Years ago I was participating in a discussion forum in which a certain passle of Christians blathered on and on ... and on and on ... about how courtship and marriage happened or were SUPPOSED to happen. Of all the things I have experienced in my life the level of sanctimony I saw was infuriating. People rambled on about how things ought to be and how things were whether or not that had anything to do with reality. There would be an occasional smug testimony about how things aren't that complicated and that people should just chill. Often this turned out to be the pat advice given by a couple where the father didn't even show up at the wedding because he was so offended by the conduct of his child prior to the wedding and the marriage was marriage #2 for one of the people walking the aisle as it stood. Yes, it's all so much simpler than people are making it out to be!
Another case involved a couple where, as the woman outlined things, she sent "signals" to the guy that she was interested and the eventually got to handwriting letters and eventually came the big old engagement and the woman, in her narrative, described her beloved in the terms "he caught me". My sister saw this and snorted (wonderfully) that this woman had not been a case of "he caught me" she practically threw herself at the man but persuaded herself that because she jumped through the right hoops in her mind she had been the one who was pursued and not the pursuer.
I don't quite understand why these sorts of narratives get shared. My instinct is to suspect that this sort of narrative means there is something to hide. It is not without cause that Agur said that one of the things too mysterious for him to understand was the way of a man with a maid but in the evangelical circle I hung out with that was apparently not mysterious, not the way most people talked, whether married or single. To be sure some of the most laughable generalizations I have read have tended to come from some unmarried people but laughable generalizations do not just come in the unmarried variety.
I got more insight into the actual relational challenges of actual married life from Wendy's one post over at Practical Theology for Women then in all the preening and spouting done by married guys on a discussion forum over a four year period. Seeing that one simple reflection on an actual piece of scripture just makes me more furious to look back on those earlier years to see how much that was passed off as "biblical" was just the agenda of a couple of self-impressed men who wanted to be able to say they had it worked out and that THEIR marriages and families were not going to be lack all those OTHER people. It was nonsense at best and self-delusion at worst.
One fellow I know after blogging endlessly about his hatred of the weakness of others justified his blogging on the grounds that though he had gotten himself into the place where he has to manage diabetes in his thirties he was taking responsibility for his actions. Never mind that his failure to be responsible earlier was how he got diabetes to begin with, in his mind he was doing the responsible thing now and felt justified in looking down on others who, in his conviction, were sickening him with their weakness. He bought his own hype, his own bullshit. His diabetes is something he is managing now, I hope, but the fact that he saw no inherent tension between looking down on others as weak and undisciplined while having gotten himself diabetes in his thirties was something he just couldn't see. If he saw it then it would destroy the narrative he has for himself about being the stalwart one who soldiers on despite opposition from the world and sticks to his principles come hell or high water. It's not really true but he believes it, just like other people believe they are victims of abuse when they are abusers and other people believe they are failures because it is safer to not try than to try and risk even small failures.
I am not without sympathy regarding the temptation to believe your own hype. I have gone through life thinking that if I dot all my I's and cross all my T's in theology that I will avoid the madness and hyper-emotionalism I have seen in some of my family, the patently irrational impulses that lead to destruction of various kinds, emotional, physical, or financial. There is a sense in which I realize I was raised to have the kinds of fears I was eventually told I shouldn't have so much of.
If the end times are upon us and Jesus could come back any time there is no point in building a family or getting married or even establishing a career, is there? If there can only be understanding through "rhema" revelation then only the peple who already have it can pass it on, or else you can't really have it unless someone else SAYS you have it. There were times when I was told that God had big plans for me (doesn't that apply to everyone?) and that I was called to ministry before I was born. Well, depends on how one defines ministry.
These kinds of narratives can come off as dubious because other people get these memos and I don't. If you get told you're called for ministry before you were born and find that in your twenties seminary is just not practical and you don't feel called to be a pastor then what point is there in going into ministry? If you have been told that you are going to have a big ministry but you struggle to find a job to keep a roof over your head and can't find a church you feel connected to then that whole ministry thing looks like a pipe dream. In the end it begins to feel like some kind of long-term emotional manipulation better left unsaid. Let God decide what the future of His children will be.
Personally the only thing I can attest so far about these sorts of raised expectations is that they just seem more impossible and improbable over time. They stop seeming like a divine calling they are presented as and look more like the expectation other people have of you as to what kind of person and Christian you should be. It becomes suffocating, profoundly suffocating. If you don't measure up to these lofty prophesies and predictions you feel more miserable than you already felt, more like a failure than you already felt yourself to be. What was no doubt meant to be the most profound sort of blessing ends up feeling like a curse.
This is why understanding ourselves to be part of a story that Christ is telling through the scriptures can be liberating. It means that the accepted narratives I see held up for admiration by others are not finally the narrative that matters. Specious self-congratulating narratives by smug couples who don't want to admit that things are tougher and not simpler than they want them made out to be for the sake of public show don't matter. The narratives asserting that you will be this or that person because people hope for that for you don't matter. Attempts to vicariously discover yourself in the lives and achievements of others don't matter. Christ matters.
And yet even many Christians will say this but with their lives reveal a different story. A pastor who talks about how it is all about Jesus can make it seem, in his practical day-to-day life as though it is all about him, his wife, his job, his kids, his blog, his church, his "friends". A man can proclaim Christ but, as David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, finally be proclaiming himself. On that day the Lord will say "I never knew you". There is such a thing as a false assurance. Not everyone who gets a direct admonition from the Lord survives in the end. Judas didn't. King Saul was addressed by the Lord through a prophet several times and he didn't make it. Numerous Samarian kings were annihilated by God after getting divine warnings and not heeding them. Yet American Christians can seem more eager to trust in the calling of a pastor if there is some part of a divine narrative built into it. This does not make tha tpastor LESS called but it by itself proves nothing.
It sticks with me that one of the ways we tell ourselves the stories we want to tell ourselves and others is we want to exonerate ourselves. We prefer to be the victim in a tragic or heroic struggle. We prefer to be the ones who are not morally compromised, not abusive of the trust given us, not neglectful of the gifts given us. Well, I do not feel I have that luxury in the end. The gifts that I do have I do not believe I have put to very good use at all or to very positive effect in the lives of others. I am not someone, I think, whom people should look to and say "I want to be like THAT person."
I can't say that I have a particularly heroic or tragic narrative at this stage in my life. I'm simply confused and struggling and that in itself makes me neither honest nor praiseworthy. I am afraid to decide what sort of story I have because I don't know. Men who decide the stories of their lives can be men who wreak havoc on the lives of others and themselves when those narratives don't come to pass. As the scriptures say, men make their plans but the Lord directs their steps.
I have met too many people who have smugly decided that they have planned their steps and the fact that things are going their way means the Lord is in it and blessing it. The narratives I have been suggested to get through my life all look cheap, worn-out, and untrustworthy. Jesus, however, does not seem cheap to me, even though I would be the first person to say I would not want anyone to consider me an exmplary Christian. I often feel like a failure because I beleive I am a failure. I have heard people say with their mouths "Jesus is what matters" and live with their lives statements that say, "My career matters" or "My being married matters" or "My being an individual matters" or "My integrity and honor matters".
I have met people who say that grace can't be explained and has to simply be experienced, as though that excused them from attempting to explain what the mercy of the Lord is, as though Jesus' parables didn't illustrate what that graciousness looks like, as if Jesus' life somehow didn't display that for us. The narrative shared becomes an excuse to not reveal the good news of Christ beyond waiting for other people to somehow "get it". If grace cannot be explained but only experienced why do we have biblical books? Why did people come to know Christ through the reading of the scriptures? If grace cannot be explained but only experienced there wouldn't be four gospels instead of none, would there? If grace cannot be merely explained but must ALSO be experienced then who will demonstrate that graciousness of the Lord to others? As Paul put it so eloquently and urgently, how will they come to faith if they have not heard and how will they hear if no one is sent to speak to them? Who will tell them the story of Christ? Perhaps we are having more fun telling stories that exonerate us than stories that reveal our need for the Lord. It is something I am struggling with.
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