Berkeley event tonight! (And other good ways to spend a Monday)

For those of you in the area, I wanted to make sure you know about tonight’s event in downtown Berkeley.

Aug. 4 Berkeley 7 p.m.
Part of the Christ Church Berkeley Summer Salon Series
Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way
BART stop: Downtown Berkeley

And if you live in SF or New York, fear not! More events are coming your way this fall. Check the book website for more details as the dates get closer.

As to other ways to spend your Monday ... I recently heard of a very cool group of folks who are fasting and praying each Monday “for God to bring husbands to women who want to be married (and wives to men), for God to work in us to change what needs to be changed, and for God to work in men, doing all he needs to do to enable them to be men who can love, serve and commit to a woman.”

In all my days of reading folks like Josh Harris and Elisabeth Elliot, I honestly can’t say I’ve heard of something this practical, obedient and exciting. (Readers of the book will know the role that fasting has played for me in the past when it comes to major decisions.) Not that by taking this extra step we can somehow manipulate God into giving us what we want, of course, but this really seems like a can’t-lose act of obedience and trust.

Email me for details if you’d like to join the group’s weekly email list.

Trusting God with our deepest desires

I was emailing a friend today, and thought what I said to her might be something all of you would appreciate.

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Just the other day I was thinking, for some reason, of this job I interviewed for in the San Francisco back in early 2005, when I was first trying to move out here from New York. It was somewhere near the financial district and I would have had my own office with a window (nicer than my present cube, to be sure), but it really wasn’t much of a job aside from that; I can’t even remember what the company really did, except that its chief significance was inviting me for the interview.

At the time, it was certainly discouraging not to get the position (mainly because it meant that I couldn’t move, which was the change I really wanted). But, I had been praying that whatever happened, I could rejoice in God’s sovereign providence, so after feeling sad for a bit (and probably crying), I went out and bought stuff to make sangria and a pineapple cake to celebrate what God had willed. (Somehow I needed to do something that physical and concrete to order my emotions! But it was surprising how quickly I actually did move on, once I had decided to try to embrace the outcome.)

It was a few more months before I completely gave up attempting to leave New York, but when I look back now, I can see that not getting either of the jobs I’d interviewed for meant not moving to California at a time when the guy I liked then and his circle would have been my main connection and when his church therefore would have been my starting place for spiritual community. It meant not moving at a time when I had no funds to cover a move, and not taking a job that wouldn’t have used my skills very well or been a great career move.

Instead, by seven months after that letdown, I had an agent and a book deal, I was beginning to learn to prayer walk for my neighborhood (which led to one of the most amazing seasons of prayer and intimacy in my relationship with God), and I got a interesting and challenging freelance gig as a curriculum developer that became the salaried part-time position which sustained me through the writing of the book. At the same time, I continued on an incredibly important journey of learning to live within my means that led to me paying off all my credit card debt last summer and enabled me to pay for things like last fall’s trip to India and the permission fees for all the songs I put in the book.

All these things in New York were so many, many times better than what I would have had in California, but God hadn’t forgotten my desire to move either. When He finally provided a way, it was at a time when two of my closest friends from college had finally committed to settling down in the Bay area and had a place where I could stay for the short time, when I had started to make female friends here, and when I had learned of a new church plant in Berkeley (the place where I had the most significant historical connection to the Bay area) that even had significant ties to my church in New York and was the new home church of my first Bible study leader from Redeemer. Moving at this time also meant that I got the money from the second half of my advance in time to pay the hefty cost of hauling all my stuff from Brooklyn (most if not all of which I would have had to leave behind in the 2005 move scenario), and that I wound getting the temp job that became one of the best and most fulfilling jobs I’ve ever had, as part as of a great department and one of the best employers I’ve probably ever had.

Even then, I of course still struggle to believe that God could prove equally so good in providing for my desire to be loved and cherished as a wife, but maybe that’s because I don’t often enough compare the plan and timeline I had in mind, with the timing and manner God chose for fulfilling the deep desire of my heart to move.

It’s strange and not a little scary to be 30 now — in the prime childbearing decade of my life — with not even a boyfriend prospect in sight, but if God could be mindful of things like where I wanted to live and my apparent need for a car (more on that later), is He not equally mindful of the husband and family I’ve wanted longer and more than probably anything else in my life? Somehow I have to trust that God is worth opening up to and entrusting with the very deepest desires of my heart, because no one else has gone so far or sacrificed as much to fix the biggest problem in the world — which problem is why loneliness, broken relationships and death are even a part of life to begin with.

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Afterward: Much as I wish I could write posts more like this on a consistent basis, I can’t promise this is the start of a new flow of fresh material, especially since I’m behind on work on what may be a second book. The funny thing about launching a somewhat cathartic blog is that, eventually (and I would hope four years is enough!), a few of the problems that were once central start to sort themselves out and recede in importance. That, coupled with the changes that having a full-time, “real” job and getting to know enough people in one’s new home to have a social life if not a boyfriend bring, largely accounts for the change in blogging here over the last two years, but especially the last several months.

Really, though, with the book out now, I feel like I’ve said most of what I wanted to about singleness. Moving forward, I’d rather — as one friend put it, kindly — be known as “hopeful in the city.” (Thanks, Charlie!) If you haven’t read it yet, it’s available at a price for every budget from Amazon (as you can see above), and I’m still sending pairs of signed bookplates to everyone who’s read it and wants to give a copy for a friend (email me with your name and your friend’s name and an address to send the bookplates to. If you have read it, don’t forget you can also help by writing a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads.

Immodesty in church?

Rhett Smith has a couple fascinating posts on his blog this week: Showing Skin at Church and Showing Skin Continued. Basically, these posts discuss the issue of dress in church and whether there should be a difference between our attire in sacred spaces and the rest of the contexts we interact in. Before you get up on any “here’s more sexism” high horse, read the posts to hear what he’s saying. Some interesting points from several people.Personally, one of the biggest things that comes to mind from reading these two posts is, once you get past the blame game and deciding who bears responsibility, how do you go about changing things?

It seems to me, part of the problem is more of a cultural/generational one. In the last couple decades, many churches seem to have adopted such a “seeker-friendly,” church-as-entertainment mindset that there’s almost no sense of reverence in our attitude and attire. How many of us who worship on a regular basis put as much time and attention toward our appearance at church as we do for a date, presentation or job interview?

I remember once talking with a relative who doesn’t normally go to church about how much we had both appreciated a visit to a more formal, traditional service. After all, we weren’t going to church because it was just like every other program or ritual available to us; we were going because it offered something unique. Just as you behave differently at a museum or a symphony, the sense of reverence that church service modeled seemed appropriate to the service.

I’m not trying to make a case for instituting a dress code or moving away from jeans-wearing … but if offices and some schools have no problem doing so, why should church be any more casual? Besides, if the challenge of dealing with immodesty is that it tends to wind up pitting one sex against the other, a move toward slightly more reverent attire asks change of all of us.

Coming back to my question of addressing the problem of overly sexy dress, then, I would make a few general recommendations.

For men troubled by revealing attire

1. Examine your own dress habits to see if there’s anything you can do to show more honor for God in your own dress.
2. Pray for the women of the church, that God would help them find their identity less in their bodies and sexuality, more in being God’s beloved daughters.
3. Look at your own interactions and relationships with women to see if you’re giving more attention to their sexuality (which can happen with praise, gaze and criticism/correction) than other aspects of their personality.

For women troubled by or dealing with revealing attire

1. Build rapport with and pray for women who seem to be dressing more provocatively before you even consider saying something about their dress. Correction and criticism are best received in the context of a loving relationship and, in fact, that very relationship may help meet the needs driving the tendency to wear revealing clothes.
2. Examine your own dress habits to see if there’s anything you can do to show more honor for God in your own dress. I know from experience how scary it can be to dress more modestly, when you don’t feel very attractive or able to get the male attention you long for without accentuating physical assets. But in my experience, whenever I’ve tried to trust God with this, He has always honored my obedience (see chapters 2 and 12 in Sexless for more on this).
3. If you feel that you really need to say something to another woman, do so very prayerfully and remember the admonition to correct with gentleness. If there’s ever a verse I haven’t heard preached on that needs to be, it’s probably Galatians 6:1. Remember that the goal should not be to shame another or protect your own “purity” from their impurity, but to help others grow toward becoming the people God created us to be. When correction affirmation is balanced with loving affirmation that makes clear your feedback is not an attack on the person, it has a chance of doing real good. Ultimately, though, only God can change people’s hearts and mend our broken sense of identity. In that, He probably needs our words of correction for others far less than we think, and our prayers for them far more.

A recommended read

I found myself writing a book review for the Barnes & Noble website* tonight (we’ll see if it gets posted) and thought I’d publish it here as well.

Redeeming Love, Francine Rivers
I have to admit, when I first got a used copy of this from my cousin, it did not jump to the top of my reading list. Oh no. In fact, it stayed on my dresser top, beneath a growing pile of books, for at least a year. Finally, however, one night when I had just finished reading a used copy of The Red Tent (a creative retelling of the life of Jacob’s daughter Dinah), and found myself swallowing disappointment at the flat second half of what started out as a very promising book, I gave our girl Francine a second thought. True, I had once devoured every Bodie Thoene book I could find; perhaps Christian romance wasn’t entirely the tepid discredit to writing I’d mostly thought it was.

Since nothing else in my dresser-top stack came close to the soul-feeding book I longed to read at that moment, I decided to take a chance on Redeeming Love. While the first couple pages didn’t exactly ring with the prose of an Updike — though he, too, struggle more with plot — it wasn’t long before I was unexpectedly hooked and turning the pages so fast I started to wonder if this book might make a speedreader of me (I did finish it in something like two days, a return to childhood late-night reading stints).

To my surprise, it wasn’t a book with the “fake” premise of a sinful woman redeemed that instead proves to paint “sin” in the palest, mauve shades imaginable; it delved with shocking candor into the sort of gritty, painful details too few authors seem to recall the Bible doesn’t blush at acknowledging. Rivers unflinchingly follows her characters’ story, not constraining it to the places church librarians might think it could safely go — and that’s where the transforming power of the book really lies.

Scenes like a later, pivotal one in a brothel play surprisingly well, though even that far into the book, I doubted there’d be a convincing, plausible resolution. Same with Rivers’ bold, but measured treatment of scenes in the couple’s marital bed. While she could never be accused of titillation, she doesn’t draw back from important issues raised and resolved in the couple’s greatest intimacies, powerfully mining the difference between physical sham and real unity. Full props to Francine on this one.

I have to say, too, on a personal note, that not only was Redeeming Love exactly the sort of story I was looking for that night — a book that fed my soul and left me feeling I’d live life better for having read it — it was a guide to me as an author. In the months later, as I tackled some major challenges in writing scenes for the book, I thought back to how Francine had handled sensitive scenes in her book. Definitely a worthy read, and a credit to the what’s possible when Christians make art with a view to honoring God.

*The links throughout are to Amazon right now, as I’m still waiting to get approval for B&N’s new affiliate program. Sigh.