Four Reasons Christian Girls Are More Alluring

I know that a lot of this is terribly subjective and I married a Christian girl, so this is about as groundbreaking as Hugh Hefner explaining why he thinks that plastic girls with low self-esteem are the bee's knees. People are free to disagree with me: I make no claim to speak for all Christian men, much less all men or all Christians.
But I am eager for the young women of my acquaintance to know that being alluring is far better than being sexy, that it appeals more to the right sort of people, and that it costs them much less.

1. Modesty
     Say you really wanted some help from the chief of police with something but you were having difficulty contacting him. So, to gain access to the building in which his office was located you threw a brick through the windshield of a passing police cruiser. The technique will be immediately successful in one sense and an ultimate failure in the most important sense.
    When a woman dresses or behaves immodestly she is just throwing bricks through windshields. It gets attention, but not the attention she wants or needs.
     But modesty enhances a woman's allure. Her clothing says about her what a safe says about the treasure it contains.

2. Worship
    All of us have inhibitions and some of us are more reserved than others. A woman's reserve contributes to her allure in the same way that her modesty does. But her reservation is less important than the things that overcome it.
     When a woman overcomes her inhibitions with alcohol or allows them to be overcome through peer pressure or the threat of disapproval from those she wants to please she is signaling that she is someone who can be used and manipulated. But when a woman, moved by the love and the glory of her God, expresses worship in an uninhibited manner it adds tremendously to her allure.
     In the unselfconscious expression of worship there is the fragrance of Eden and a resemblance to Eve. This has the power to provoke an intense admiration.
    There is something very alluring about a woman who knows who to worship and how to worship Him.

3. The Advantage of Not Caring
     Allure, like the quality of being "cool," is a crop that only grows in fields where it was not sown. Aim for it and you've already missed.
     The Christian girl, being impressed with the importance of growing in grace, feeding the poor, and packing her bags for a mansion in Glory, has little time for making herself appealing. Having allure is so low on her priority list that it has a chance of being high on her list of personal qualities.

4.  The Boyfriend Factor
     When I was in high school and college I noticed a strange phenomenon in which a girl would suddenly seem more attractive upon entering into a dating relationship. There could have been a lot of things going on there, but I think mostly that another guy's appreciation of the girl had the effect of opening my eyes to qualities that had always been there.
     It adds to the allure of a Christian girl that she's been seeing Someone. She has an ardent lover who brings her flowers. How many flowers? All of them.
     When a woman is loved the way that a Christian woman has been loved by Jesus that changes her and it changes the way in which she is regarded.

Now all that I have said is at least potentially true of Christian girls . . . but it doesn't have to be true. Sadly, a girl who loves Jesus can still forfeit her allure. She can forfeit her allure by preferring the interest of a boy to the affection of her God. She can forfeit her allure by feeling the desperate need to cultivate it. She can forfeit her allure by dressing or behaving immodestly.
But my hope for the Christian girls I know (and particularly my daughters) is that they will be wonderfully alluring.

A Mild Rebellion

I live in the country now and the public space in our neighborhood amounts to the road in front of our house. It is hardly a freeway. The intervals between cars can stretch to significant lengths at times. But, having lawn and meadow, we never use the road for anything but transportation.
When I was a kid, though, growing up in Washington, D.C., the streets of our neighborhood were places for tag football, lightpost to lightpost. Public space was just that.
It occurred to me recently that over the last several years I have spent a good amount of time in nearby Rutland. I have driven down pretty much all of its streets at one point or another, at all times of day and in all sorts of weather and I have never once interrupted a game in the street. My minivan has never once been the occasion of the sentinel's bellowed "Car!!!" and the scatter of sweaty children.
I have, however, had to slow my car down for the sake of dissolute youth shuffling three abreast in their vaguely menacing hoodied packs. But I wouldn't say that that's a public use of the public space.
I'm not sure why behaving humanly feels so counter cultural, but there would definitely be something rebellious, something provocative about using a sidewalk in Rutland to do something other than walk along the side.
Well, here's to having picnics in public spaces, to stopping traffic, to doing the subversive work of living publicly.