Personal

How much affection and approval should come from God vs from a woman

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Let’s start with a quote from the introduction to Dr. Laura’s “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”:

I have never gotten a complaint from a male listener in twenty-five years on the radio over my assertion that men are very simple creatures. They agree. I have explained time and again on my radio program that men are borne of women and spend the rest of their lives yearning for a woman’s acceptance and approval. Unless you’ve got a man with a frank mental or personality disorder (the exception, not the rule), men admittedly are putty in the hands of a woman they love. Give him direct communication, respect, appreciation, food, and good lovin’, and he’ll do just about anything you wish — foolish or not.

Out of all the men in the world, I am probably the one whose life experiences most incline him to appreciate receiving approval, attention and affection from a woman. I was stuck in daycare after 6 weeks with a relative, never had any sisters, and my mother was entirely focused on her career and making money. She remained distant or even antagonistic to everyone in our home until the day she retired from work. The shouting and abusive language stopped almost overnight, but by then it was too late for any of us kids. So I never had the affection, approval and attention from my mother that most people just take for granted.

I always felt that the Holy Grail of my childhood was to get affection from one of these apparently unattainable women. It did not help that I was colored, growing up in neighborhoods that were mostly white – that just seemed to me to make the women even more unattainable. And in my case, it could never be just any woman who would give me these things – it had to be one who had listened to my plan to serve God and who was giving me these things because of what I was doing as a Christian. And unfortunately, there are precious few Christian women who have come along to give me what any man needs from a woman just because of who I am in Christ – forgiven, and dedicated to serving him effectively with apologetics and charity.

Those women that do come along sometimes find that my desire for approval, affection and attention can be overwhelming at times. On the surface, I function great as a Christian. Work gets done, money gets saved, chastity and chivalry, million page views per year on the blog, and lots of donations to Christian scholars and apologetics events. But that’s because everything emotional is turned off inside – it has to be, in order for me to function like this. But when a woman comes along who values what I have done, and what I am doing, that’s when the vulnerability comes out. I am going to look to her for attention, affection and approval.

This New Year, my friends Blake and Dina decided that I was going to not just go to church almost every week like I am already, but that I was also going to do daily prayer, Bible reading, Psalm reading, meditation on the meaning of what I read, and praise hymns. They know I don’t like taking time away from work or apologetics or blogging for any of those things, but they think I need to come back to the things I used to do, in order to be more balanced. And since they are my friends, I really cannot say no to them, because we all have the same Boss.

Dina has asked me to read a chapter out of Paul Tripp’s “New Morning Mercies” every day, and here is today’s very relevant devotion:

JANUARY 11

If you have been freed from needing success and acclaim to feel good about yourself, you know grace has visited you.

It is an intensely human endeavor. It is the quest we all pursue. We all want to feel good about ourselves. We all want to think that we are okay. It is a fearful and anxious quest from which only grace can free you. Here’s what happens to us all—we seek horizontally for the personal rest that we are to find vertically, and it never works. Looking to others for your inner sense of well-being is pointless. First, you will never be good enough, consistently enough, to get the regular praise of others that you are seeking. You’re going to mess up. You’re bound to disappoint. You will have a bad day. You’ll lose your way. At some point, you’ll say or do things that you shouldn’t. Add to this the fact that the people around you aren’t typically interested in taking on the burden of being your personal messiah. They don’t want to live with the responsibility of having your identity in their hands. Looking to people for your inner self-worth never works. The peace that success gives is unreliable as well. Since you are less than perfect, whatever success you are able to achieve will soon be followed by failure of some kind. Then there is the fact that the buzz of success is short-lived. It isn’t long before you’re searching for the next success to keep you going. That’s why the reality that Jesus has become your righteousness is so precious. His grace has forever freed us from needing to prove our righteousness and our worth. So we remind ourselves every day not to search horizontally for what we’ve already been given vertically. “And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever” (Isa. 32:3.7). That righteousness is found in Christ alone.

For further study and encouragement: 2 Corinthians 6:3-10

What I got out of this devotion is that I should try to remember what my primary source of attention, affection and approval should be, and then it would be easier to treat a Christian woman’s affection, attention and approval as extra – sort of like dessert after the main course.

Commentary

The dangers of judging others based on physical attractiveness

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UK apologist Calum Miller has a long post up at Dove Theology about people making judgments based on physical appearances.

Here’s the part that really struck me:

Quite obviously, most people put an emphasis on physical appearance. They decide who to date or be friends with at least partly on the basis of physical appearance, and by doing so they create an expectation of the opposite sex (or the same sex) looking good enough. They make comments about people looking good or looking bad. They make comments about people wearing nice or unimpressive clothes, or combinations of clothes. They spend obscene amounts on improving their appearance. They include physical criteria in their lists of what they look for in a partner. They reject people because they don’t match some physical criteria. They ogle at others, sometimes making comments to their friends while doing so.

Sometimes they do much of this non-verbally: they make faces to indicate disgust (or something less extreme, but of the same genus) if a suggestion of romantic or social interest is raised regarding someone who has an obvious deformity, or who is wearing something unsightly, or who is too short, or whatever else. Or they gesture to direct friends’ attention towards a good-looking person, it being incredibly important that such a person be noticed and lusted after.

Men and women both do this, and do so to enormous degrees. The fact that men have less resources to change how they look, or that some people go to further extremes in their shallowness, or that some people make these ratings and judgments quantitative, is not really the main problem. The main problem is these underlying attitudes and behaviours pervading society at a much deeper level. I know very few people of either sex who don’t make comments about others’ looks, height and clothes, and that includes champions of these recent campaigns which claim to challenge such shallowness.

The fact that this image seems so farcical is a testament to the fact that this shallowness is something propagated by both sides. The fact that many women will spend their time looking at topless men in magazines while men peruse infamous lads’ mags confirms this further. And really, I will controversially suggest, there is not much difference between the woman who fawns over the face and body of a male model with her friends, and the man who comments, “nice t*ts” to his. The latter may be more extreme, more sexually explicit, and more crude, but it is really the same kind of thing: an objectification of the other sex, and an instance of lust, which is an indulgence in sexual attraction and the use of another person’s body for self-gratification, without the context of a marital commitment and the promise of life-long self-sacrifice and mutual giving.

And the most hard-hitting part of all of this is that Christians do all of this too, in my experience to just as significant a degree. Christians reject people on their looks, they include stringent physical criteria when looking for partners, they lust regularly and verbalise their lust to their friends, and by doing all these things they create expectations which others feel obliged to fulfill, and which make others feel inadequate and excluded when they don’t fulfill them (either because they don’t spend extortionate amounts of time and money doing so, or because no realistic amount of time and money would suffice to fulfill them).

Read the rest. I am not sure if I go as far as he does in the rest of the post, but I definitely agreed with him on the paragraph in bold.

This is something that struck me very hard when I was a young man, and it was especially annoying when Christians did it. I always believed that the most important thing about a person was their character, and that this would especially be true for Christians. Imagine my surprise when I found that Christians in the church were just as likely to judge on appearances as anyone else. There isn’t much that people can do to improve their appearance, but we can do a lot to have good theology and sounds apologetics. But in the church, it seems to me that theology and apologetics are on no one’s list of priorities. If our job was to preach the gospel, then it seems to me that we should be valuing skills that help us show that the gospel is true.

But there’s more to say. Everyday, Christians have to decide who to evangelize, who to defend the faith to, who to disciple, and who to make friends with. It seems to me that we need to remember that every person was made to know God. So we can’t be picking and choosing who to do Christianity with based on appearances. Furthermore, if you are assembling a team of Christian friends to serve as resources, we shouldn’t be picking on the basis of appearance, we should be picking on the basis of interest and aptitude. If your job as a Christian is to focus on theology and apologetics, and the application of that in loving God and loving your neighbor, then you will pick a completely different set of friends than if your job is to be popular.

News

Study: brain of child neglected by mother is smaller and underdeveloped

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Here is the scan:

Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected
Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected

Excerpt:

Both of these images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children, but the brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right.

According to neurologists this sizeable difference has one primary cause – the way each child was treated by their mothers.

The child with the larger and more fully developed brain was looked after by its mother – she was constantly responsive to her baby, reported The Sunday Telegraph.

But the child with the shrunken brain was the victim of severe neglect and abuse.

According to research reported by the newspaper, the brain on the right worryingly lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left.

The consequences of these deficits are pronounced – the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and more likely to develop the social ability to empathise with others.

But in contrast, the child with the shrunken brain will be more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crimes, much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on state benefits.

The child is also more likely to develop mental and other serious health problems.

Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, told The Sunday Telegraph that if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, it can have a fundamental impact on development.

He pointed out that the genes for several aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot function.

[…]The study correlates with research released earlier this year that found that children who are given love and affection from their mothers early in life are smarter with a better ability to learn.

The study by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found school-aged children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.

The research was the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing, Neurosciencenews.com reports.

The research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Lead author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry, said the study reinforces how important nurturing parents are to a child’s development.

I have a very good feminist non-Christian friend who sometimes comments here. I once asked her about marriage and she said that her skills would be wasting on raising children. I explained to her my view that a mother needs to stay at home with the children, and that is more important work. I expect my future wife to read all kinds of books on child care and to give the child attention, nutrition, exercise and play so that the child will grow up to be an effective Christian. Maybe I need to be clear. I am not going to spend hundreds of thousands per child with just any woman. I need a woman who can produce influential and effective Christians who will engage in the public square. And we do not entrust that job to just anyone. Professional women who are willing to be stay-at-home moms in the first five years of each child’s life.

I expect the woman I marry (if I marry) to have a college degree, and preferably a graduate degree, and a couple of years of employment. Then she has to stay home and invest in those children through the first five years at least. After that she can stay home or work as much as she thinks is beneficial to the family goals of impacting the university, the church and the public square – as well as continuing to raise those children. It’s not a waste of her talent to make the next William Lane Craig, the next Marsha Blackburn, the next Doug Axe, or the next Edith Jones. Even if we only aim for those guys and get decent, hard-working Christians who make a difference using apologetics, that would still be something. The main thing is not to be scared to try to achieve something with the family – if you aim at nothing, you always hit it.

UPDATE: I am linking to a relevant post from Lindsay, a Christian mother who has a graduate degree in biology and was teaching biology before leaving her career to care for her children.