Tag Archives: Protector

Mentoring

Are churches preparing women to choose real men for husbands?

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First, I want every one to take a look at this verse on providing for a family  in context: (1 Tim 5:3-8)

 3 Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need.

4 But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

5 The widow who is really in need and left all alone puts her hope in God and continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help.

6 But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.

7 Give the people these instructions, so that no one may be open to blame.

8 Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

And these verses on charity in evangelism: (Phil 4:10-19)

10 I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. 

11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.

12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

 14 Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles. 

15 Moreover, as you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you only; 

16 for even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid more than once when I was in need. 

17 Not that I desire your gifts; what I desire is that more be credited to your account. 

18 I have received full payment and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God. 

19 And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.

Now I want to talk about a very disturbing trend that I see in the church. I see a lot of women who are not prepared to choose men who are going to fill this provider role. Men have a role, straight from the Bible, to provide for their wife and children, and to donate to support evangelistic efforts. And providing is not predicated on how a man makes a woman feel. Providing is based on the things such as:

  • working for money before you are legally able to work for money
  • working summer jobs during high school and college
  • working during college or doing college degrees while working full-time
  • doing consulting work or running your own business from home in the evenings
  • studying science, technology, engineering and math (no exceptions!)
  • not drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes – no addictions of any kind
  • not spending money on hair, tattoos, clothes, shoes or flashy junk
  • own your own car, and keep it well-maintained
  • own your own pet, and keep it healthy and well-trained
  • pay your rent or mortgage payments on time
  • carry no debt, borrow no money
  • avoid depending on government welfare or student loans
  • not taking sick days, not getting sick at all
  • purchasing resources for others, especially things like apologetics books, to build them up
  • giving charity to solid Christian speakers and funding apologetics events (William Lane Craig debates)
  • making investments in stocks or real estate
  • maxing out 401K contributions and Roth IRAs
  • taking women out on dates, driving them in the man’s own car, and paying for everything
  • spending money to help the pro-life and pro-marriage causes (Morse, Klusendorf)

And I think you have to give bonus marks for getting up early, although I can’t do that. I know someone who does, though – the hardest working software engineer I know.

Women should not prefer young men who are studying political science, psychology, English, education, grievance studies, and other non-quantitative subjects which do not equip a man to provide enough salary and savings to run a Christian life plan (homeschooling or private Christian schools or both). What ends up happening is that there is a lot of fighting over money, especially with women who don’t have savings of their own before marrying. Without money, the children will likely get pushed into public school and they influenced by secularism and leftism.

What to do? Pick a man with a proven record of taking his responsibilities to study and earn seriously.

Here are some of the top earning careers:

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary – Full List
STARTING MEDIAN PAY MID-CAREER MEDIAN PAY
Petroleum Engineering $97,900 $155,000
Chemical Engineering $64,500 $109,000
Electrical Engineering (EE) $61,300 $103,000
Materials Science & Engineering $60,400 $103,000
Aerospace Engineering $60,700 $102,000
Computer Engineering (CE) $61,800 $101,000
Physics $49,800 $101,000
Applied Mathematics $52,600 $98,600
Computer Science (CS) $56,600 $97,900
Nuclear Engineering $65,100 $97,800
Biomedical Engineering (BME) $53,800 $97,800
Economics $47,300 $94,700
Mechanical Engineering (ME) $58,400 $94,500
Statistics $49,000 $93,800
Industrial Engineering (IE) $57,400 $93,100
Civil Engineering (CE) $53,100 $90,200
Mathematics $47,000 $89,900
Environmental Engineering $51,700 $88,600
Management Information Systems (MIS) $51,000 $88,200
Software Engineering $54,900 $87,800

I think that marrying someone who is not in one of these careers makes no sense at all, especially in light of a global recession.

And just to be clear, this is an area I struggle in myself. I am great at working for money, and saving it and investing it. But I say a lot of controversial things and a lawsuit would not be good for my fortune. I should be spending more time on evenings and weekends keeping my skills up, and that’s what I’m going to be doing on my vacation. But I think the standard stands regardless of my own abilities to meet it. It is the standard.

Money is an important part of the Christian life. The Bible says that if a man does not work, neither shall he eat. We have a tradition on what men are supposed to do in Christianity. Men are supposed to take care of business, and women are supposed to prefer men with proven records of taking care of business. Being handsome and fun is nowhere in the Bible as a qualification for men to be good husbands and fathers. But earning money and providing for others in the community is a non-negotiable requirement. It’s as required as the obligation to not marry a non-Christian man.

Women who are serious about Christianity will prefer men who meet the specifications laid out in the Bible. And this has to have been demonstrated over the course of years – a pattern of studying hard things, working multiple jobs, spending little, saving much and supporting family and evangelism.  To me, a woman who prefers a man who has no record of providing is a woman who has been influenced by feminism. She rejects the traditional roles of men and insists on a man who is has no authority to lead because he does not have the provider role. That’s what’s really going on here. Men who earn have authority to lead and hold a woman accountable when she misbehaves, and some women hate being led and being held accountable. (By being held accountable I mean disagreeing with the woman, canceling optional goodies, etc.)

I think we have a major problem in this society, and in the church, where we think that women are above criticism. We think that anything they feel like doing is a good idea. We think that their complete lack of rational thought and lack of planning in relationships is somehow “romantic”. We think that women who embrace spontaneity and ignorance of statistical data are “free spirits”. Is it any wonder that the out-of-wedlock birth rate is 42%, the divorce rate for first time marriages is 45%, and women are shacking up with unqualified men instead of getting married?

This is all – all – caused by the fact that women have no idea what men are for, and they deliberately prefer non-judgmental, non-theologically-exclusive, non-rational, tolerant, intuitive, wusses instead of men who give them hard books to read and who hold them accountable when they misbehave. Women today think it is a bad thing when a man holds her accountable when she disrespects him in public, but think it is a good thing to date a man who asks his parents to borrow the car keys before taking her out. Huh? I had a current year car with only 7500 miles on it at age 17 – because I was working two jobs in high school, and part-time IT/desktop publishing in my own business on the side.

Women who are interested in testing a man’s abilities can use my checklist for finding authentic Christian women. Those questions work on men too.

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News

What’s behind the explosion of sexual activity among college students?

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Consider this article about the problem first, from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.

The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it’s countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.

Now this is where things get interesting. The religious conservative people don’t like students drinking, hooking up, and getting depressed. Who could possibly be in favor of hurting women?

Well, consider this article in the College Fix.

Excerpt:

Now John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, is suing CUA for discrimination.

Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Washington D.C. Human Rights Office alleging that the university had violated D.C.’s Human Rights Act. CUA lawyers met with Banzhaf at the Human Rights Office on September 15 to defend the university’s decision.

Banzhaf, who has a history of using lawsuits to fight against what he sees as discrimination, compared the university’s decision to separate students by sex to separating them by religion or race.  He specifically linked the single-sex dorm policy to the “separate but equal” racial policy in place in the U.S. before civil rights movement.

He also told CUA’s student newspaper, The Tower, that the decision is “the same as saying that since Muslims and Jews don’t get along we should force them to live apart.”

What’s behind the push to make women drink and hook-up with men? Feminism.

What feminism says, in practice, is that men have no special duties when compared to women. To say that men have anything special that they are responsible for is to be “sexist”. Therefore, men and women have to be lumped together from kindergarten to college graduation so that they can be identical in every way. Anything less would be “discrimination”.

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Commentary

Many professional women spend their 20s getting drunk and having “fun”

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Dina sends me this depressing article from the UK Daily Mail. This is a must-read.

Excerpt:

The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle  to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it’s a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has ‘only’ drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of Jagermeister (during a drinking game called I Have Never) and still feels ‘a bit sober’. Her friend Hannah Freeman, 19, was punched in a fight and stumbles about swearing and searching for a bathroom.

‘We only do embarrassing things when we’re really drunk,’ Naomi says. ‘I kiss random men in the street and Hannah has had sex behind a chicken coop.’ She screams with laughter as Hannah lurches unsteadily in the stairwell of Charleston Bar and Grill on Caroline Street (known locally as Chip Alley) and unashamedly urinates in front of us.

Amazingly, none of the 80-strong throng of passers-by seems to notice – or perhaps care. Hannah rearranges her minuscule dress, steps over her own urine, shouts ‘f*** off’ and the pair stumble back to Walkabout. It’s only midnight, after all.

[…]But as I found out on the streets of Cardiff after midnight, many of these women are – by day at least – well qualified pillars of the community. Among them I met teachers, nurses, occupational therapists,
personnel professionals and full-time mothers, all determined to shake off responsibility and have fun in the only way they know how. By getting ‘smashed’.

Every week, the ritual is the same: Groups of between four and six girls congregate to dress up and competitively drink bottles of cheap wine or sickly shots. Competition ramps up over who can wear the tiniest mini-dress, the highest heels or the reddest lipstick. Drinking carries on during the bus ride to Cardiff (many young women travel from the surrounding Valleys) and continues in bars between 9pm and 11pm, or until they feel bold enough to dance.

Condom in purse and telephone number for a pre-booked 3am taxi in handbag, they stagger between nightclubs. The ritual continues long into the morning when, dulled by hangovers, they congregate for McDonald’s or fried breakfasts to giggle about the drunken ‘fun’.

New figures show that alcohol misuse costs the nation £7.3 billion in crime and antisocial behaviour and that one woman in five drinks at levels hazardous to health (more than 14 units each week).

I went looking for the answer to the real question: Why? In a series of raw but illuminating interviews, I discovered that beyond the superficial bravado, their nights of booze-fuelled excess make them anything but happy – but they still have no intention of changing. Naomi Jenkins is a classroom assistant from Carmarthen and is adamant that downing sickly Jagermeister shots (which she nicknames medicine) is ‘a laugh’.

I hear the same knee-jerk answer again and again. Human-resources administrator Becky Sherlock
from Chepstow tells me: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll lift my head off the pillow and think, “Oh s***.” But it’s worth it.’

‘A hangover is the sign of a good night,’ says her friend Danielle Malson, a secondary-school teacher.

What quickly becomes apparent is the ease with which these young women distinguish their responsible weekday personas from their ‘fun’ selves. Naomi easily switches from diligent teaching assistant to Saturday night party girl when she squeezes into a skintight minidress. She tells me: ‘I wouldn’t do this if it affected my work.’

Occupational therapist Sally Baldwin, 24, added: ‘If I bumped into any of my patients or their relatives, I’d hide. It doesn’t give off the right image… But as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work, I’ll carry on.’ By splitting their characters into two personas (professional and social), these young women appear confident that their professional reputations remain unblemished. In their own minds, at least.

‘I just like knowing I haven’t lost my mojo,’ admits a 27-year-old full-time mother, dressed in a skimpy football kit and slumped in a shop doorway on St Mary Street. ‘The world seems a better place when you’re wearing beer goggles.’

[…]It is a sad testimony that obliteration of reality is the highlight of the week for many of these young women. For Alicia Howley, 20, and Lucy Griffiths, both shop assistants, the ritual of dressing up in tight minidresses and wearing lashings of make-up begins at 4.30pm, straight after their Saturday shifts at Matalan.

Lucy says: ‘After a few drinks, you feel like you can do anything. It’s amazing. The only time I usually talk to new people is speaking to customers at work. Alcohol makes me loads more confident… Like the time I had a foursome.’ They laugh.

Read the whole thing, as this is going on with women from late high school right through college, until they are age 35, when they suddenly want to have a baby. And that doesn’t mean they want to get married first. They are happy to conclude from their careful search for Mr. Right during drunken “foursomes” that there are no good men. After all, they are already perfectly suitable for marriage as they are, so if Mr. Right doesn’t come along, then it’s not the woman’s fault. And it’s nothing that a little IVF, day care and public school won’t solve – all taxpayer-funded, of course.

This story makes me think about why men like me (chaste, and marriage minded) are in the situation that we are in today. I have been taking some flak from friends of both sexes about my reticence to try to get married. I think that people who are criticizing need to realize what is out there right now to choose from. This is what is normal for most women who go through college today. And even if I could find a girl who managed to stay chaste while getting herself mature and independent, the laws are being made by the majority of women, who are more like the ones in the article.

Even when people mouth the words “I’m a Christian” you have to understand that most people who claim to be Christians go through 15 years of church and learn nothing at all that is useful about Christianity. I understand that once women become aware of what men like me want, that they are able to do it and to see the reasons for doing it. But it’s very difficult to convince women to be serious about things like economics and apologetics these days – many of them aren’t being serious about preparing for marriage in the time that they should be doing that.

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