It’s Who You’re With: 25 Years of Marriage, Baseball, and Faith

You’ve heard that old cliché, “It’s not where you go or what you do, it’s who you’re with”? My parents are living that to the extreme.

Today, people are remembering September 11, 2001. I respect that; it’s important that we never forget what happened 17 years ago.

But I want to talk about September 11, 1993 – the day my parents got married.

That’s right; 25 years ago today, Kevin M. Renckens and Cyndi J. Kamp tied the knot.

(There weren’t wedding hashtags back then, but I like to think theirs would have been #GoneKamping. Other options include #HappyKamper and #StairwayToKevin.)*

So, what are they doing for their silver anniversary? Renewing their vows? Enjoying a romantic dinner? Revisiting the spot where an Ivy league grad from New York first met a bubbly systems analyst with big, brown eyes?

Nope.

Tonight, they are dining on Chipotle burritos, and in two weeks, they are flying to Ohio.

Because, you know, why settle for Paris when you can always have Cincinnati?

My parents are celebrating their 25^th anniversary at the Great American Ballpark, watching a Reds game and chowing down hot dogs. Over the past few years, they have been on a mission to visit every MLB stadium, their navy Rays caps popping up in a new one every few months or so.

If you want to know where baseball ranks in my family’s priorities, my cousin Luke didn’t tell us when he got engaged, but as soon as the Rays officially announced the Logan Forsythe trade, my phone almost dropped dead of exhaustion.

It’s kinda funny; even though Mom is one of the biggest baseball fans I know, she really didn’t take any interest in sports before she met Dad. Now, she keeps up with the Lightning, she can talk about the Bucs…she even tells me about the latest round of the PGA tour.

In that way, Dad completely changed her.

But Mom changed Dad, too.

My dad wasn’t a Christian when he met my mom. In fact, on their first date, when she brought up Christianity, he told her how he could never give up control of his life like that.

He hadn’t figured out yet that Mom is usually right. And even when she isn’t…she is.

Now, he’s taken seminary classes, leads a mission trip to Africa every year, and has helped me, my sister, and so many others learn what it really means to have the heart of Christ.

I’m not here to say which is more important (sports fan or Christ follower), but I think we can all agree they both changed for the better.

(Ok, fine, Jesus is more important than baseball. But you can’t tell me He didn’t play a part in me getting an apartment right next to Tropicana Field.)

You might think that after spending 22 years around what’s been a pretty successful marriage (so far, knock on wood), I could crank out an article on what, based on my observations, is the formula for a strong relationship. But I don’t know if there’s some big secret to a long, happy marriage; I’ve never tried it. Heck, I’ve never even been in a relationship that lasted a full month (not counting when I was five and got married in my sandbox).

But I have learned something about how you know it’s the right person.

A lot of times, when we think of love, we picture someone we’re comfortable with. You know, sitting on the couch together, oily hair coiled into a messy bun, watching Netflix, and eating ice cream straight out of the carton, knowing that he’ll still kiss you goodnight and text you in the morning. Someone whose should you can cry on, who you can open up to about everything.

Feeling relaxed, comfortable, and safe around someone is definitely an important part of a relationship, but true love is more intense than that. It’s caring so deeply about someone, you can’t leave them where you found them. You don’t want to change who they are; in a way, you want them to be more who they are. You want them to be the best version of themselves.

That’s what Jesus did for us, right? God meets us where we are, but He never leaves us there. And no matter how many times we squirm ourselves out of His protective embrace, turn our backs to Him, and run back to the mess He saved us from, He always comes back for us, cleans us up, and brings us home like His beloved bride.

When I imagine what it’s like to be in love, I always think of someone who pushes me to try new things, to grow in some way, whether it’s finally mustering up the nerve to send my short stories to a literary magazine or even something dumb, like pulling me up on stage at karaoke night or just making me put on real clothes and leave my apartment once in a while. (No small feat, lemme tell ya.) I imagine someone who encourages me to do things I would never have done by myself.

Here’s what I have learned: in a healthy relationship, both people are unselfishly, earnestly working to help the other person grow and bring out their best qualities. My parents taught me the importance of being with someone who loves me not just for who I am, but who I can be, and is excited to support me on that journey.

And, of course, who’ll take me to every MLB stadium.

And Chipotle.

So, I guess the old cliché is true – it is about who you’re with, because the right person will take you where you need to go and help you with whatever you do.

If you want more reflections on relationships and advice from someone who has never actually been in a long-term relationship, type your email into the “Stick Around” widget on the top right of the screen! We can figure this out together, friends.

*I kind of just realized that my mom planned their entire wedding without Pinterest…like, how do you pick a dress when you haven’t been digitally hoarding photos for years? That’s probably why so many women wound up picking dresses with sleeves the size of balloons. I firmly believe the entire fashion disaster that was the 80’s could have been prevented if Pinterest had been invented 30 years earlier.

If you’re still reading this, you may be interested in my opinion on weddings (i.e., why I will never have one).

 

“Having Gifts, Let Us Use Them”: The Equality of Career Women and Stay-at-Home Moms

This the third article in a series of responses to the blog post, “Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins (Without Tattoos).” Over the last couple weeks, I’ve discussed the double standard for Christian men and women and the problem with building an identity around men (or anything other than Christ).

Hours before the sun rose on Erfurt, Germany, Martin Luther would awake on the floor of his spartan room, a table and chair the only furniture in the cell-like space. His monastic life consisted solely of worship, work, and prayer. Upon enclosing themselves behind the stone walls of the monastery, men renounced all earthly pleasures, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As he dedicated his simple life to the Lord, Luther was taught that monks and nuns had a higher, nobler calling than anyone else.

Then he read the Bible for himself. And he realized that was a lie.

Yet we continue to affirm it.

More than 500 years after the start of the Reformation, we still consider certain work “holier” than others. Specifically, while the secular world often applauds career women more than stay-at-home moms, Christians tend to praise stay-at-home moms over career women – even though favoring either devastates the mission of the church and drains our potential and power as women.

“For the body does not consist of one member but of many,” Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, comparing Christians’ different gifts to various body parts. “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as He chose…As it is, men can act as many parts. Women, on the other hand, were intended to all serve the exact same purpose. Because the God who invented 440 species of sharks and specially designed hummingbirds’ eyes to detect predators’ movements while beating their wings 80 times per second – that God couldn’t think of anything else to do with women, so He gave the body of Christ four billion arms.”

Oh, sorry. I hallucinated there for a second.

Paul opens the chapter, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone” (I Corinthians 12:4-6).

In other words, God designed each of us to glorify Him in a unique way. As David praised, as God shaped us in our mothers’ wombs, He saw our futures (Psalm 139:13-16) and crafted us – our personalities, our talents, our dreams – with a specific vision for our lives.

We know that “every good and perfect gift comes from above” (James 1:17), so all human skill must come from God. Why would we believe He didn’t intend for women to act on the abilities and passions that He gave them? Why, if He gave women the gift of intellect, the capacity for reason, a passion for learning, and placed them in a society and financial position that allows them to attend college, would He forbid them from taking advantage of that opportunity? Or if God gave them talent and ambition, why would He demand they refrain from pursuing a vocation?

The only explanation, if you want to contend that women shouldn’t go to college or pursue careers, is that either everything I just listed is evil (which I don’t think anyone in their right mind would argue) or that, for some inexplicable reason, all women are just supposed to suppress the gifts and passions that God has given them.

Again, that irrational line of thinking is rooted in the idea that certain callings are noble and others are inferior.

The Bible does not imply that women’s role in society is fundamentally different from men. In fact, the much-lauded Proverbs 31 woman is industrious outside the home, buying fields, helping the poor, and even running her own business, making and selling linen garments (#GirlBoss). In the New Testament, Christians actually empowered single women. While Greco-Roman culture dictated that widows remarry within two years, Christians provided widows the financial resources and assistance they needed to live independently.

Some might argue that when we become Christians, we are supposed to present ourselves as a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), relinquishing our own desires. But dedicating ourselves to God means striving to be the people He planned us to be before sin twisted the world. It means becoming more like the unique individual He originally intended us to be – not a copy of what well-intentioned legalists say we should be. C.S. Lewis addresses this in The Screwtape Letters: “When [God] talks of [people] losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

God not only calls us to good works, He designed us for them (Ephesians 2:10). Evangelist and author Jack Taylor once observed, “Our adversary would divide us by leading us to suppose…that the Holy Spirit deplores personal motivation.” When we root our identity in Christ, our drive to excel in our craft or industry is the greatest way we can glorify Him, because in doing so, we reflect His workmanship and character.

The persona of God is complex beyond our comprehension. He is an artist who brushes the sky with a fresh palette of colors every morning, but He is also a scientist who calculated the exact tilt and position of the Earth to sustain and nourish life. Jesus is the Prince of Peace who rode into the city of God on a donkey to negotiate an impossible peace treaty, ending thousands of years of division between sinners and a just God. But He is also a warrior who armored Himself in a feeble human body and struck a fatal blow to all the powers of Hell with the cross they nailed Him to.

As flawed, sinful beings, we cannot encapsulate these paradoxical aspects of God wholly or perfectly. But He still fashioned us to reflect these qualities, so together we can project a picture of our Creator. To suppress our gifts is to censor the image of God. It doesn’t matter if it’s an artistic ability, like dance, drawing, or theater; an intellectual pursuit like chemistry, philosophy, or law; an quality like leadership, organization, or peace-making; an “unskilled” position that lays the foundation for society, such as housekeeping, food service, or child-raising. There is value and dignity in all work, and we need to embrace our responsibilities with exuberance, knowing that we do so “for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

Because all work is God’s work when He has called you to it.

And if all work is God’s work, then, at its essence, no job can be “nobler” than any other.

That was what Martin Luther realized; all jobs are “masks of God.” To borrow his example, God may not send angels to surround the city gates, but He uses guards to protect the citizens. God may not rain down manna from heaven, but He has equipped farmers with the knowledge to produce crops.

That means that a neurosurgeon is no more valuable in God’s eyes than an automechanic. Ultimately, being a stay-at-home mom isn’t any more dignified than scooping monkey poop at the zoo. (And, based on my babysitting experience, some days it doesn’t feel all that different, either.)

This probably seems extremely uninspiring right now. But I would argue that recognizing the inherent equality of all work is both essential for the mission of the church and incredibly empowering.

For one thing, it liberates us from others’ expectations. We haven’t missed some divine calling just because we aren’t living the “traditional Christian life” of being married and raising a family. By the same token, not being part of the workforce does not equal a less significant role in society. It simply means God has called you to something else, at least for now. Knowing this allows us, like Paul, to be content whatever our circumstances (Philippians 4:11-13).

It also allows us perceive and approach all work – career, parenting, or otherwise – as just work. It is a means of survival, a way to glorify God, and/or (hopefully) something that we personally feel joy and a sense of accomplishment in, but it isn’t the essence of our identity or worth.

Finally – and possibly most importantly – recognizing the equal value of work builds unity.

We are the body of Christ, and as Paul points out, all the members serve a vital, irreplaceable purpose. We are a community of equal members, which means that there is no division – male or female, Jew or Gentile, career woman or stay-at-home mom. It abolishes our right to look down on anyone. It decimates our self-righteous hierarchy.

Sisterhood, and especially sisterhood in Christ, is one of the most precious blessings God has given us. The devastating thing about the “career woman vs. stay-at-home mom” mindset is that it pits women against each other, obliterating the power that we find when we come together, sharing in each other’s lives, rejoicing in each other’s accomplishments, sympathizing with each other’s struggles, offering each other advice, encouragement, help, and love.

Belief that God endows only some Christians with a “holy calling” negates the idea that all believers are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] own possession” (I Peter 2:9). It creates division, not only between “work life” and “spiritual life,” but between believers. Between women.

It defeats the purpose of a God who came to Earth to bring unity, ripping from top to bottom the veil that obscured His face and welcoming His estranged people back to Him.

God has blessed Christian men and women with a diversity of gifts, passions, dreams, and callings. Let’s stop bickering and ostracizing each other like God only calls us to use them in one specific way.

Let’s just use them.

Thanks for reading! To subscribe, type your email address into the “Stick Around” widget at the top right of the screen.

“If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.” (I Corinthians 12:17-20)

The Identity Crisis of “Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins (Without Tattoos)”

Author’s Note: For the next few weeks, I am publishing a series of essays responding to a blog post, “Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins (Without Tattoos).” In the article, the writer basically argues that Christian women should not go to college, get married, or even move out of their parents’ house (until they’re married) because it might distract them from their sole life purpose of raising a large family. Last week, I discussed the double standard for Christian men and women that the article exploits.

I would like to announce that the writer of “Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins (Without Tattoos)” has rethought her position and admitted that she was incorrect. She said that the title of the post should have been “Godly Men Prefer Debt-Free Virgins (Without Tattoos).”

That’s all.

Good. Because that was the glaring problem with her theology.

But, as someone who struggles with pride (I mean, sure, I have a lot of good qualities, but humility isn’t one of them), I really respect it when people admit they were wrong. So, let’s phrase it her way.

It actually does kind of address the problem I wanted to talk about: leaving out God.

Now, changing the title to “Godly Men Prefer YadaYadaYa” doesn’t fix the issue at all, because the overarching motivation expressed in the piece is still the same: women should lead godly lives (and we’re ignoring her perception of how women live a godly life) to please men.

If this was a video, I would put a record scratch right here.

Not doing things to please other people is a very popular idea in modern mainstream culture. Disney teaches us to wish upon a star and follow our dreams no matter what anyone says. Pop stars croon that you only need to love yourself. You don’t live to please other people; girls don’t need to pander to men; live your life however you want; you do you, babe. #GirlBoss

All that is true, but it’s not the whole truth. And, as my mom likes to say, a half-truth is a whole lie.

Here is part of the truth: not only do we not need to live our lives to please other people, as Christ-followers, we shouldn’t live to please other people.

In church, we talk a lot about how we need to be passionate, “on fire.” We are shouting in the streets, dying to ourselves, conquering kingdoms, extinguishing flaming arrows (Christians love war imagery), crying out loud in the desert, eating wild honey and locusts, and beating our camel hair-clothed chests.

But when it comes to the declaration that “[anyone] prefers [anything],” God allows us to respond with lying-in-our-PJs-watching-golf-after-a-turkey-dinner apathy.

I Corinthians 10:31 says, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Christians are still human beings. We experience human wants and needs. In some ways, how we live our lives is no different than the rest of the world – we work, we eat, we sleep (not as much as we should or would like to). The difference in the day-to-day lives of Christians is our motivation for living and, by extension, everything that we do in life. We live to glorify God, because we find our identity in Him and boast in knowing “nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (I Corinthians 2:2).

Here’s another part of the truth: we all find our identity in something.

Our identity is the very core of who we are. Do you know the biblical term for finding our identity in anything except Christ?

Idolatry.

Pastor Tim Keller describes idolatry as “anything in your life that is so meaningful to your life that you can’t have a life if you lose it…in your heart of hearts, you say to it, ‘If I have that, then my life has value, then my life has meaning. And if I lose that, then I don’t know how I would live.’”

That makes for a pretty bleak future when your idol is a temporary object of a fragile reality.

Here’s a third truth: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to please other people. In fact, we should be serving, encouraging, and caring for others. The problem is when it becomes the consuming purpose of our life.

Here is the truly twisted and insidious truth about modern idols: most – if not all – of them were created by God.

In his book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes that, try as he might, Satan cannot create a single pleasure; the concepts of joy and happiness defy his very essence. Instead, he uses pleasures that God has given us – love, food, money, for example – and subverts them – lust, gluttony, greed. That is what makes sin so alluring and (at least temporarily) pleasing; it was originally designed for us to enjoy.

The problem isn’t that the idols themselves exist or that we enjoy them; the problem is the level of importance with which we regard them and the amount of control we allow them to wield over us.

God gives His children three things: blessings, callings, and an identity. The first two tend to be closely related; for example, God blesses us with a spouse, He calls us to be a faithful and loving wife or husband. He blesses us with a successful career, He calls us to work hard. However, blessings and callings come and go. They do not affect our identity. Our identity is constant. It is always Christ.

Idolatry is when we mistake the blessings or callings that God has given us for our identity. It’s what St. Augustine called “disordered loves.” Suddenly, instead of just making money so we can afford necessities (and the occasional splurge), we base our self-worth on the shape of the dried ink on our paychecks.

And that is absolutely heartbreaking, because here is the final truth: what makes Christianity radically different is that it is the only religion that does not require a performance. Every other religion dictates that you act a certain way, follow a certain code for a deity or whatever the highest power may be to deem you “worthy.”

We don’t have to do that. Our liberated lives are no longer a performance, a succession of rituals to placate a god who views us with indifference. Yet, when we find our identity in anything other than Jesus, we are placing that idol in the judge’s seat. We have no choice but to act out a desperate charade and present our case, hoping for mercy from something that by its own nature demands unceasing drudgery.

Last January, The New Yorker published an article titled “Improving Ourselves to Death.” The writer, Alexandra Schwartz, explores some of the ways that people try – and fail – to mold themselves into the pinnacle of human perfection. Two of the men she writes about, both business professors, spent a year delving into all the popular methods of self-improvement: Crossfit, therapy and life coaching, yoga, drugs, cleanses, stand-up comedy…the list goes on. Every month, they tried to achieve a different virtue: creativity, intellect, athleticism, productivity. At the end of the year, one of the men, André Spicer, realized that his self-focus had ruined his relationship with his wife, who was due to give birth in a few days. Schwartz summarizes what he discovered after a year of striving to perfect himself in every possible way: “On the other side of self-improvement, Cederström and Spicer have discovered, is a sense not simply of inadequacy but of fraudulence…[Spicer] writes, ‘I could not think of another year I spent more of my time doing things that were not me at all.’ He doesn’t feel like a better version of himself. He doesn’t even feel like himself. He has been like a man possessed: ‘If it wasn’t me, who was it then?’”

He lost his sense of identity.

In his famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” writer David Foster Wallace says, “If you worship money and things…then you will never have enough…Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

Wallace concludes, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

It truly hurts me to say that Wallace was not a Christian, and he committed suicide three years later. Despite his objective realization that all humans worship, he never chose to anchor himself to something that wouldn’t destroy him.

If this seems really depressing and hopeless – you’re right. It is. That’s the point. Our idols will always “eat us alive.” They are insatiable. They will always demand more from us, because when fulfilling our identity depends on our actions, we can never rest.

The good news is that we do not have to submit to them. Jesus is already sitting at the right hand of God – He doesn’t have to sit on the judgement seat anymore. The hammer that nailed Him to the cross acted as the gavel for God to declare His final verdict on those who claim their identity in Him: not guilty.

Paul writes, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, emphasis added).

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (II Corinthians 5:21).

Court adjourned.

So, let’s try this headline: “Godly Men Prefer Women Who Could Not Care Less What Men Prefer.”

Thanks for reading! If you would like to subscribe, just type your email address into the “Stick Around” widget on the top right of the screen.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)