women and men in a world of despair.

As a married man and a leader in campus ministry and local church, allow me to attempt a response to the question of men and women.

I can't say that I speak for the whole of the Christian Church, but I do speak for a large part of it when I say what I'm about to say.

God created a man and then proclaimed that it was not good for him to be alone.  So, to complete the picture of humanity, he created a woman.  The man was ecstatic. "This is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones," he exclaimed.

And God saw what he had made, and it was very good.

Humanity.

One entity, two parts.  We are, first and foremost, a community.  I don't know a whole lot about cars, so I take mine to a mechanic or to my father-in-law's garage.  If everyone had to do everything, society would be stuck in the stone age.  On this point I think we all agree.

This integral separation within the community of global humanity stretches all the way down to the smallest part.  One man and one woman.  The two are different.  But they are necessarily so.  Even biologically, the differences are required for the production of children.  It doesn't stop with biology.  Anyone who has been around young children for any length of time recognizes differences between the sexes...


Let me clarify one thing before I move on.  This is not an argument against homosexuality.  When I wrote this I had in mind the idea of biblical marriage between biologically distinct sexes.  Please, leave the problem of homosexuality to another argument, this is not that.  Okay?  Okay.

When a man and a woman are married this foundational human community sinks its deepest roots.  There must be absolute trust; trust that the other person has capabilities that I don't.  Many of these capabilities are culturally driven, but even where the specific capabilities disagree cross culturally (i.e. in the Kenyan bush the women do most of the manual labor to provide for the family), there are always differences between sexes.  Often they go unspoken, but we all know they're there, even if undefined.

One of the constants in this separation of roles seems to be the issue of love and respect.  One man will die for his friends on a battlefield, because he deeply respects his fellow soldiers.  He'll die for them and win a medal of honor, his deep respect and honor for his fellow men will be awarded with great fanfare.

Want to make a man feel good?  Tell him honestly that you deeply respect him for who he is.

Women will love so passionately that they'll do and say whatever it takes to protect their children.  Even in nature it's the female who gets violent over her young.  You never get between and mamma bear and her cubs, right?

Want to make a woman feel good?  Tell her honestly that she's worthy of love for who she is.

Now, there most certainly are exceptions.  But it seems that across cultures the hearts of men long for respect and the hearts of women long to be cherished and desired, despite how they fail.  Died for.  And men are in the business of dying for them.

Think about many of the movies that move us to knotted throats.  They end with the woman being loved and the man sacrificing something great for her, often his own life.  These move us because they communicate to something deep within us that what we are watching is true.  It is the way we work best, and we feel it down deep.

In marriage, often the man is rightly to blame for lack of love.  Much of what we see wrong with the world is the fault of loveless men.  But I do wonder if down deep much of the lovelessness and anger just comes from a place a little deeper.  A place where that angry, powerful man still feels like he did when he was fifteen.  He feels like (and probably unconsciously) if people really knew how he thought and what went on inside of his mind they would label him a fraud.  He still feels like all his actions are an attempt to validate that he is indeed worthy of respect.

Perhaps this is why tyrannical rulers force their people to bow and, in some cases, worship them.  They desperately want to feel worthy of respect.  The problem is, when they act this way to get respect, the respect that they do receive, they know--again, deep within them--that it's all just a scam.  They forced the respect.  "Nobody actually respects me," he thinks to himself.

And this is where the Godly wife enters this man's life.  She is the only one who is in a position to see how really wicked this man is, hear his darkest secrets and his silliest dreams, and still respect him deeply.  Her respect can actually mean something.  Because she knows him, she feels it when he calls her a name in a fight.  But she respects him just because he is.

And do you know what that does?  It breaks a hard man's heart.  He begins to trust that he doesn't have to get angry when his rightness is called into question.  Because his wife has taught him that his respect comes from something much, much greater than what he does.  His worthiness of respect comes from his being a man.

This is very difficult if the man is unloving.  Because, as studies show, unlove begets disrespect.  When she feels unloved she'll lash out disrespectfully, unintentionally most of the time.  And when he feels disrespected he'll lash out with unlove.  It is a viscous cycle. Unlove-disrespect-unlove-disrespect....

The command of God is "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her."  Thus, just as in the Christian worldview Jesus loved us while we were still evil, so the husband is commanded to love his wife, even (and especially) when she's disrespectful.  And, just as when the woman respects the man he feels the desire to love, so when the man first loves the wife she desires to respect him in return.  Often, and problematically, neither the man nor the woman consciously understands this (universal?) pattern, and so the vicious cycle continues down to the pit of divorce.

It isn't sexist drivel.  It is a return to the longing of the heavenly heart.  We once had the heart of God.  Now we have stones in our chests, waiting to be broken by that Christ who loved us. The man and the woman in healthy relationship is a window into the character of that deliverer of hard hearts.

Marriage is divine.