The Thing About Boys and Girls, and the Weird, Sort of Twisted Way I Am Able to Tie It In with the Church

I know there’s a season in the childhood of young boys when they are not supposed to like girls. For me, I can’t remember such a time. Oh, when I was four or five, I bought into the girls-have-cooties thing for awhile, but that was mostly because other boys were saying so. I suppose at that time I could have taken girls or left them, but I never remember a time when I disliked them.

My wife likes to think I married my first love, but actually I had been engaged to one girl, and married to yet another, years before I met my wife. When I was in first grade living in Michigan, my mom and I went to California for vacation, and Mom visited a friend of hers. Her friend had a daughter in kindergarten, an angelic blonde creature with beautiful eyes and a smile filled with gorgeous, straight baby teeth. While my mom and her friend visited that evening, little Kelly and I fell madly in love. We lay next to each other and gazed into each other’s eyes, and promised to write each other, and to wait for each other. We got engaged that very night, promising to get married when we were old enough. (The only thing we disagreed on was how old we should be. She said she wanted to marry when I was 21 and she was 20, but I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted to marry her as soon as I was 18 and she was 17. Anyway, I figured I’d have plenty of time to convince her to move the wedding up.)

All that year, separated by thousands of miles, I wrote to Kelly, pined for her, and waited till I could see her again. But something terrible happened to me during that time. For some inexplicable reason, I started losing my teeth and growing new, bigger, uglier ones. By the time we went back to California and my mom went to visit her friend again, I had a huge gap in my mouth where one of my front teeth had been. That’s when I found out how incredibly superficial and fickle that Kelly was (if I had known what “superficial” and “fickle” meant). She took one look at my deformity and told me she didn’t like me anymore. I tried to put on a good front and act like I didn’t care, but I had to face it. I had been dumped. The wedding was off.

You’d think I’d have sworn off women after that, but less than a year later I’d fallen for another beautiful blonde named Kim in my home town in Michigan. We were never engaged, though; we were on-again and off-again for several years, and during one of the “off” times, I actually got married to someone else. I think I was 8 or 9, I can’t remember which. It was nothing very fancy. I didn’t even rent a tux. Some kid performed the ceremony for us in the alley next to my house. Then the girl went home. I think her name was Carol, but don’t hold me to it. I don’t think the marriage was legitimate, anyhow. (At least, I hope it wasn’t, because that would make things a bit tricky with the marriage I’m in now.) But Carol (I think) was my first wife, and I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for her–whatever her name was.

Oh, and then there was Gina from the after-school day care center. Gina was a gymnast and could do the splits. I couldn’t do the splits. I didn’t really like her that much–always showing me how girls are better than boys and what not. But she liked me, apparently, because one day she gave me a love note, and in the note was a test with one question:

I checked “No.” (I didn’t want to be mean, I was just trying to be honest.)

Apparently, this was the wrong answer, because after she went crying to the day care people (who thought it was all cute and that I was a spoil-sport for saying “no”), the next day I got another love note with the same test question on it. Not wanting to keep re-taking the test, I tried a write-in answer: “No, I don’t love you, but I’ll still be your boyfriend.” That was good enough for her, and it got me out of the doghouse. (Okay, so I was a heel. It was a phase.)

I’m sure I’m not the only one with memories like these–playing the boy-girl romance games in our childhood. What makes it so cute and funny is that we were playing with something we didn’t have the slightest idea about. I mean, I liked different girls in my childhood, wanted to impress them, to gain their attention and affection. But then at some point I hit puberty, and the girls I grew up with did, too, and they looked different, and I felt different when I looked at them, and all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, you mean GIRLS.” When I grew up enough to understand the real thing, the real dynamic between men and women, I realized the game I was playing as a child was only a shadow of something I had yet to learn. I’d had no idea what it was really all about.

Pondering all this, I can see a similar picture in my journey with God and my relationship with the church. I grew up seeing the church a certain way, with the institutional system as the model for how things should be, and I played along with it for many years. But at some point I got a glimpse of something more, something deeper. And as I searched for that something deeper, I came to realize that playing “church” as I knew it was very like how I played the boy-girl thing as a child. What had been modeled for me as “church” was actually just a shadow of something much more.

Unlike the childhood romance game, though, a deeper understanding of church isn’t something we automatically grow into, nor am I suggesting that I’m more “mature” than my brothers and sisters who attend institutional churches. And unlike childhood romance, institutional Christianity isn’t really a shadow of something we are about to discover; it’s actually more like a shadow of something we’ve lost.

You see, when I realized there was a difference between my image of “church” and the whisper of something more, I looked in the Bible and discovered that the church in Bible days looked almost nothing like what it does today. We use similar terminology and all that, but there’s a lot of stuff we’ve added to the mix, and not only that, there’s a lot of stuff missing from the original mix. It’s too much to go into right now, but to put it simply, it’s like the stuff we added wasn’t all that important, but we made it important, and we sacrificed some stuff that really was important along the way. As a result, it’s like what we now call “church” has only some of the basic form of what we started with. It’s a shadow of what we used to have.

The good news is that God has never abandoned the church. Over the past few hundred years or so, various things we’d lost have been restored to us. The restoration of the idea of justification by faith in Martin Luther’s time was a huge deal, for example, and that’s not the only thing that’s been restored. Wave after wave of God’s Spirit has flowed over the church, restoring spiritual gifts, restoring healing, restoring passionate worship, and so on. But even with all those ingredients being restored, I believe the church still functions as a shadow of what it once was. It isn’t that those things aren’t real or important or helpful, but it’s like because we still haven’t got rid of some of those extra, unnecessary things we added to church, our effectiveness is limited, and the restoration isn’t quite complete. Thankfully, in recent days, it looks like God has been working on that problem, too, getting more and more of His people back to the basics. I believe as He continues to mold and shape us, we aren’t only going to recover what we lost, but we are going to mature into that glorious church He spoke of in Ephesians 4.

And therein lies the paradox. In a manner of speaking, we will grow into a glorious church as we revert back to our beginnings. When we went from playing the boy-girl thing as kids to living it as adults, it was because we grew up. When we stretch beyond our shadow of “church” to be the church the Bible describes, we will, in essence, be “growing young”.

By the way–when I grew up, I married a beautiful blonde. And yes, I married my first love. For real.

Wayward Son

Musician. Composer. Recovering perfectionist. Minister-in-transition. Lover of puns. Hijacker of rock song references. Questioner of the status quo. I'm not really a rebel. Just a sincere Christ-follower with a thirst for significance that gets me into trouble. My quest has taken me over the fence of institutional Christianity. Here are some of my random thoughts along the way. Read along, join in the conversation. Just be nice.
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