DaveEnglund.Name/DBlog

Confessions of a Reformission Rev (Inro)

Earlier this week I paid a visit to marshillchurch.org - the Web portal for Mars Hill Church in Seattle Washington, where Mark Driscoll is the executive teaching pastor. I knew that both Mars Hill and Driscoll are associated with the Emergent Church Movement, so I was surprised to see the prominently displayed sermon topic on Predestination. I watched online Mark's teaching about Predestination, which was from a very Calvinistic perspective. In fact, Mark laid out quite clearly why he is a Calvinist. While I myself tend to be more Arminian than Calvinistic, there was little if anything that I found objectionable in his message. To the contrary, I found Mark to be very biblically based, contending convincingly for the Calvinist principles that lead him to his perspective on Predestination. Over the week I watched a few additional short videos of Mark's teaching, and again I came away very impressed by the heart, method and message. Since this was such an unexpected and pleasant surprise coming from an Emergent Church, I decided to purchase one of Mark's books and give it a read. I will be reviewing "Confessions of a Reformission Rev" by Mark Driscoll below as I plow through it over the next few weeks.

Could someone please tell me about married life?

Yes. Neil Chethik can. Chethik is the author of a book titled "VoiceMale: What husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework, and Commitment." It's a startlingly honest and refreshing look at the male experience of marriage - "How men do marriage." Among the convention-challenging insights presented are:

• Men propose marriage primarily because they want the physical, emotional, and intellectual companionship of a woman. Men like company.
• Beauty attracts. But what works to keep men interested in a woman as a potential life-mate are two personality traits: a positive outlook and self-confidence.
• You can change a man. Most husbands are open to changing in healthy, positive ways. And some actually look to their wives as agents of change.
• The more satisfied a wife is with the division of household chores, the more satisfied a husband is with his sex life at home.
• Forget the old wife’s tale about heeding how a man treats his mother. More often, a man’s relationship with his father shapes him into the husband he will become.
• Husbands in mature marriages tend to report a high level of sexual satisfaction, regardless of the frequency or physical intensity of sex with their wives.

I find the book is even helpful to me as a middle-aged man, never married, who is contemplating marriage for the first time. I find that I want to sit down with other married men and ask them about their marriage experience; how they've learned to handle their differences with their mates, how they've learned to work through issues, how they've learned to build something new together they would both be satisfied with. As a man contemplating leaving the individuated life of singleness for marriage I want to sit down and listen to married men tell me about married life. Neil Chethik's book gives me that opportunity and it is a very encouraging dialog. Here are a few additional quotes from my own reading:

• Despite our many differences - in expression, aggression, and emotion - most husbands and wives ultimately want the same thing; a safe, caring fellow traveler in their journey through life.
• William gradually became comfortable with Rachel's values, sense of humor, sensuality, and vision of her future life. For the most part, they were in sync; where they diverged, William noticed, Rachel seemed willing to meet him halfway.
• Men are anxious at the alter, he said, because they know the ultimate promise they are making in that moment. It's the promise to sacrifice their personal needs and desires for something greater than themselves. The struggle to follow through on that promise is the challenge of virtually every married man.
• Couples must renounce the fantasy of perfection and accept the reality of difference.

Whether you're a single man contemplating marriage as I am, or newly married, or have been married for decades, there will undoubtedly be fresh insights gained from reading Neil Chethik's book "VoiceMale."

Let Your Life Speak - Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Here are some quotes from Parker Palmer's book that have deeply impacted my soul...

Way Will Open
• A traditional Quaker counsel..."Have faith, and way will open." p37
  • Ruth's reply, "In sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me...but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that's had the same guiding effect."
  • There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does - maybe more. p39
• I was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be, if I were to make the effort. The message was that both the universe and I were without limits.
• My troubles began, of course, when I started to slam into my limitations, especially in the form of failure.
  • I experienced my first serious comeuppance: I was fired from my research assistantship.
  • The culture I was raised in suggested an answer: I had not worked hard enough at my job to keep it, let alone to succeed.
  • It is true that I did not work hard enough to keep that job, and so I lost it.
Learning Our Limits
• But that truth does not go deep enough - I was fired because that job had little or nothing to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, with what I care and do not care about. p40
  • ...it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent in doing it. p41
  • Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. p41
  • I behaved in blind but blissful unconsciousness - and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am: way closed behind me.
• Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.
• It is important to distinguish between two kinds of limitations:
  • Those that come with selfhood, and
  • Those that are imposed by people or political forces. p42
• Getting guidance from way closing requires thoughtful discernment.
  • The despair...contained a call to vocational integrity. Had I not followed my despair...I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do. p43
  Listening to Life
• How we are to listen to our lives is a question worth exploring. In our culture, we tend to gather information in ways that do not work very well when the source is the human soul...the soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. p7