I had the fortune of embracing the Facebook phenomenon in its youth, as I was actually in college when the social networking site was reserved strictly for twenty-something students. While scrolling through the page of a classmate, I laughed out loud when I noted the name of one of the Groups she belonged to: “I Like to Give Advice for Relationships (Even Though I’m Single).” I joined immediately.
Never had there been a more true statement said of me. The only “relationship” I had ever been in at that point was a high school summer romance (truly, it began the day school got out and we broke up a few days before returning in the fall) to a guy who, within a few months, went after my friend, and two years later, came out to his family. (There should be some sort of club for innocent Christian girls with gay ex-boyfriends...). After that brief stint, I became pretty stubborn about maintaining high standards for guys I would date, and equally intent on making sure my other female friends did too. I developed a stack of relationship theories, most of which, by default, went un-tested. These theories emerged through a combination of movies, college lectures, and keen observance (and judgment) of the failed, flawed, but also successful relationships of my own family and friends. Without the necessary doses of reality and humility (those would come later), I would come to jealously guard and stubbornly uphold my theories for years to come.
Today, most of those theories have since been scrapped. Thanks, in large part, to a three-month Biblical worldview course I took a few years ago. Since that summer, I decided that instead of just soaking in films and professors perspectives, I should start seeing what the Bible actually had to say about love, sex and relationships. Quite a lot, it seems. And this was problematic for a twenty-something punk of a girl who thought she knew all there was to know about these sorts of things. Fortunately, I’ve been able to sift a lot of the junk from my theorires while I'm still single. But I could have saved myself a whole heap of time if I had just gone straight to ancient Hebrew literature in the first place.
During the next few posts, I'll share the top three things the world has to say on the subject of sex, singleness and standards that don’t (in my opinion) match up with Scripture…
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