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.

Sinner!

Recently I had all the kids in the car with me and I took the opportunity to pose them some Uncle Josh questions. We were having fun considering one of the marriage related questions when it became clear that Obadiah had no time for this subject, already having determined who he was going to marry. While we all approved of his choice (no word yet on how Obadiah's conversation with the girl's father went) one of the girls asked him about a neighbor with whom Obadiah has played on occasion. 

He responded to the suggestion with indignation. "No! Her a sinner!"

We were all so aghast at this uncouth observation that it took a while to register what he said. It led to a very interesting conversation about theology and the limits of polite observation.

I said a number of things to Obadiah, chastening things I hope. But one thing I did not say is that "we are all sinners." 

I do sometimes run (under duress and in wheezing spurts) but that does not make me a runner. I can and do speak up, but not enough to qualify me as a loudmouth. In truth, I blog, but perhaps not enough to be a real blogger.

And these are important distinctions because these are meaningful categories. 

"Sinner" is a meaningful category. It describes someone whose patterns of behavior reflect a systemic, habitual resistance to the will of God. That is not true of me, by the grace of God.

That's not to say that I am perfect or that I do not sin. But the sin of which I am regrettably guilty does not amount to a feature of my identity. We are so shy of making this case because it invites a greater scrutiny and  accusations of hypocrisy. And I'd like to avoid that by glossing over the distinctions and downplaying the difference the gospel has made in my life and heart. But I have to have more respect for the accomplishments of grace than for the tongues of sinners.

If I call myself a sinner I make the category less meaningful and I deny the sanctifying work that has been done in my life which is one of the chief features and benefits of being Christ's disciple.  

I have no more right to call myself a sinner than to call myself a runner (but of the two I could make the case for "sinner" much more persuasively.)

The Church's Confused Effects and Purposes

Isak Dinesen famously expressed a cynical regard for man by asking “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
It takes a remarkably low opinion of man to so confuse the effect of his drinking with the purpose.
I have a woodstove in the den. That little metal box is a wonderful device for reducing an acre of forest into a bucketful of ash.
And what is a gun but a remarkable device for separating bullets from their casings. Loudly.
This trick of identifying an obvious but secondary effect and pretending it's the purpose is not a particularly impressive trick, though it can seem clever when done on purpose.
But you wouldn't think it clever if you went to visit a friend in January and discovered his house to be inhospitably frigid. Coming into the house through an open door he greets you with a blanket and offers you an ice cube to suck on, all the water in the pipes being frozen. You note with perplexity the windows left open and ask him if he doesn't have a woodstove, having noted the piles of wood, cut, split and stacked beside the door.
He smiles broadly. "Haven't I! And it's a real beauty. I keep it going all the time." He takes you downstairs to show off his hard-working stove and you discover that what heat is not going up the flue is heading out the open windows. But it's not the heat that your host is pleased about. He wants to draw your attention to the buckets of ash he is proudly displaying. "Just look at all this ash! And I've got piles more ash outside. You want to go see the ash pile?"
Well, I'm afraid that we can come across that way in the church sometimes. We've been given the fuel of God's Holy Spirit to produce the warmth of God's glory but we are carelessly indifferent to that glory, reveling instead in the byproducts of that holy combustion, the programs of the church the increases in attendance, etc. But those things are, at best, an evidence of the good things that have happened and not the good things themselves.
I have made the mistake at times of measuring the church by the size of the ash pile and not by the spiritual temperature, and I'm embarrassed to admit it.

Five Steps Toward Agrarianism

"I'm small and it's God who makes the sun rise, the moon spin, the springs froth, the rain pelt, the mountains quake, the oceans surge, the deserts spread, the wind rake, and the snow to muffle. Not me. God."
That's the testimony of the Psalmist and all the other Old Testament saints.
But we have an inflated view of our importance and a diminished view of God's involvement. This leads to all manner of folly and harmful mischief.
When it comes to our environment, right living is a great aid to right thinking. The Bible assumes at least an agrarian awareness in its audience, if not an agrarian existence. The Jewish liturgical calendar is remarkably agrarian. The imagery and metaphor of Scripture is predominately agrarian. The curse in Genesis is agrarian and the depictions even of the New Jerusalem in Revelation have an agrarian dimension.
So here are five suggestions that even urban people might act on in an effort to get into our right minds.

1. Follow the Moon
     If someone asked, would you be able to say what phase the moon is in today? Is it waxing or waning? To know requires the discipline of stepping outside in the dark to scan the sky, and that alone would be reason enough. We do far too little stepping outside in the dark and looking up.

2.  Take a Constitutional
     My grandmother was fond of taking a walk after a meal. It was very Victorian and quaint, but it served a valuable purpose beyond helping to digest one's food. Nature is obscured in direct observation, but reveals itself in the sidelong glance. If you would know creation well it's no good making a point of looking out the window or reading books on the topic. There is no substitute for strolling, for aimless walking.
     Honestly, when was the last time you walked beneath the trees with no haste and no object?

3. Keep a weather journal.
    My friend has a journal in his milking parlor. His grandfather kept a similar journal, containing notes about the weather mixed with observations about the goodness and majesty of God. There is something about accepting today's weather and jotting it down, whether with glee or resignation, that takes from tomorrow the power to distress.  Knowing what happened a day ago and a year ago makes me much less anxious about what will happen a year from now.

4. Experience extremes of weather
    If the wind never ruins your umbrellas, if the rain never soaks you, if the sun never warms you to the touch, if your return from the snow storm never means booby traps of icy puddles for your family to discover with their stocking feet you are soft and experientially impoverished.

5. Celebrate extremes of weather
     When confronted with weather extremes people are most likely to cry for legislation, but there is another, more legitimate response. When trees come down cry "Glory." When the thermometer rises cry "Glory." The wild variability of nature is not something of which we are guilty and it's not something we're responsible for fixing. It is a pointed reminder that our God is great, big, and thrilling. Let him thrill you and applaud him when he does.

Five Ministerial Titles in Order of Preference

There are so many things to call the leader of a local congregation and all of them are heavy with associations and connotations. And even though I have my preferences I have very little control over which ones people use or how they refer to me in my absence. But for what it's worth these are the ones I prefer.

1.  Pastor*
     It's awfully bland, I know, but it works across all sorts of contexts and requires no explanation. The word comes from the Latin word for shepherd, which makes it rich with all sorts of Biblical references. And "shepherd" is, while metaphorical, perhaps the most comprehensive description of what it is I do. And one of the things that I like about it is that when referring to me in Latin, "Pastor Tate," I am just a simple leader of a congregation. Whereas, if you switched from Latin to English, "Shepherd Tate," I would suddenly be a cult leader overseeing the construction of a compound.

Can you imagine calling this fellow
"Pastor John?"

2.  Preacher
     I have a dear woman in my church who calls me "Preacher." Just "Preacher," whether referring to me or addressing me. And I kind of love it. It makes me feel frontier, if you know what I mean. It's what John Wayne would call me. Straightforward and unpretentious.
     I've noticed that when people in the community meet me and figure out who I am they'll usually say "You're the preacher, right?" It's interesting that unchurched people immediately use that designation to identify me. It is the most public aspect of my role.

3.  Vicar
     Another of my parishioners has affectionately dubbed me "the Vicar." Again with the Latin! The root meaning of the word here is "substitute," and it shows up in "vicarious." I am, in a very real sense I hope, Christ's stand-in, where he'd like to be, doing the things he'd like to be doing. And he's pleased to accomplish those things through me, vicariously.
     That's lovely and all, but the reason "Vicar" is number three on the list is because it requires a lot of explanation. That, and it makes me sound like I should have my own sitcom on the BBC.

4.  Minister
     I do minister, but it's just so vanilla. And it's a term that gets shared with political office holders.
     And you can refer to me as "the minister," but it wouldn't work to call me "Minister Tate."

5. Reverend
    This is, sadly, a title that sinks under the weight of all of its negative associations. It sounds, to most ears, like a horribly pretentious and stuffy title. It could be redeemed, but it's probably not worth the effort. I sign my name "Reverend Tate" for official business and I make no objection when, in a public capacity, I am introduced as such, but I do nothing to promote the use of the title.


My least favorite title, by the way, is "Team Leader," or any other such modern foofoo-ism. Any pastor who elects to change his title to "team leader" ought to be forced to preach out of the Book of Numbers for a year as penance. The Book of Ecclesiastes if he thought he was being particularly clever.
The effort to come up with less churchy sounding names for church offices and activities is misguided folly. It does not succeed in making church more relevant or accessible. It removes no obstacles. And it has a very short shelf life. No one calling himself a "team leader" today will be doing so ten years from now, or will be willing to admit that he ever had.

*I'm kind of a stickler for "Pastor Tate," because "Pastor Joel" gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just don't like it. And there are number of other reasons why I'm opposed to the practice - but that's a post for another time.

Five reasons to love the apple

The roxbury russet is my favorite apple. I almost cried
when the Rutland Co-op ran out of them this fall.

1. No other fruit can match the apple for variety. It can be russetted, smooth, dimpled, seamed and seamless. It can be an almost translucent yellow, bright green, or a red so deep it looks black. It can be tart, sweet, juicy, dry, red-veined, pink-fleshed, tiny, and softball sized. Whereas a banana is pretty much a banana.

2. Apples are always being unfairly identified as the fruit Adam and Eve ate to bring the curse upon us all. And despite having been saddled with this monstrous bad rap have you ever heard apples complain of the injustice?

3. Apples require a certain number of “chill days,” times during their dormancy when the temperature falls below freezing, for them to produce fruit. This is a rebuke to the softness of the south, a redeeming feature of our otherwise hateful winters, and a ready made sermon illustration.

4. The trees from which the apples come are uncommonly beautiful in every season.

5. An apple requires no more effort for enjoyment than the effort involved in biting. But it can be peeled and pared and made into a hundred delightful dishes and an indispensable ingredient in many more.