’re bent. Jesus came and he began the process of righting all the wrong and healing all the hurt. Those of us who believe are called to continue the work Christ began until he returns, when everything will be made right at long last! We do this by orienting our lives toward God.
Here’s where I get back to why it’s important to have standards concerning who you will and will not date. Because purity, sexual purity, is bigger than sets of dos and don’ts, rights and wrongs, standards and judgments; it’s about shaping our lives to the themes of the Gospel, themes such as love, mercy, justice, healing, forgiveness; themes such as defending the oppressed and supporting the weak; themes that express God’s way. Learning how to do this is a life-long process. Jesus promises in Matthew 6 that if we will orient our lives toward God’s Kingdom, everything else will work out. In light of this promise, let me challenge you to commit the rest of your lives invested in communities dedicated to learning what it means to pray and live out, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Marry the man who has oriented his life toward God and journey toward the Kingdom together… for as long as you both shall live.
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* Winner, Lauren. Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005.
This blog post originally appeared at http://reneamac.com/2009/03/20/expectations-in-dating-part-two/