:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

I grew up attending several conservative Protestant churches. They weren’t bad places to learn about Jesus.

For the most part the people I met there sincerely loved God, prayed, and read scripture. I don’t have any entertaining stories about tyrannical pastors. My pastors over the years have been friends and mentors.

However, there was this overall vibe or driving force among us in the conservative churches I grew up in. I can’t point to any one enforcer off the top of my head, but then again, perhaps we were all enforcers. In fact, that’s probably what made this vibe so troubling.

The vibe I felt was fear.

We were all afraid of being exposed as sinner, of being unfaithful to scripture, of being condemned for our worship preferences, of being singled out because of our doubts, and a list of other offenses that grew longer the more conservative you became. I attended this one fundamentalist church in my Jr. High years full of kind people, but they had the strangest list of rules against things such as not going to see movies in public since someone may see you in the theater and think you’re there to watch porn or something.

Don’t get me started on the Harry Potter books.

There are thousands upon thousands of Christians like me who grew up in relatively good churches but were surrounded by this vibe of fear and control. The worst churches actively use fear for their agendas or at least incorporate fear-based campaigns from other organizations that mangle the banner of Christ for their own gain.

The consequences of fear can be devastating.

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I had a theology professor who once said, “Theology is not supposed to make you stupid.” At the risk of trumpeting the obvious, I like to ask myself sometimes, “Is my theology making me stupid?”

It happens sometimes.

Stupidity creeps into our theology when we take one aspect of it too far and allow it to dominate the other parts of our lives. This is particularly tricky with matters of making decisions and discerning God’s will (i.e. predestination). When it comes to making one of the most important decisions of our lives—who you will marry—predestination is lurking in the background.

I don’t think I can quite do predestination and free will justice in a small blog post, but let me at least say a few things before moving on to some thoughts on how we make important decisions, especially about love and marriage. For starters, the Bible holds us in the tension between making our requests known to God and interacting with him, while also teaching that God can set people apart and direct them.

We have extremes between “I make up my mind and do what I think God likes” and “I literally only do what I sense God telling me to do.” The former means that I like breakfast and I think God likes it when I eat breakfast, so I eat it every morning without stopping to sense if the Spirit is leading me in a different direction at the start of my day. The latter means I’ll sit and go insane waiting for God’s permission to eat breakfast every morning.

God has something to say about our decisions, but he doesn’t want us to become crazy robots who only seek input. Why else would Jesus tell us to make our requests known to God? We live in this tension where we seek first God’s Kingdom purposes and lay our lives down, while also making our requests known to God and expecting guidance and provision.

There is a huge buffer zone of mystery here.

This week’s Faith Jam is on the topic: “Finding the One,” and our theology always creeps into how we pursue our relationships.

Questions such as, “Is he/she THE ONE?” push us toward theological insanity. We could end up second guessing whether this guy or that woman is THE ONE, and we’ll forget how to prayerfully seek God’s direction in our relationships and make good decisions based on what we hear from God. Worrying about finding THE ONE simply isn’t helpful.

Does God have something to say about who we marry? You bet! However, to try to discern God’s divine foreknowledge in the midst of a relationship puts the cart way before the horse. And besides, who can think clearly about a theological mystery in the midst of a new relationship?

Trying to find THE ONE is an unhelpful bit of speculation based on a misapplication of theological mysteries. I’ve seen the fruit of people who have been completely stressed out over finding THE ONE or whether a certain person was THE ONE, and it’s not pretty.

God wants to direct us and help us make decisions. However, finding a spouse isn’t quite like a high-stakes search for a needle in a hay stack. There’s nothing I know of in the Bible that says we all have only one person who is perfect for us.

I only find very level-headed teaching that God gives different gifts of singleness and marriage to different people on different timetables. Our decision-making process is no different from daily life: seeking first God’s Kingdom, making our requests known to God, listening to God, and then obeying God. Adding anything else extra-biblical doesn’t help us with our decisions, especially those related to marriage.

I never prayed more than before I dated my wife. I wanted God’s direction throughout the process.

Looking back, I can see the wonderful mystery of God at work with us. God was both leading me and giving me the desires of my heart. The process of seeking God’s will should bring us closer to God, not stress us out or turn us into robots who only seek input before acting.

God works with us in the midst of our big decisions, speaking in so many different ways, and I hope that brings us to a place of peace and comfort. I’m pretty sure that’s what he wants for us.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pray about what I’ve been predestined to have for breakfast.

I’ve been deeply engaged in Christianity since the age of twelve when I first started reading the Bible. Ever since I first understood the bridge to life story of the Gospel, I’ve had some nagging notions that some things I had learned weren’t quite right.

I’d read the Bible and pray, and there was something about the God I met in the Bible and in my prayer time that didn’t quite square with how I’d been told to read the Bible and understand salvation. Comedian Mike Birbiglia sums up my confusion pretty well if you don’t mind my paraphrase of his comedy routine:

“Jesus loves you, but if you don’t love him back he’s going to come and kill you.”

There’s some version of this story that many atheists and agnostics find tough to handle about Christianity. To be honest, I both embraced and held loosely to the tension of a loving God who also punished those who rejected him—it all depended on the day it seems. I was grateful to know that Jesus had saved me, but I didn’t understand how so many people could be outside of the Christian faith and suffer eternal punishment in hell.

I don’t think it’s anything all that new to struggle with God’s justice and love, but it seems that doubt, uncertainty, and new answers are taking hold in some evangelical circles of late. The success of several Christian books lately suggest there are many Christians who have gone through similar struggles about God, hell, and the point of Christianity.

Is there more to Jesus than just escaping hell?

I can’t say why I’ve sat on some of these things for quite so long, but I think part of it has to do with the complexity of rethinking Christianity and proposing a different take on something that seemed solid and set in stone for so long. There’s so much baggage, so many personal experiences, and so many diverse perspectives to take into account.

This week I want to look at how we rethink Christianity and particularly focus on the matter of God’s love and justice in relation to the mission of God and what to make of hell. Whenever we express doubts over a Christian belief and consider changing it, we sometimes slip into a rhetoric of “biblical integrity” vs. “error.”

In the case of Protestants, and especially evangelicals, we have created our own monster here. Every good evangelical is taught commitment to biblical integrity over tradition. If a sincere follower of Jesus reads the Bible and comes to a conclusion other than a tradition that has been passed down, that person is supposedly duty-bound to break with the past in pursuit of that new understanding of the Bible because biblical integrity trumps tradition.

There are good and bad aspects to this. On one hand, we no longer have to worry about ridiculous things like the sale of indulgences, but on the down side we have an army mini-Martin Luthers declaring to one another, “Here I stand, I can nothing else” as we split again and again. Over time we have lost sight of our traditions, both the good ones that ground us and the bad ones that will prevent us from repeating past mistakes.

I thought it would be helpful to look at how we can rethink Christianity this week in terms of a rather high-stakes issue such as the doctrine of hell so that we can both ground ourselves in some solid principles that we can use in similar situations, while also creating a healthy place to rethink hell in terms of Christian tradition and the biblical witness.

Rethinking aspects of the Christian faith can be a healthy practice for committed disciples, but we can also mess things up. This week we’ll try to figure out some steps forward.

Posts This Week

I’ll be taking tomorrow (Tuesday) off for an end-of-semester celebration with my wife, so I’m currently planning to  pick up the rest of this series on Wednesday and Friday with the following posts:

Wednesday: In times of questioning and transition, we need to avoid swinging too far in one direction over another and leaving the past behind.

Friday: I think we have made too much of hell in relation to the Gospel message, but let’s be careful that we don’t make too little of God’s justice, judgment, and the reality that anyone can reject God’s love and forgiveness.

On Wednesday night our Alpha group at the local prison watched the video and met in small groups on the topic of the Holy Spirit. While I believe it’s really important to learn about the Holy Spirit—you have to start somewhere—it can also be really discouraging.

I now have a laundry list of all the awesome things that are NOT happening in my Christian life.

I caught myself sort of begging the Holy Spirit to descend on me during the video—such is my insecurity at times. However, the point of it all is that the Holy Spirit is within us, and we can’t replicate the Holy Spirit’s work among us.

Our job is to seek and wait. Those two words come up over and over again in the Psalms. Stillness and silence often help, which run counter to everything in American culture.

The truth is that the Spirit sometimes just shows up. Sometimes we need to fight off every distraction and get a drop of God, and it feels like the most precious thing in the world. Other times God fills us with himself in ways that almost seem wasteful. I want to bottle some of it up for later.

Christianity is all about God bringing the dead to life—people who spiritually have no life going on and no power on their own to connect with God. They can only seek God and wait for God to bring the Resurrection.

The Christian life is full of Good Fridays where we confess our sins and die to ourselves. We’re waiting for Sunday to come—the day when God comes to us with his presence, joy, and peace. These are the moments we realize that every other source of joy in ours lives, even playoff hockey, cannot compare with the goodness of God.

However, stuck between Friday and Sunday is Saturday. Before I start singing in an auto-tuned voice, “Gotta get down on Friday” (which can have a sort of spiritual double-meaning if you take it out context), I wanted to say something about Saturdays.

We have to persevere through our Saturdays. There’s no way around it. God does the resurrecting. God raises us on Sunday on his schedule.

On my way to visit some family this weekend while Julie wrapped up some some pressing school work, I put some worship music on in the car. All of sudden, KABOOM! God’s presence invaded, and I experienced three hours of spiritual insanity—joy, hope, peace, love, etc.

Driving through the abandoned wasteland outside of Hartford with empty lots and heaps of rubble and trash, I had a sense of God’s love for the broken people and broken places of this world. The places that no one gives a damn about are his treasured possession—the places where he is Lord. This was his domain.

I sensed his love and delight for me, his child. I felt his acceptance erasing the insecurity I manifested on Wednesday. In a few minutes he erased all doubt and fear.

When I tell people about Christianity, I don’t need to talk about too much theology, even though I’m passionate about theology. It’s moments like these when you meet with God and he turns your insecure Saturdays into the assurance and peace of a Sunday.

I follow Jesus because he rose one Sunday 2,000 years ago, and he continues to raise people every day.

I wrote a monologue for Palm Sunday that told the Easter story from the perspective of Caiaphas the high priest. It was part of a larger project involving 3 total monologues to be performed by actors.

While writing them, our team of writers tried to encapsulate the central belief of each person. We settled on the following:

Judas: I didn’t betray Jesus, Jesus betrayed me.

Caiaphas: I saved God’s people from destruction by killing Jesus.

Pilate: I hate my job and the scheming Jewish leaders—if they want Jesus dead, I want him to live.

Each character study drove home a chilling point to me. I could understand each character’s perspective. Once you see their values and their hopes, you can understand why they conspired to kill Jesus. This drives home that the Bible is both true factually and incredibly relevant to us.

Even the worst villains in the Bible have their own logical consistency when taken in context.

I doubt that none of them set out to be the villains. In fact, the high priests and Pharisees saw themselves as the protectors of God’s people, the temple, the land, the traditions, and the law. They prove that God’s supposed people can become so concerned with things about God and close to God that they miss out on God’s actual work among them.

At a certain point, characters like Caiaphas became so wrapped up in political schemes, national hopes, and religious ceremonies that that they forgot the simple law to love the Lord their God. When Jesus arrived, many remarked that he taught with power and authority compared to the teaching of the priests and Pharisees that lacked both.

One summer we were vacationing at my wife’s family’s cabin which is surrounded by other cabins and houses on a lake. We usually gathered on Sunday evenings for a time of prayer and Bible study. While one distant relative taught us, I remember this feeling of the Holy Spirit opening my mind. It was like the words on the page came alive to me.

There was a God-given authority to the way he taught us.

On other occasions I’ve received prayer from Christians who knew what to say and how to pray for me. Their words carried weight and power. In fact, God powerfully used a friend’s recent prayer for us as we prepare for our move to Ohio next fall.

In contrast to the villains of the Easter story, God’s people are in touch with the Father and his ways. They are united with Jesus, the Son, and can therefore act, pray, and teach with his authority and power.

I’m reminded of Paul saying that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power (1 Cor. 4:20).

At a certain point, Caiaphas and his fellow leaders settled for talk and forgot what God’s love and power felt and looked like.

When we depart from the love, power, and authority of God, we settle for cheap substitutes.

We need something large to satisfy our longing for influence, so we cling to political power and seek influence in our culture.

We need something authoritative to cling to, so we overemphasize the importance of traditions and/or theology.

We need something powerful to help us, so we ask truth and teaching to do it all for us.

With our emphasis in the wrong place, we forget what it feels like to be God’s beloved children.

We forget what it feels like to be led by God’s Spirit.

We forget what it feels like to be empowered by God to act and pray in faith.

The villains of the Easter story remind us of the terrible consequences of losing sight of God’s love, power, and authority. There are plenty of other options out there for us to choose.

We won’t make the wrong choice tomorrow. It will happen gradually. We’ll set ourselves up to make the wrong choice when we begin to allow our love to grow cold and we stop seeking more of God’s influence in our lives.

I can relate to the villains of the Easter story. Over time they got mixed up in a tangled web of distractions, unable to find the true love and power of God. The more I understand them, the more I can appreciate the compassion of Jesus, who forgave them while he hung on the cross.

He saw a group of people who had lost their way from God, and even as he hung on the cross, he called out in love for them to come back.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Christianity after growing up with it, studying it in college, really studying it in seminary, and continuing to read extensively after seminary, it’s this one simple thing: I’m always wrong about something because I’m always changing or shifting one belief or another (usually small stuff, but still…).

Error is inevitable for every Christian.

N.T. Wright, the patron saint of theological awesomeness, often tells his students that significant bits of what he teaches them are wrong, but he’s not sure which bits are wrong.

I used to imagine God sitting up in heaven with the Westminster Confession or Ladd’s Theology of the New Testament and a scantron sheet with a pile of number two pencils. Perhaps he’d whip out a Wesleyan hymnal for an examination on classic hymns.

Perhaps he’d just tell me, “That bridge to life explanation of the Gospel was a good try, but you didn’t quite know enough about how the cross works. Sorry pal. If only you’d done a better job on your seminary homework…”

While I have no doubt that I’ll be amazed at how far off some of my beliefs are, I also have no doubt that God will be merciful to us even though we’re stupid.

Perhaps you think I’m overstating the stupidity of humanity, but scripture is quite conclusive on the matter. God declares, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” and then for good measure he adds, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

We may think we have a solid grasp of God, but it will always be a dim, imperfect sketch of God’s full-colored reality.

To my utter amazement, God seems OK with this.

Whether we rely too much on grace, the cross, God being a pushover, God being a wimp, sacraments, the Bible, icons, meditation, emotional worship songs, fixed hour prayer, incense, creeds, theology, or whatever else, God is still able to save us.

I’ve been switching between the New and Old Testaments quite a bit for the past few years, and I continue to notice over and over again the same theme loud and clear: Love the Lord.

Isn’t that refreshing in its simplicity? It’s as if God knew we are hopelessly stupid, that we would mix up our theology, that we would confuse worship of God and worship of country, that we would commit sins that we’d never see on this side of heaven, and that we’d need to repent times without number.

Loving God and letting him change us overshadows our faltering efforts and the times when we mean the best and still stumble into error.

A popular Christian author recently stated: “If we embrace universalism however it is cloaked, then we’re free to live our lives however we want, to sit back as easygoing Christians in comfortable churches, because in the end all these masses are going to be OK.”

I have two things to say.

1. I don’t think universalism is true.

2. I think the above statement makes a critical error about why we follow Jesus.

The author who made this statement made a bloomer, dropped the ball, and missed the boat. That statement makes the mistake that no one supposedly wants to make. That statement reduces Christianity to something that we all say it isn’t.

That statement reduces Christianity to nothing more than a ticket to heaven.

That statement asks, “If Jesus can save everyone in whatever way they want, then why follow him as sold out disciples?” Thankfully, the Bible has a good deal to say in response.

Avoiding hell as an eternal destination is not a major point in Christianity or in the Bible. Separation from God is certainly serious, but Jesus doesn’t make avoiding hell the pivot point of his message or speak of avoiding hell as our reason for being here. He speaks of separation from God, but if avoiding hell was the point, the major pivot upon which everything turned, then Jesus failed us. Jesus pointed to something else as far more important than merely avoiding hell.

When Jesus was asked how to get eternal life, he stated, “Love the Lord your God…”

The greatest point, the reason why we’re here, is to love God. That’s it. If you want life, love God. And when you love God, you’ll have faith in him, trust him, and begin to act like him. You’ll end up having compassion on the poor, the imprisoned, and the sick. When it’s time to pass from this life, you’ll either be on your way to turning into one of God’s children who loves him, trusts in him, and has been changed by him or you’ll resist him. If you love God first and trust in him, then you are saved because of the cross, resurrection, and indwelling Spirit.

If you reject God, fail to love him, fail to have faith, and fail to trust him, then you will not be ready to transition into a life with God. I can’t tell you who goes where or what happens because the Bible uses a lot of symbols and imagery. Christians have proven fantastically able at misunderstanding the language of the Bible.

But here’s the thing that gets to me: Even if God could one day figure out a way to save everyone and universalism proved to be true, I believe that Christianity still stands strong. While I don’t think universalism is correct, we don’t follow Jesus for our ticket out of hell. We don’t pick up our crosses just to save souls.

Every Christian I meet says that we don’t follow Jesus just to get a ticket to heaven.

And yet, if we agree with this author that Christianity with universalism is meaningless, we prove that we’ve really been in this all along to save our skin and to just provide tickets to heaven. We can do what we want because it really wasn’t all about loving God, loving others, and joining God in his advancing Kingdom.

God’s love is beyond our comprehension.

God’s ways are not our ways.

God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.

What makes us think we can understand the things of eternity?

What makes us think we can limit the love of God?

What makes us think we can stand as judges over anyone else?

I have dedicated myself to following Jesus, loving God and loving others. There is nothing in theology that can change my commitment to Jesus—whether universalism is true or false, nothing changes for me. Honestly, I don’t need to know. When I experience the love and joy of God, it’s an incredible moment of ecstasy, unspeakable and wonderful. It’s a little taste of heaven.

The love of God is that precious pearl for which I sell everything.

When I’m used by Jesus to pray for a prison inmate or to share a word of encouragement to a struggling friend, I get a taste of his invading Kingdom. I drive home from a prison meeting with tears in my eyes because I’ve been part of God’s healing work in this world, bringing his freedom to the here and now, while making an eternal impact. I’d give up anything to feel God’s presence more, to be wrapped in his love, and to share that love with others.

That incredible love is what makes Christianity so compelling for me.

I can sense God’s Kingdom pressing in like a wave on a warm summer day, and I want to ride it as far as it will carry me. When I feel God’s love, I want to pass it on to as many people as I can so that they can know him and his love too in this world and in the next.

God’s Kingdom infects me, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

Woe to me if I let anything or anyone deter me from that simple calling. Woe to me if I reduce the expansive love of God into a self-serving ticket that spares my life from hell.

Whether God saves a few or saves us all, I won’t give up my commitment to Jesus. However he sorts out the sheep from the goats, I’m not concerned about protecting my personal ticket to heaven. I have a calling to commit myself to the Kingdom and to make disciples.

The love of God compels me, not an exclusive calling.

The Only Item on My To-Do List

I used to have a Christian growth check list. It read something like this:

• Daily prayer time.
• Daily Bible study time.
• Sin-free day.

If I had a major revelation during my prayer or Bible study time, I added a star or a sticker to my Christian growth list. OK, maybe not, but you get the idea. I had a clear picture in my mind of what a successful Christian looks like.

Follow the list and grow as a Christian.

It was exhausting.

I knew lots of other Christians who really enjoyed their prayer time, even if they had to discipline themselves into making a habit of it.

I knew lots of other Christians who found life-changing truth in the Bible, even if they had to drag themselves out of bed at an indecent hour.

Why was I struggling? Why didn’t I know how to make it work? I had the information, but it wasn’t clicking.

A former pastor of mine used to say, “Keep Christianity simple.” I’m all for that. I mean, it’s not like I had a very extensive list, right?

The problem? I wasn’t keeping it simple enough.

It started with a prayer time, in which I confronted the reality that God loves me. It shocked me. My life was swallowed up into something more accepting and powerful than I could have ever imagined. As I opened myself up to God’s Spirit, his leading, and the love he gave to me, I found my desires changed and shifted.

I wanted more of God.

I wanted to spend time with him.

I wanted to listen.

I wanted to obey him.

The result? I began to grow as a disciple.

Prayer, obedience,  and scripture became sub-points under the single item on my new to-do list: fall in love with Jesus.

Love prompts me to seek the leading of the Spirit, toss aside my goals and priorities, and steer clear of sin. Love drives me to greater discipline in prayer and study of scripture.

A wise man once said, “If I do not have love… I am nothing.”

Without love all of the best intentions, all of the hardest work, and all of the to-do lists in the world will just wear us out. May we never grow weary because we rely on God’s unfailing love.

Bring your mess to God, but don’t expect to hang on to it.

The story of the Prodigal is a great starting point: yes, God will take us in with all of our doubts, sins, and messy, complicated flaws. God doesn’t want us to come to him perfect.

How could we?

But when we become God’s people, his adopted children, and those joined to him through the Holy Spirit, obedience needs to enter into the equation if we dare speak of loving him.

God loves his people, but he wants his people to demonstrate their love through obedience.

In the book of Deuteronomy we read the words love and obey together in chapter six because we can’t say we love God unless we obey him. However, we also won’t obey God unless we love him.

God is not looking for people who will just obey him without loving him. He also won’t have much patience for love without obedience. How many marriages would last if husbands never listened to their wives?

We can turn God into a tyrant, but we can also turn God into a pushover. The reality we find in scripture is a highly relational God who wants intimacy with his people—intimacy that isn’t marred by destructive decisions or selfishness.

He gives his love to us because he wants to change us, to make us more like him. In changing, we’ll find that the old things we once valued no longer carry the same appeal. It’s a process, but it’s one that is well worth it. God loves us and he’ll patiently stick with us while we figure out what it means to be loved by God, to love him in return, and to obey him out of love.

This post is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday Faith Jam on love. For more posts, check out Bonnie’s post “Giving Myself Permission to be Loved.”

Today I’m posting as part of Bonnie Gray’s Faith Jam on the topic: “What I Wished Someone Told Me About Marriage.” With Valentine’s Day approaching, I think it’s a timely topic.

When my wife and I were first married, I knew in part that she faced an uphill battle with me. As an only child who was very attached to his own ways of doing things and only partially self-aware of this, the joining of two lives into one had its fair share of tension and comical moments.

“Don’t fold my t-shirts like that. They don’t all fit in the drawer if you fold them that way.”

Gosh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

You’re learning to think like a completely different person, while establishing your new identity as a married person. You need to figure out how you and this other person are going to work together:

How does she handle stress?

What is she like she’s tired?

How does she show appreciation?

What is relaxing for her?

Does she value exercise, hiking in the forest, or time in the city?

The questions go on and on. As married couples figure out who they are as a couple some sparks will fly. Perhaps there’s pressure to imitate a parents’ marriage or to meet certain expectations for a wife or a husband.

How clean should the house be? Who plans and cooks the meals? Who cleans up? How much do you spend on clothing? What will you do for entertainment?

Thanks to our expectations and previous experiences we will be blindsided sometimes. No matter how much you prepare, you’ll end up being shocked in one way or another when this other person sees things in a completely different way. There will be fights and clashes, especially early on.

The success of a marriage, so far as I can see, doesn’t depend on avoiding conflict, but learning from it. If my wife processes stress by talking about it, while I clam up and don’t say a thing, I’d better figure out a way to meet in the middle on that one or she’ll think I don’t care.

If my wife needs time away from people, even me sometimes, in order to recharge, then I’d damn well better make sure I give her the space she needs.

When I was told that the two would become one in a marriage, I had no idea that it would be so complicated. You really are taking two completely different ways of viewing the world and merging them together. Hopefully a marriage begins with a lot of common ground and an appreciation for how your differences compensate one another. However, expect to be blindsided.

You won’t see it coming until you’re in the thick of it. It’s going to happen, so don’t worry about it.

You can only respond with patience and grace, confessing your oversights, and working together on ways to make things better. If you are repeatedly blindsided by the same problem, then you have a real problem that needs to be addressed.

Thankfully, the rewards of getting to know someone intimately has tremendous rewards. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to know that when I explain a situation to my wife, she is immediately tuned in to my perspective and is on my side. In order to reach that point, we need to prepare ourselves to be blindsided.

To read more about marriage, visit Bonnie’s blog today.

What do you wish someone told you about marriage?