"An Omlet is only as good as the eggs" - Dr Myles Munroe
August and September are months where the subject of football is normally a trending topic. Christian dating usually isn't such a hot topic. So why was it being discussed as much as football this time round?
Being about the same age as Joshua Harris I remember when his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl were released, and how much they were being read and discussed. That I Kissed Dating Goodbye is still being talked about 20 years later I think says more about what led to it being written than its contents.
Why else, all these years later, would we being seeing posts like these in September 2019:
Darren Salmon's Why is dating not in the Bible?
Daniel Thomas's Why we need to kiss ourselves goodbye
Kacy Garvey's The Church he kissed goodbye
Jo Fuller's Religion verses Relationship
Emma McGeorge's I'm not sick, I'm single.
The answer is simple: two decades later the question still hasn't been answered. The problem has only been compounded, as we now have a whole new generation that has been raised by a generation that couldn't answer the biggest question of all: who am I?
Life in 2019
I've said lots of times to many people that I never want to be famous. Yet I also want my life to leave a positive and far reaching impact on generations to come. As being connected online becomes an ever increasing part of our lives is it possible to leave a legacy and not become a public figure?
When Joshua released his book the internet was still in it's infancy. Mobile phones were for making phone calls without needing change in your pocket, sending sms and playing snake.
So much has changed in those 22 years. It's now possible to run a legal billion dollar business from a mobile phone. It's also easy for anyone to voice their opinion on any subject to a worldwide audience in an instant - my heart feels for anyone living through their personal struggles in the public light.
As much as technology has connected us to each other more than at any point in history, it has also aided our disconnectedness. We can now share with all our "friends" anything that happens in our life, at any time of the day. Yet we could easily go a day, a week, a month and for some years, without healthy human interaction.
The statistics on the "hikikomori" - a psychological condition in which people stay in their homes for months on end - are horrifying, and we as a global community have allowed this to happen.
It all comes back to identity, which begs the question: who am I?
I Kissed Dating Goodbye resonated when it was released because people where searching for answers. People have been blogging about the author's recent public posts because they resonate, because they are still searching for answers.
We may have never known who Joshua Harris was if we had known who we were. The 90s were huge for self-help books. In 1992, John Gray released Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which was the "highest ranked work of non-fiction" of the 1990s and spawned numerous additional follow up titles.
My Confession
The non-public history of my relationships says that the book didn't achieve for me what I wanted but I don't hold the author responsible for that. I hold myself responsible for not reading the right book. I think I was approaching the question of dating from the wrong angle. Rather than 'how do I fix the problem?', if I'd asked 'why does the problem exist in the first place?', my past may have been a different one.
I fully believe now that the more we can see our Creator for who He truly is, the fewer self-help books we'd see on our bookshelves, and the less dust we'd see on our Bibles. The more we would see ourselves through His eyes, the more we would not only see ourselves differently but the more compassion we would have for others.
Let me leave you with this short video from John Piper:
Courtesy of Press Service International
