Don’t Waste Your Engagement

STEPHANIE FORMENTI|CONTRIBUTOR Summer is upon us and so is wedding season! This means that many engaged couples are anticipating a wedding and preparing for marriage. The season of engagement can seem like a time created for planning a wedding, attending bridal showers, celebrating with friends, and booking a honeymoon. But engagement is much more significant than that. It is a unique season full of opportunities for growth and maturity. So don’t waste your engagement! Whether you are engaged yourself, walking alongside engaged friends, a mother-of-the-bride, or a spiritual mother to younger women, here are three things to consider about preparing for marriage. Embrace the Tension First, embrace the tension. The season of engagement is wrought with mixed emotions. There is a growing sense of commitment which leads to contagious excitement, ear-to-ear smiles, and hopeful anticipation. On the other hand, the engagement season comes with a heavy load of details to think about and plans to make. This can be overwhelming and even paralyzing. But, more than that, there is an underlying tension present during engagement. When you get engaged, you make a decisive move towards planning your life with someone; you make a significant commitment. You decide what dishes you want, the thread count for sheets, and pick out a mattress. In premarital counseling, you talk about budgeting, conflict-resolution, family dynamics, and sex. And all these small decisions and weighty conversations inch closer and closer to becoming “one flesh” the way God intended marriage to be. You talk about the future as if you are already married. But here lies the tension: you are not married yet. This tension makes engagement a tricky experience that can be difficult to navigate and even frustrating at times...

Don’t Waste Your Engagement2023-08-15T13:22:15+00:00

Living With Gospel Tension in a World Gone Binary

Long, long ago, in college classrooms far, far away there were no personal computers. In fact, there was simply one little basement room in the entire campus of my college that had two or three computer monitors and a computer system that ran paper cards. Really. This was the era in which I took my first computer programming class. (Truth be told, I despised that class. Attention to detail is not my strength, so every time I had an extra space or a mis-placed keystroke in the code I wrote, the program would not run. Then I would spend hours trying to find and fix my error. But I digress…) My biggest takeaway from BASIC programming was that computer programs run on a binary system of rapidly processed continuous choices between “1” and “0.” That’s it. (Remember that next time you spend $1000 on a laptop!) A Binary Culture Do you ever feel like our culture is operating inside of a computer? Have you noticed that so much that poses as discussion is couched in binary ways? If you spend any time on social media, or on cable news, or in political theater, you are likely to find yourself regularly bombarded with either-or propositions. This or that. Them or us. Rich or poor. Rural or urban. Black or white. Is this really the nature of God’s universe? Do we live in a static computer program or in a dynamic universe held together by God’s power? Does God reveal himself through a set of binary propositions or does he reveal himself through his Word and his world? So much of what the Scripture teaches us is that life is lived in tension. There is not only conflict between good and evil—which I am not discounting—but also a literal tension between two right things. Christ was described by John as “full of grace and truth.” That is noteworthy because it requires so much godly tension. Grace AND truth. Fallen human beings are prone to one or the other. Jesus as the only perfect human being flawlessly exhibited both. While none of us can possibly perfectly emulate Christ, by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit we are called to be conformed more and more to his image. What I am asking each of us to reflect on is this: “Where am I presenting or embracing a binary stance where there is a biblical call to embrace the tension between two good things?”...

Living With Gospel Tension in a World Gone Binary2022-05-05T00:11:29+00:00

How the Resurrection Comforts us in Our Waiting

When I signed on to write this post, I had no idea the world would be in the midst of one of the hardest waits we’ve ever faced, the global pandemic of 2020. As I write, Americans are being urged to stay home from school, work, church, even from the doctor’s office. We stay home, and we wait. We wait to see if the curve will be flattened; we wait to see if the virus will strike us or our loved ones; we wait to see what will happen to the economy when it’s all over. It feels as if the whole world is trembling as it waits. And yet, even as we wait in this nerve-shattering season, because of the resurrection, we wait with hope. Unlike the first followers of Jesus on the day after his death, we know there is a better day coming. The First ‘Already/Not Yet’ Day You may have heard the phrase “the already and the not yet” in a sermon or read it in a book. The “already” refers to the fact that Jesus has “already” died for our sins and been raised to new life, that his followers have “already” known the cleansing of our sins and our adoption as God’s children. The “not yet” refers to the fact that Jesus has “not yet” returned to fully restore all of creation; indeed, we groan with all of creation for the redemption of all things (Romans 8:22-23). In this season of the “already/not yet,” we eagerly await the day when Jesus will return to fully and finally restore all broken things...

How the Resurrection Comforts us in Our Waiting2022-05-05T00:52:45+00:00
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