Is the church really handling singleness the right way?

The Need
An increasing number of believers today are well into their twenties and thirties and are still unmarried. Who knows why they aren't married? That's not the point. The point is that the number of single people isn't going down, and single people are not becoming magically more happy.

Our solution? Publishers churn through reams of paper, printing book after book on the topic. Some, like Getting Serious about Getting Married, spell out specified steps to marriage. By far the greatest number are books such as When God Writes Your Love Story: they recommend contended singleness and waiting on God. The fact that there are so many books indicates only how unhealthy believers' attitude towards singleness is. Peter Kreeft points out that '"[i]t is in when everybody's pipes are leaking that people buy books on plumbing," implying that we don't print books about a subject unless we have a problem in that area.

By no means do I have a solution to this problem. I don't do very well with solutions. I do have an idea what part of that problem might be. I think we Christians are lying to each other - we are lying to ourselves - about how very important marriage is, and about why singleness is important. I want to take on the first half of that lie (how important marriage is) in today's post.

The Problem
I have always appreciated science fiction writer Orson Scott Card for how well he blends intricate narrative with deep, thought-provoking themes. In Shadow Puppets, set 5-10 years after the events of Ender's Game, he takes on the importance of marriage.

Card's argument is based on a common, truthful observation about the human psyche: We are hardwired to want some meaning in our lives. He writes:

"Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off" (95).

Card makes a point that we believers cannot afford to overlook: the connection to other human beings, especially the person-to-person oneness between a husband and wife intended to come with marriage fills the human need for meaning in a way that little else in this life can.

Right now half of you are objecting, "What about Jesus? He is the real meaning of life!" Bear with me; I'll get there. The other half of you are objecting: "That's not the only meaning of life" (95). "Couldn't Card come up with anything better?" you ask. "Anything more creative? For the answer to life, the universe and everything?" Card himself calls this theory a cliche. But he immediately adds that "shallow as it had to be, it is still the truest thing I have ever found": this "deepest desire of all, the desire to be an inextricable part of the human race."

The Solution
To Card, becoming "an inextricable part of the human race" has by far the most permanent significance in life.

Actions that seem memorable turn out not to be, often within a lifetime. Anton (the character speaking in the passage above) is a great scientist. Yet though he expected his scientific name to give him "immortality of a kind," he realizes that he was in fact "swept away until [he] existed only in footnotes in other men's articles". Two years after I wrote my graduate thesis, I have a hard time articulating the point as clearly as I'd like. How many students today really know what, say, Copernicus was famous for?

Bean and Petra saved the world from the hostile alien species (yes, I told you I was writing about a science fiction book) and even the significance of this great act fades away. Anton tells them, "You can change the world . . .  [b]ut time has taken it away. It's in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?" We Christians get a God-fearing candidate into office, we think we've changed the world, and then the election is over, and yet we are still alive, so what is our life for?

A family, for Card, guarantees that good, noble actions will have an enduring significance. In a family, it's not just genetic material that is passed down from "generation to generation"; Card specifies that parents may "find [children] some other way" (95) - adoption. Adopted kids pass zero of their adopted parents' genetic material on to their own children. "Generation to generation" they pass down instead a treasured heritage of love and welcome, of emotional and (hopefully) spiritual stability. Parents' actions live on long after they are dead. Surely this continued web of love and acceptance is significant.

However, Card is not really saying that all meaning in life can be found in a Build-Your-Own-Leave-It-To-Beaver-Kit. Making yourself "an inextricable part of the human race" blossoms from:

a deep hunger to find a person from that strange, terrifyingly other sex and make a life together. Even old people beyond mating, even people who know they can't have children, there's still a hunger for this. For actual marriage, two unlike creatures becoming, as best they can, one.  

To "become, as best you can, one" with someone else fills the human hunger for significance. In the Scripture, the very first thing that God records as "not good" was "that man should be alone". The absence of the article before the word "man" suggests that the meaning is humankind: Neither woman nor man should be alone. We are designed for partnership with someone besides our own inner being.

This is what the church misses out on, then: that two of the largest doors to significance are closed to single Christians. For us it is impossible to become one with someone else, to have children and pass the love of God onto them and onto their children "generation after generation."

Having a friendship, or working in the nursery in church, is not the same thing at all. I love my job teaching students, and I hope and pray that they take the lessons I teach on through life with them, but this is not where I find real meaning in life. To really make ourselves "an inextricable part of the human race," we need a family, or at least a husband or a wife, of our own.

I'm sure some of you are wondering what happened to Jesus being the meaning of life, as I mentioned earlier. I agree with you. I really do. Card makes some important points - really important points, that we need to pay attention to - but I don't think he has the whole picture. As Christians, Christ for us supersedes some of our ordinary human considerations, including the marriage state.

Otherwise, all singles would be in a bottomless Pit of Despair, and I at least am not there yet. I'll post more in a week or so.

P.S. Bear with the photos, please. It's about 5 degrees outside. I am unmotivated to take pictures in this weather, but hopefully I will have new ones soon. This cat picture is not mine.

Delightful as Christmas Break was, I am now back at school and back at work. Already I've lesson planned until 9:30 P.M. and re-started Stargate Atlantis as a way to decompress from all that lesson planning. Eventually I will tell you more about my classes: English Composition, and ever the favourites, Introduction to Literature and Christian Classics.

Right now, however, all Iowa is amazed by our first touch of winter in months. All November and all December, the grass remained stubbornly green (or brown, especially towards the end). Now, everything is white. In the last 72 hours, the temperature dropped from 55 degrees to 15 degrees and we were treated to more than 7 inches of snow.

All the Iowans have broken back out their winter spirit and their boots. Me, I don't come from a particularly wintery state. I don't come from a snowy state. My most vivid memory of winter driving is falling asleep in the back of a rental car at 11:00 PM, winding through the Colorado mountains at 30 m.p.h. in the snow. Every half hour or so, my family pulled over and waited while a caravan of twenty Colorado drivers zipped past us confidently.

So, I've taken a crash course in Winter 101 lately. Here is what I've learned:

My road is not significant enough to merit much plowing. 
All we get is a packing-down as cars drive on the road. The minimum plowing, and then the packing down, leaves the road in a condition reminiscent of the ice roads in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Here is a picture of the Ice Road (from the History Channel), used by truckers who ship supplies into the remote villages:

Here is a picture of my road, which I took this morning. Compared to the Ice Road, my road (unfortunately) has no mountains or pine trees. Notice, however, the huge piles of snow and the perpetual layer of ice across the road. Any time I pull in or out of my driveway, the snow crunches reluctantly. I swear, the snow is waiting to freeze and trap me.

Do not park on the street. The snow does, in fact, trap some cars. The night of the storm, I lay in bed for thirty minutes listening to one driver's attempt to escape the trap. The engine revved, then dropped back, then revved again. Then, everything was quiet for sixty seconds or so - and then the engine revved again, dropped back again, revved again, dropped back again.

This is why I park in a garage. 

Slow WAY down for turns. A winter driver I am not (at least not yet). After some icing in October, I have taken to toodling along on the frozen roads at about 30 m.p.h. This is too fast for a turn. In fact, half of that speed is still too fast for a turn on frozen roads.

Right in the middle of the storm, I took a left turn through a larger intersection, tapped on the brakes, and went skidding away towards the right. For a moment, I was afraid my car was about to slam into all the waiting cars on the other side of the road. We straightened out, though, and I continued safely - and slowly! - on my way.

Left turns on frozen roads should be taken at 5 m.p.h.

People, if faced with a snowstorm, like to state the obvious: that there is in fact a snowstorm happening right now. If I turned on the car radio, someone told me it was snowing. Yes, thank you, I can see that outside my car window. Then, I drove onto the highway and found a warning sign that told me roads were icy. Mmm, thanks! I can see that too. I pulled up Weather.com and was told that it was snowing. Gee, thanks! I just stepped out of my snowy boots. I want to know when it will stop.

It's as though we humans feel like we can control things, or are in charge of them, or are at least particularly observant, simply by stating the obvious.

A snowstorm is a great time to shop at Wal-Mart. Usually, I hate shopping. I especially hate shopping at Wal-Mart, where I have to forever duck around customers who stop in the middle of the aisle to wonder whether they should purchase the red Cars II toothbrush or the blue Transformers one. This is not what Wal-Mart shopping is like in a snowstorm.

I had teaching supplies to pick up, so I braved the icy roads and hills to stop there after were. Perhaps twenty cars were in the parking lot, and huge plows with blinding headlights. Inside the store, nobody was in the electronics section or the clothes section; the only customers were walking about in heavy parkas with car scrapers and snow shovels in their hands. I grabbed eight sheets of posterboard, some oatmeal and toothpaste, and booked it out of the store.

Now I'm wondering whether I should check the weather, and wait on the next snow to go pick up the rest of my groceries.

The Boy Scouts' motto is Be Prepared. Right now, the storm has ended and it's a sunny 20 degrees outside today. But I am now prepared (hopefully) for Winter 102.

Apparently, the post about The Power and the Glory last time was quite successful: I heard through the Grapevine that a number of you enjoyed it, and I know I inspired at least two or three people to actually read the book. My devious mission (to get people to read - wait for it! - literature) is a success!

Problem is, a successful post is hard to top. I feel like I have to write an even better, more thought-provoking one right now - something that will wow your socks off, compared to the last 50 or so posts that I've ever written on this blog.

Even worse, this is the worst time of year to write thought-provoking stuff. I've spent an hour and a half each day for the last four days with my nose buried in student papers. If my nose isn't buried in papers, it's reflecting the glow from the computer screen as I pound away on my Introduction to Literature syllabus for next semester. At the end of the day, I summon the energy to snuggle down on my couch under the Christmas lights and watch an episode of Monk, which is fun but not that thought-provoking, or Stargate: Atlantis. 


So, no: Between student papers and next semester, I have no thought-provoking comments for this blog. Probably I will post a Christmas poem in another few days, and get all literary again, but until then, I thought I'd leave you with a few crazy stories from the craziness of college semesters. This is my semester, in four stories.


Chocolate
I occasionally bring chocolate to my class. I have unleashed a beast here at my new school. Early on in the semester, I told my students that a boy gave me a kiss when I was in college - the chocolate kind, since I was at a restrictive religious university. I took the kiss back to my dorm room and announced to my R.A.: "A boy gave me a kiss today!" Her mouth opened, and she stared at me . . . until I produced the melting silver-wrapped treat on the palm of my hand.

My students have started doing this now, to each other. Alternately (depending on who is in on the joke), they horrify each other and make each other laugh by offering kisses in the middle of movies and other activities.

Random kisses are not the only danger of chocolate. Chocolate is also dangerous as a projectile. I was never strong in sports, and so when I throw a piece of chocolate towards a student who has just correctly identified a pronoun, my aim is never very accurate. The chocolate periodically ends up on the floor. Fortunately, it is always wrapped.

One day, I tossed the chocolate towards the student, it sailed up, and . . . it never came down. The students and I stared blank-faced at each other for a moment, then looked up. The chocolate had been stuck in one of the light fixtures. The brown-and-gold Dove chocolate wrapper stared down at us from the milky fluorescent light fixture, ten feet up.

After the students had finished laughing at me, I headed off to the Front Desk and asked them to tell Maintenance to take the chocolate out of the light. Notably, I did not tell them how the chocolate got into the light.

Oops
I have been drilling my students on grammar all semester long: what a pronoun is, what a noun is, how to change a passive sentence into an active sentence, and more. Subjects and direct objects turned out to be the hardest, so I made up example sentence after example sentence after example sentence for my students to do.

Coming up with the examples is always the hardest part. I've taken to writing facetious advice for men and women going on dates (advice such as dying your hair zebra-print), just to avoid the inevitable brain block when I think, "What shall I write this example on?"

Before I started giving advice, I went through a stage when all the examples were literary-themed: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Ender's Game and even Dante. At Dante, my class ran into trouble.

I'd written the examples about Dante's trip through the underworld, and I'd included quite a few (maybe four out of ten?) about his conversations with the damned souls in Hell. I used 'damned' as a technical, short and artistic term, like this: "Dante gives the damned news of their children." In that sentence, "Dante" is the subject, and "damned" is the direct object (people in Hell).

At this question, one of my students - smart and, apparently, brave - pokes up her hand and asks, "Why is the news damned?"

I'm not sure how much the students learned about direct objects, but they did learn a new vocabulary word, and that the teacher was not cussing in class.

Ninjas
Periodically, I announce a random holiday to my students. I believe I posted about Talk Like a Pirate Day in mid-September. In October, I celebrated the Mad Hatter's Day with a huge, floppy felt hat. In early December, I made all my students sing Happy Birthday to Milton. They complained, until I fed them more chocolate in celebration of his birthday.

In early December, the students had a chance to celebrate something: December 5, Ninja Day. I told them if  they dressed like a Ninja and sent me a photo, they'd get extra credit (5 points, only as much as a quiz). About ten of them took me up on it, and for the next week, my inbox was flooded with ninja photos.

The best were two guys from my Composition class (I'll call them Steve and Josh) that worked together. In a fit of procrastination that Saturday night, they dressed up all in black and spent ninety minutes lurking around the school grounds and taking photos. First, they sneaked up to my office to see if I was in there. I was not, but our two music teachers were. They stepped out of their office into the hallway and watched in astonishment as Steve and Josh crouched by my office door, flexed their fingers into pistol shapes and posed for a totally geeky photo. Presumably, one of the music teachers took the photo, because both Steve and Josh are in it.

Later they sneaked out to the school grounds and surprised as many students as possible.


Commas
As an English teacher, I've noticed how often people talk about Englishy subjects around me, like they assume that I couldn't be interested in other things (they're wrong, but my ears do perk up when I hear someone talking about poetry or grammar). I was accosted at lunch one day and asked whether 'sneaked' or 'snuck' was the appropriate word (It's 'sneaked').

A few days back, I received a random phone call at work about grammar. A guy's voice on the other line identified himself, told me that he used to attend my school and that the English teacher there would look over his writing. Since she had left, he had a question for me:

He wanted to know whether all quotes began with a comma, between the introductory tag and the quote, or whether the comma could be omitted. I informed him that the comma is occasionally omitted, if the quote and the part before the quote make a sentence together, such as this: Bill said that "The sky is blue." It's all one sentence, so there's no need for a comma.

He then thanked me, and hung up. If the question hadn't been so random, I would think he was a stalker. Instead, I've decided to start a business: 1-800-GRA-MMAR.

That's all, folks!

I once heard someone describe broccoli as her new favourite vegetable: a food they'd once rejected but now enjoyed. My new favourite novel is The Power and the Glory. 

The Novel:

Eight months ago, I hadn't even heard of The Power and the Glory. For me, the book first cropped up on the Prague school shelves, when I was poking through our collection for extra copies of The Lord of the Flies. It stayed on the shelves for another few weeks, until I discovered that Augustine's theological tomes made horrible bedtime reading and absconded with the novel. Every night I curled up in my bed at Bubenečská flat with Graham Greene's tale, set in 1930s Mexico, of a Catholic priest on the run from a hostile government. As the priest tries to keep up the semblance of his religious duties, he struggles to overcome his fear of death and his deep sense of sin and damnation - a story which proves, in the end, emotionally and spiritually moving.

So moving is this novel that I will be teaching it next semester (Spring 2012) in my Literature course. In evangelical (and fundamentalist) Christian circles there exists an tendency to shun anything related to Catholicism as doctrinally contaminated and therefore irrelevant. Ironically, I have found the opposite to be true, especially in this novel: the Catholic priest's spiritual journey has great relevance for problems that plague the church, for problems that plague me. 


The Theme:

Last night I discovered the following passage about halfway through The Power and the Glory. The priest arrived at a town of relative safety, stops to listen to the confessions of the devout. In the sins confessed, the priest discovers a difference between those which are not truly sins and those which are truly damning. An elderly woman confesses the first type (not-truly-sins) to the priest, and he responds:

      "Why don't you confess properly to me? I'm not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night . . . remember your real sins."
      "But I'm a good woman, father," she squeaked at him with astonishment.
      "Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?" He said: "Have you any love for anyone but yourself?"
      "I love God, father," she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor--the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl--another of the pious--like himself.
      "How do you know? Loving God isn't any different from loving a man--or a child. It's wanting to be with Him, to be near Him."

At the heart of this passage is the woman's shocked response to the priest: "I am a good woman, father." A good person, to her, is clearly someone who follows religiously the laws of Mother Church: fish on Fridays, clear-headed prayers before bed. It is this, and nothing more, that makes her "a good woman" and indeed makes her so astonished that anybody could question this. How could people not notice how carefully she followed every rule?

Her self-defense echoes (I believe deliberately on author Greene's part, since he was no idiot) a better-known self-defense from Luke's gospel. Recounting Jesus's parable, Luke tells of a Pharisee who "stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men--extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess." Like the woman, the Pharisee names as evidence of his goodness public examples of his rule-abiding: his justice indicates that he follows the Jewish legal code; his regular measured fasting and tithes (weighed out, we imagine, ounce by ounce so that he does not pay too much), that he follows the religious code. Surely this is a religious man.

And yet there is something missing. It is the Catholic priest that puts his finger on the problem: this woman has no "love for anyone" besides herself.

At last the Catholic priest has brought us back to the root of the matter. Just as the woman freaked out about her "sin" when she ran out of fish or fell asleep at her prayers, so we freak out, with very little reason, if we miss one Sunday at church, if we wear jeans to church, if we miss a month or two of tithing, or a morning or two of our devotions. Like the woman, I have confessed missing devotions as though this were my biggest sin.

All these petty concerns, the priest reminds us, ought to be swept away so we can focus on the sin which is truly damning: a lack of love. It is not just the priest that believes this; it is St Paul himself. In Galatians he tells us that the Law "avails us nothing"; what is valuable is "faith working through love" (5:6).

Are we loving other people? Are we loving God? Am I?

Or are we only, as the priest says, "another of the pious"?

Years ago, probably while I was still at the University-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, I heard a sermon on Psalm 73 that stuck with me.

I have no idea who it was that spoke on the Psalm, nor do I remember what he even said about the Psalm. Right, you say. Sounds like that sermon really stuck with you. Must have been doodling in church. What stuck with me, though, was this: this Psalm is crucial to living "as strangers and pilgrims on the earth" - in other words, to knowing what in this life is worthwhile and what is not.

What is Not Worthwhile

Psalm 73 opens with an extended descriptions of what comfortable lives unbelievers live:

They are not in trouble as other men.
Nor are they plagued like other men.
Therefore pride serves as their necklace;
Violence covers them like a garment.
They have more than heart could wish.

I want to leave behind the question of violence and pride (the connection between a good hand in life and religion is one for another blog post) and focus on what I think the most basic principle in this passage is.  According to this Psalm, there will always be unbelievers who live happy, comfortable lives, who have "more than heart could wish" - money, a satisfying job, a partner and children, a good home, the "American dream". It is this fulfillment that most of us, in some way, want.

Psalm 73 follows this up, several passages down, with a conclusion about these unbelievers. The Psalmist tells God,

Surely You set them [the wealthy unbelievers] in slippery places;
You cast them down to destruction.
Oh, how they are brought to desolation, as in a moment!
They are utterly consumed with terrors.

I always assumed this passage described a sudden, definitive event: the wealthy person wakes up one fine morning, wealthy as ever, then "in one hour such great riches came to nothing."

I think there's more to this passage than a sudden overturn, though. Just a few verses previously, the Psalmist has assured us that these unbelievers "are not in trouble as other men" - in other words, no outward sign warns against pending doom. Nothing is there to suggest that these people are about to be "brought to desolation," yet they have already been set "in slippery places". I suggest, therefore, that the very prosperity they currently enjoy is their destruction. Their downfall does not just end a period of prosperity. Their very prosperity is a catalyst for this downfall.

An Example

Consider, as an example, the rising rates of extended singleness in the Western world. A day or two ago, I read an article in Atlantic magazine called "All the Single Ladies." (Incidentally, my students introduced me to this one. I printed it out and saved it for future generations of students.) Though Kate Bolick supports singleness as a healthy, viable lifestyle, she also acknowledges that not marrying was not the plan for most singles. She writes, "That we [herself and her college friends] would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith." Turns out, that was one huge and unjustified step of faith.

Later, she describes the moment of disillusionment, using the metaphor of a cocktail party: We're "finally ready to start our lives," she says, "only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up--and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with." Her plan for a "prosperous lifestyle" - husband, kids, career - didn't happen.

Okay, so being single is not the end of the world (I'm single, so I should know); I applaud Bolick's attempt to legitimize the single life as a healthy, adjusted one. My point is this: Bolick's plans, and the plans of so many more women like her, fell through when they suddenly realized that they'd missed out on marriage. Life was not going to give them what they wanted from it. All those well-arranged plans for family and career were, albeit on a very small scale, "suddenly brought to destruction."

I think the reason that Bolick gives for this mini-destruction is illuminating. Bolick, noting that her generation has much more power than her mother's to make their own decisions, reflects that she "could [not] have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation." What Bolick is saying is this: the independence from social norms that men and women gained in the second half of the twentieth century is (if you simplify history) the cause of extended singleness today. Give men the option of whether or not they want to marry, some of them will choose not to, and Voila! fewer married women. What is happening here is exactly what Psalm 73 predicts: some of the very things that make life more comfortable, such as greater independence, ultimately destroy us.

I don't think the Bible's solution is not to make life comfortable at all. Nowhere does the Bible ever outlaw wealth or require a vow of poverty, though I understand now why the monks took that vow. In fact, in some places (such as Ecclesiastes and some of the Parables), money comes out as a positive blessing. To use my example, much of the independence achieved in the last fifty years of Western society is not exactly bad and in fact is probably biblical (that would be another blog post). Comfort is not a bad thing. But the fact remains: That which is intended to bring us comfort in this world ultimately betrays us.

The Solution

Providentially, Psalm 73 answers this question of what to do with life comforts, given that these very comforts are a catalyst for destruction. The Psalmist concludes,

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Here, the Psalmist acknowledges the connection between the comforts of life and his own eventual downfall. That his "flesh and [his] heart fail" is only the most obvious example of this principle: The very fact that the heart is beating by time, that the flesh sloughs off dead skin cells and replenishes them day-by-day predict that the very things which keep us alive right now are going to be the things that kills us in 50 years or so (think of people who die of a heart attack: the organ that kept them alive for so long is the organ that gets them in the end). In just this way, the comforts normal to a physical life will eventually be exactly the thing that destroys our plans for life in a year, or two years, or ten.

Having acknowledged this problem, the Psalmist finally provides a solution: "God," he writes, "is the strength of [his] heart and [his] portion forever." Long after our "portion" of physical goods are gone, God will be there. Long after the heart stops beating, God will still be there.

Apply this to modern-day life: Long after our independence has wrecked our marriage potential, God will still be our companion. Long after our wealth has vanished in the recession, God will still be providing for us.

It is well and good to enjoy the physical things of this life: a friend, a marriage, a satisfying job, good food and money. It is equally important not to let these physical things define life, because then life will only be defined by the eventual, inevitable destruction.

I must learn to say with the Psalmist, "Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides you."

Or with C.S. Lewis:

The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out."

As of today, there is only one month left until the end of the semester. Every day that passes marks another step my students take towards getting their final project done. My Introduction to English class is stuck somewhere in between the "More Research!" stage and the "State your Thesis" stage. Right now, they're trying to figure out what they believe and why about a particular topic. For a significant percentage of that group, the topic they are addressing is online dating: Is it okay for a believer to "do" online dating or not?

I assigned the topic in a fit of inspiration after my English teacher mother visited last week. Although I know that online dating has a host of problems, I see nothing inherently wrong with it, provided that the user exercises caution. I reckoned that a group of students who can't remember not having a family computer in the home would weigh in in support of online dating, or at least acknowledge its potential. I reckoned wrong.

A Story

As I've talked to my students about their topic, student after student has told me that they are completely against online dating. Generously they acknowledge that, sure, online dating sites help daters meet more people, but in the next breath, they mention a concern that has plagued Christian evangelicals since Josh Harris published his first book. Christians, my students murmur, should not try to tip God's hand by poking around on online dating sites. They should wait on God, hope He'll bring them a spouse in the normal way in the normal amount of time.

Problem is, these students are all about 18 years old - just now old enough to even consider marriage. Most of them won't even want to get married for another couple years. Admirable as their opinions are, they are necessarily uninformed, thanks to the students' age. I am more than 8 years older than most of my students. My younger sister, as I expected all my life, married long before I did. I once heard "extended singleness" described as being single "one day past when your younger sister gets married," so I guess that makes me not only a single woman but also someone who is an extended single woman.

As long as I don't have to exchange all my short-leg jeans for long-leg ones, I'll be okay with being an extended single woman.

Okay, bad joke over. I don't want to convey disapproval of my students' opinion against online dating. I approve wholeheartedly that my students have an opinion, and I'm thrilled to see the stress they put on pleasing God in their relationships. All I really want to convey is the shock of realizing how a few years and a little experience changes you.

See, eight years ago I was in my students' shoes. I was up to my eyebrows in both the Josh Harris books, and I'd never had a boyfriend or really even a crush. I probably would have weighed in against online dating, just like my students do now.

Then, a girl I knew (she worked with me at AWANA) married someone she found on an online dating website. Another girl I knew at Bob Jones asked her future husband out for the first couple dates. I got my first real crush. A couple years later, I went out for coffee with a guy. Another close friend met a guy on an online dating website. A lot of what I held to so fervently as a college freshmen went out the window.

Don't panic. I've not become a '60s hippie who advocates free love. I don't really want to discuss how, specifically, I've changed my views in these areas (maybe in a later post). For right now, I'm just fascinated: Hearing my students express their concern about online dating shows me how much I've changed in the last eight years, and how much I'll probably change in the next eight.

An Interpretation

In the Bible, young people are pointed to the older ones for wisdom for a reason. All that life experience accumulated over 50 or 60 years counts for something. However, if you stack that experience against the 110 years of Joshua, the 800 years of Adam, or the 900+ years of Methuselah, and suddenly "the wisdom of old men" becomes foolishness. Stack it against the eternity of God, and even the great wisdom of Methuselah is nothing.

Listening to my students talk about their papers has taught me how much I've changed. It's taught me to appreciate the wisdom as one of the "gifts reserved for age", hard-won over many years.

Most of all, though, my students have taught me this: Every single one of our human beliefs is just as limited as my students' considered opinion against online dating, limited by our narrow human experience and narrow philosophy.

Perhaps this is why T.S. Eliot begs,

           Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless (East Coker).

It's not worth it to not have an opinion. Most of us will always have opinions, no matter how stupid they are.

Even as we voice and support these opinions, though, we should have humility enough to remember that we belong to God, that it is His wisdom that matters, and not ours.

My students taught me all that.

I think I'll call this post "I Can Do Pronouns." Or maybe "Teaching Moments." You'll see why in a few paragraphs.

As a student, I found that the closer I got to the end of the semester, the more everything reminded me of the papers I was writing. If I were writing a paper on Underworld, say, every movie I watched, every conversation I had, every sermon I listened to reminded me of that paper. I could even tell you exactly how the subject of our conversation tied back to my paper. In my thesis, the main reason I quoted Aquinas was because when my Literary Theory class read Summa Theologica in the middle of my thesis-writing, Aquinas reminded me of the thesis.

A few days ago, this characteristic of mine popped right back up, this time from a teacher's perspective.

Intro to English class has been all about pronouns. Turns out, pronouns are one of the most confusing parts of speech to learn. Poor students. Asked to define these words, they suggest that a pronoun is 'a proper noun' or that an antecedent is, in fact, a word like 'he', 'she', or 'it.'

No, I said. An antecedent is a noun. A pronoun replaces that noun - a word like 'he', 'she', or 'it. Keep this straight. They mixed up the words anyway.

So, because this is my teaching philosophy, I took responsibility for my students' learning. They've never had English before, I told myself. Grammar is hard for the best of us to keep track of. So I reduced the terms to a simple form (sort of like finding the least common denominator, but for English) and in some cases I matched these definitions to songs. For pronouns, the song was called "I Can Do Pronouns" (yes, I know, creative name) and set to the tune of "Do Lord." That song gets stuck in my head. And after hours of helping students find pronouns and antecedents and correct pronoun errors, pronouns got stuck in my head too.

Pronouns, antecedents and "I Can Do Pronouns" were still stuck in my head when I went to Bible study; I hummed the song when I hopped in my car and drove off. I stopped humming (fortunately) when I picked up a couple students, whom I'll call Joy and Anne. Anne was enrolled in my Intro to English class and learning about pronouns and antecedents right along with me.

I didn't give pronouns or antecedents much thought during Bible study, or even on the way back from Bible study. I was deep in conversation with Joy, deep enough to pay little attention to whether my language met the guidelines laid out in The Little Seagull Handbook. And then I gaffed: I said "this people" - as in, many people (not a people group) but a singular pronoun (this). For you non-grammar folks, that error is like saying "this mountains" or "this books" or "this jokes". It's an error in pronoun number agreement, and it's wrong. Unless you're still learning English, you can hear it's wrong.

Immediately I thought of Anne, who was still learning about agreement in number among pronouns. Like the other students, she was also still confused. So I pointed out my error to her, named it as an error with agreement in number, and corrected it for her. I treated the three of us to a mini-lecture in pronouns, in the space between stoplights at 9:00 PM on a Wednesday night.

Oh, dear. I am becoming a teacher (Joy actually told me this, by the way, minutes after I'd lectured her about agreement in number for pronouns). Before you know it, I'll be telling everyone why Milton is relevant to 21st century Christianity.

Wait. I do that already.