Boy Meets Girl - Say Hello to Courtship (5 page)

"I had never heard anything like that before," Rich remembers. "Mike convinced me. It wasn't a case of him forcing me to break up with his daughter. As he shared his own understanding about relationships, I saw that he was right."

Three Words

Ending what he and Christy called the "us" part of their relationship wasn't easy, but they both knew it needed to happen. They went back to just being friends. They interacted at church but didn't act like a couple. They thought of each other as brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend.

The plan worked.. .for a while. Even though they both knew what was right, their hearts were deceitful. They
wanted
the feelings. They
wanted
the thrill of expressing how they felt. They
wanted
the security of knowing they belonged to each other. As a result they began to compromise their commitment to keep the relationship strictly a friendship. In a letter, Rich told Christy that he loved her. She did the same. They did nothing physically, but before they knew it, they were back in a full-throttle romantic relationship, this time behind her parent's back.

But after several months, conviction set in. Deceiving Christy's parents began to take its toll on them. "We have to tell your parents," Rich told Christy one day "We can't go on like this."

They never got the chance. A day later, Christy's dad walked by while she was on the phone talking with a girlfriend about her relationship with Rich.

"Personal prayer requests," Christy answered.

"Really?" her dad asked. "It sounded more like, 'Richard Guy Shipe.'"

They were caught.

Christy broke down and confessed her deceit. Rich met with Christy's parents a few days later. Like Christy, he was brokenhearted at the way he had deceived them. He'd gone back on his word to Mike. He'd stolen more of Christy's affections when he knew they didn't rightfully belong to him.

Rich asked Mike and his wife, Vickie, for forgiveness. This time, he promised, the relationship really was going to end. He understood now that this would require drastic measures. They couldn't simply be casual friends. "If we didn't pull back, we would be moving forward," Rich says. "You can't stand still in a relationship like that." They had to get out of each other's lives.

That's when Rich asked Christy to give back all the letters he had ever written her. Reluctantly she handed them over. "I wanted to serve her," Rich explains. "I wanted to take everything from her that represented my feelings for her. Those letters were the record of our love and all we had shared. We cherished them and reread them over and over. I knew that in order to truly lay the relationship down at God's feet, we both had to part with them."

An Early Morning Funeral

Rich was digging a hole in Christy's front yard that night to bury a box that contained all the letters they'd written each other. There were over one hundred handwritten pages inside it.

Had his feelings for Christy changed? Not at all. But he real

It took Rich nearly two hours of digging to finish the hole. He made it two feet by three feet wide and eighteen inches deep so it would be beneath the fros't line. He picked up the box of letters and laid it gently into the ground. He had wrapped it tightly in several layers of plastic. Rich wanted his hopes to be able to stay in the ground for a long time.. .maybe even forever.

For eighteen-year-old Rich, that moment was the funeral of his dreams. He was submitting his feelings and longings to God. He stared at the box one last time, looked longingly up at the quiet house, and then pushed the dirt he'd unearthed back into the hole and packed it down with his foot.
If You want to dig this up some day, I know You can,
he told God. But
if not, this is where it will stay.

He covered the spot with sod, then quietly stole away.

The Kite and the String

I don't want you to get the wrong idea from Rich and Christy's story. Matching romance with wisdom doesn't necessarily mean that you do the opposite of what you want. What it does mean is that you learn to do what's best. Wisdom is simply the ownership of insight. It's the "Oh, I get it!" that means we understand how one thing relates to another.. .and that we're willing to change our attitudes and behavior accordingly.

I like the way Eugene Peterson describes wisdom. He says

I like to think that the relationship between wisdom and romance is like the one between a string and a kite. Romantic love is the kite that catches the wind and tenaciously heads for the sky; wisdom is the string that tugs downward holding it back. The tension is real, but healthy

I suppose there are times when a kite feels tied down by the string. "If this bothersome string would just let go of me, I could fly really high," the kite might think. But that isn't true, is it? Without the string holding it in the face of the wind, the kite would quickly come crashing to the ground.

In the same way romance without wisdom will soon take a nosedive. It becomes selfish, indulgent, and even idolatrous. Have you been in a relationship like this? Have you witnessed such a relationship in the life of a friend? What was it missing? The answer is wisdom.

It's not enough to simply
have
romantic feelings. Anyone can do that! Long-lasting romance needs practical, commonense wisdom that knows when to let the wind of feelings carry us higher and when to pull back. When to express our emotions and when to keep quiet. When to open our hearts and when to rein them in.

The Art of Skillful Romance

Let me share some practical examples of what I mean. The following are three ways that wisdom leads and guides us into skillful romantic relationships.

Like Rich and Christy, maybe you just couldn't wait to express your feelings for someone and wound up starting a relationship prematurely. Or maybe you got impatient waiting for God to bring someone godly into your life, so you got involved with someone you shouldn't have. You couldn't regret it more.

Patience is important not only in waiting for the right time to
start
a relationship, but also in allowing it to unfold at a
healthy pace.
Impatience rushes everything. It urges us to skip the time and attention a healthy friendship requires and to jump right into emotional and physical intimacy.

On Julia's first date with Matt, she dove headfirst into an emotionally intimate relationship. They had gone out to dinner and afterwards stopped at Bibo's Juice for fruit smoothies. Not being the shy type, Matt confessed that he was attracted to Julia. She admitted that the feeling was mutual.

What followed that flirtatious exchange was a marathon tour of each other's personal lives. Impatience put them on the fast track. "We just instantly connected," Julia remembers. Everything came out in that first conversation. She poured out her life, telling him about her struggles as a new Christian and about mistakes with ex-boyfriends-preconversion and post-conversion. "I told him parts of my testimony that are very personal," Julia says. Matt did the same. Though they had known each other only a brief time, their conversation instantly threw their relationship into high gear. They felt close, even though they hadn't taken the time to nurture a friendship or get a reality check on each other's character.

Mishmash
Romance

Just because a couple is at a place in their lives where they can seriously consider marriage doesn't mean that they should proceed recklessly. I call a relationship like Julia and Matt's "mishmash romance." It makes me think of going out to a fine restaurant with someone who doesn't have the patience to wait for each course of the meal to be served. The master chef has a wonderful plan that takes time to appreciate fully. But instead of enjoying each course individually, your date insists that all the courses-the drinks, the soup, the salad, the entree, the dessert-be blended together into one bowl of mishmash. Yuck!

Imagine sucking that slop through a straw, and you've got a good picture of what many relationships are like today. Instead of savoring the "courses" of an unfolding love story-acquaintance, friendship, courtship, engagement, marriage-impatient couples mash the sequence together. Before they've built a friendship, they start playing at love. Before they've even thought about commitment, they're acting as though they own each other. Mishmash romance, like mishmash food, is an unappetizing mess.

Wisdom calls us to slow down. We can be patient because we know that God is sovereign and that He is faithful. "I wait for you, O lord; you will answer, O Lord my God" (Psalm

My dad likes to say that time is God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. If you're not ready to get married, don't grab at a relationship. Patiently wait for the right time to start one that can eventually lead to marriage. If you are ready for marriage and you're in a relationship, don't let impatience cause you to rush. Take your time. Enjoy where God has the two of you
right now.
Savor each course. Don't settle for mishmash.

2.
Romance says, "Let feelings decide what happens." Wisdom leads us to pursue a purposeful relationship.

The Bible exalts the virtues of, "love and faithfulness" (Proverbs 3:5). In God's plan the personal benefits of an intimate relationship -emotional or sexual-are always inseparably linked to a commitment to another person's long-term good within the covenant of marriage. The most beautiful blooms of love can open only in a protected environment.

As Rich and Christy learned, romance that is not able (or intending) to result in marriage becomes selfish and indulgent very quickly. That's why wisdom calls us to pursue romance only when we are willing and ready for it to succeed-only when it's part of a clearly defined and purposeful pursuit of marriage. Being honest about our hopes and intentions for a relationship is basic to doing what's best for the other person.

The way of sin is to try to separate feelings from commitment.

Setting
a Clear Course

People ask why I initiated a defined season of courtship with Shannon. Why not just ask her out and see where it would go? I did it because I didn't want another undefined romantic relationship. Too many times in the past I had separated the pursuit of intimacy from the responsibility of commitment. I had learned that this was neither a wise nor caring way to treat a girl.

When I expressed my desire to explore the possibility of marriage, I wanted to set a clear course for our relationship-a course that would lead to marriage if it was truly God's will.

For us the season of courtship was a wonderful time in our relationship in which we refrained from physical intimacy, deepened our friendship, learned about each other's values and goals, and interacted on a spiritual level. We asked a lot of questions. We went on dates. We grew closer to each other,
but all for the very clearly stated purpose of finding out if God would have us marry.

Unlike my past relationships, my courtship with Shannon was unambiguous. From the start, our pursuit of intimacy was paired with an openness to commitment. The difference was that now our activities and the time we spent together had a purpose beyond mere recreation, and that purpose was clearly defined.

Do you see the difference? We were walking towards the