Do you believe that God should be the one to fulfill all our needs? Does the fact that God said it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone (Genesis 2:18) conflict with this idea? In saying it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone, did God mean that it wasn’t good for Adam to be
Tag: cross-gender friendship
A Single Perspective
I had the honor of being asked to write a guess blog post for Dan Brennan. It took me a while to pull it together, but it is now published. Check out “A Single Perspective” on Dan’s blog.
Bold Boundaries, Part 1: Seeing God
(Note: the primary message which inspired this post can be heard here.) Dan Brennan kicked off this year’s Sacred Friendship Gathering, themed “Bold Boundaries“. In the year since the first and most recent gathering, I had almost forgotten the intensity stemming from the depth of the presentations and the feeling of being surrounded by such
Expressing Love Outside of Romance
This post is part of the February Synchroblog “Cross Gender Friendships”. Those of you who have followed me for a while will remember that I did some writing about friendship between men and women. I reviewing those posts, I realized that I had not as of yet done a good job of explaining the subject
Friendship Between Men and Women: Safety
One important topic to address in the conversation of friendship between men and women is that of safety, especially of women. “Worldwide, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused during her lifetime” (“The Resignation of Eve”, Jim Henderson, pp. 59-60). As men, I believe we need
Friendship Between Men and Women: Sacred Friendship Gathering, Part 4
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Another main theme of the gathering was what a great witness it would be to the world if they saw Christians have healthy, loving friendships between women and men. As Jim Henderson later commented, “It would be powerful for the church to actually ‘lead’ this conversation but I don’t
Friendship Between Men and Women: Sacred Friendship Gathering, Part 2
Part 1 One point of emphasis from the conference was in the need for people—Christians especially—to understand that friendships between men and women are actually possible and healthy. One single woman shared about how she had kept men at a distance in order to try and “guard her heart”. She later realized that she was
Friendship Between Men and Women: Sacred Friendship Gathering, Part 1
This past weekend I attended the Sacred Friendship Gathering. There was so much goodness squeezed into 24 hours that it was—and is—difficult to take it all in and comprehend all of what happened. First of all, I want to express how impressed I was with the group of people who assembled there (close to fifty
A Church of Men and A Church of Women?
There are not two churches, the church of men and the church of women, just as there are not Jew and Gentile, slave and free, etc. Of course we have made countless divisions among ourselves. However these are merely illusions. I don’t mean that they don’t exist or don’t matter. What I mean is that
The Beauty of Freedom in Love
One idea which I picked up from Dan Brennan I’ve just recently been thinking about. I recognize that in the romantic myth, and typically in our culture, the thinking is that a person will find one other person to be the object of all their love, and the primary if not sole source of all