|
|
| |
 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
|
| |
| The Nashville Statement
|
| |
|
|
| |
Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
|
| |
Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
|
| |
|
email
|
|
| Dealing With A Frigid Spouse. |
You can remember the way it was when you first came into the relationship. It seemed you were always holding hands, always together. Snuggling. Hugging. Talking into the night.
Over the years however (because it is so easy to take another for granted), those affections your spouse had for you (which once were so evident) began to cool down.
Suddenly a decade or more has slipped away. Somehow, it seems time has robbed your spouse of that former, willing inclination, and replaced it with a cold indifference. However you might long for the intimacy of former days, you seem unable to breach the barrier that somehow came between you.
So you lay there in the night, beside the one you love, and have loved for so long, knowing that as your heart breaks for them, they could care less, being more interested in their sleep than in keeping you company.
Wasn't it Robert Frost who wrote:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
He was speaking in metaphor about the demise of a relationship. I remember having to study it in high school.
Yet though I write to you today from the perspective of a lover whose true love has grown cold, I do so because this is the tale of so many Christians. Not that they love their spouses who have grown cold - but rather that they might see in themselves the cold spouse, increasingly indifferent as the years role - not towards their earthly spouse, but rather towards their heavenly one.
I come at it this way because I want to use the common experience of every married person, man or woman, to give us perspective on what our own spiritual indifference truly looks like. Have you ached for the embrace of your spouse when he or she was cold to you, and nothing you could say or do in the moment could change his or her heart? Has some argument, or bitter spell robbed you of some former peace? Have you never fully over come such a thing? Then you know what it means to be on the receiving end of rejection and indifference.
Your prayerlessness - you know who you are - is cold. You heart is hardening even as you refuse to let go of whatever it is that is holding you here. The trouble with madness is that the person who is made doesn't see it that way. They may know full well that what they are doing is destroying them, but they do not connect this knowledge to the moment they are in. It is some distant thing that they know to be true, but not something they concern themselves with in the moment. They hope to one day deal with it, but not today, but each day they grow colder so that they are less likely to overcome this as the days go on.
I don't want to manipulate your affections and emotions. My goal is not to paint a picture, and get you to so emphatically connect with the imagery, that you use your emotions to jump-start a personal revival. Rather I paint these things in such a way as the prophet Nathan painted David's sin to him on the canvas of another premise - that you might see as sin that thing in you that you are intentionally ignoring. If this applies, and for some of you reading, you know it does.
So I call you, even as the scriptures do, to remember your first love. Stop being frigid with the Lord - stop it today. Find some time - make it the exalted and immediate priority of your life - to set your heart before the Lord in prayer - to draw close to Him, and to stay there in prayer until your heart is fully reconciled.
Do this, for He deserves your love, and you cannot express it properly from this distance. |
posted by Daniel @
7:42 AM
 
|
|
| 3 Comments: |
-
Excellent. Marriage is, as you know, a metaphor for Christ and the church. Marital intimacy is so extremely intimate because our relationship to Christ is intended to be extremely intimate. (I do not intend to give legitimacy to crass sexual comparisons, as some do.)
-
Any comment that begins with the word Excellent is welcome on my blog.
-
|
| |
| << Home |
| |
|
|
|
|
Excellent. Marriage is, as you know, a metaphor for Christ and the church. Marital intimacy is so extremely intimate because our relationship to Christ is intended to be extremely intimate. (I do not intend to give legitimacy to crass sexual comparisons, as some do.)