I am told by many that I’m not that old, but they flatter. I have not got to retirement age yet: I am in the last decade of the “standard work life” with retirement at 65, with no plans to retire. One of my peers said (in the gym, doing a very long session) that he’s cut down to four days a week: not an option for me. As the boys finish high school and start university I have a series of projects that will keep me very busy for at least another three years (God willing) and then I can consider slowing down.
But the memes of this time have curdled among the young. At the age when young men should be courting, choosing and committing many are fearful. Two quotes about the evil of this age, one from an elder, and one from the young.
I’m old. Old people typically associate with other old people. In consequence, over time we can lose touch with developments among younger people. It takes effort to resist the process of temporal separation. (It helps not to move to Florida.)
However, young and old both have the benefits of the Internet. Numerous sites exist almost explicitly to reflect the trends in opinions and behavior among members of particular demographics. If we have the inclination, we can apprise ourselves of changes among our non-contemporaries fairly easily. Of course, as in all such sentences, the most important word in the previous one is if.One of the trends that fascinates me is the trend, among young and middle-aged Americans, away from interaction with members of the opposite sex
In my job I am continually training. Educating. Medical students, Advanced trainees. PhD students. I deal with a lot of younger people most days, and I’ve seen the same thing. For good reason, moreover. My sons were at school when one of the senior students suicided — because his GF was pregnant and he was being pressured to get a job. At 16. They call those who chase the fornication fools, not because they are that righteous but because they have done a cost benefit analysis and short term female companionship is seen as wanting.
The future of sex in the UK seems to be “if you have a vagina, you can put any man in prison unless he records the whole seduction process or makes you sign papers where you write down everything that happened in meticulous detail.” This is not a joke, this is actually happening…. In other words, if you are married and your wife has a much lower income than you (which means you are a male provider), then she can sue you any day she likes for being raped. Once that happens, you wake up in court for having provided for your family and YOU need to provide evidence that she consented to sex last week. Good luck to all married UK men!
Frances Paretto, who I quoted first, is correct. The very structure of society is crumbling. THe laws we have (as quoted from Return of Kings) assume that every single interaction we have is somehow criminal, and all sex needs to be regulated. By inspectors. In our bedrooms. Married, Single, Gay, Intersex or whatever. This is in the context of a moral panic about those who were rock stars in my teenage years sleeping with groupies who may or may not have been drunk or may or may not have been under 16.
It is time for us to work as congregations. We need to correct. We need to teach. Because the law is now not merely against Christ. It is agains society: it is proposing a revolution that will destroy any vestige of humanity in the family, leaving us with the state,
While the state enters a bankrupt endgame.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.
Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
(Galatians 5:25-6:10 ESV)
In the church we have a bigger problem than women in eldership or gay ministers. Those are easy problems to solve: they should not happen, the people who seek these positions generally have a respect for the word of God, and their sisters (for the girls) and elders need to show them scripture and then pray with them, as they step down and join the rest of us broken and divorced in the pews.
The problem is that the family courts is destroying our families, and breaking our witness. Too many of us are divorced: and anyone who has that T shirt will tell you it is not worth it. God hates divorce with good reason.
I would advocate that the divorced treat their ex as if dead and do not return to him — following the Westminster confession. If it is a one way door, then people would pause. I would also say that the divorced should not remarry but support themselves for a season, and only after a period of some years should they date — and if there are kids, this should be when their kids are much, much older, but that is not scriptural, that is observing the chaos when a mother is living with serial boyfriends.
Within the church we need to correct each other with gentleness, and continue to do good: again that is clear. If you are, like me, divorced, and find another divorced casualty from this intergenerational sex war, then pray for guidance, ask your elders to pray for you; and move slowly and carefully even though you may fall head over heels in love. Because the stakes are now so high, and it is not only you but your children.
For we have to live by the Spirit: and only the Spirit can allow us to live fully human.
But my fear is this. That the very model of Christian marriage, the teaching that men and women are morally responsible, that mothers be mothers and fathers fathers, that the teaching from Paul (who was writing in a time when divorce frequently took place for political considerastions) about wifecraft and husbandry, all the teaching in scripture, taught by all branches of the church until reccently, will be seen as oppressive, and reasons to bang the male in prison. Because he may have not got permission, because he is not acting according to the fine craft of feminist regulation.
Because the State is a jealous God, and wants our women and children. We are facing the endgame of social democracy, as we run our of not only our own money but others: the situation Greece, Venezuela and Argentina are in will be played out throughout the world. (And it will be much bloodier in the Oil states, who have to import their food, as their population vastly exceeds the carrying capacity of the land).
And at that point, our only response has to be that we will obey God, not man. We will obey God, not women. And we will obey God, not the microaggression and microregulation of these antichristian and antihuman laws. In England the crown lost his head for less than this. I hear the calls of revolution and restoration, and they do not all come from the Islamists and Nazis. But instead, the working man, the middle class, who have lost decency and want it back, are voting with their feet.
So let us do good in this time and reform our churches. Let us pray for revival. The alternative is revolution.
I’ve prepared myself for prison. I do not see it as at all far-fetched to prepare myself for this. Of course, I’ve learned the hard way to be very careful whom I broach such a subject with (i.e., family members and many friends this is not such a great idea). But the fact is, as you noted, we must obey God. And as also noted, the law is no longer merely against our Faith but indeed, our entire society and the traditions that held it so carefully together. I consider it likely that, should things continue this way, the worst case scenarios could very well prove true.
I’m not interested in labeling myself, thus “MGTOW” is not my brand. But there’s no question that I’ve weighed the options of attempting to exit permanent bachelorhood (I’m divorced, like yourself) and found the balance wanting entirely too much. So I remain a bachelor. I don’t know anything worth focusing my time on these days but to dig and dig into my faith and, if I study to show myself approved, perhaps God will grant me more wisdom.
What else is worth the trouble now, besides Wisdom? Besides, the further I dig the more I discover just how much God loves to give to us what He already wants us to have. Servanthood is not an issue when the One being served is so ready to see us become what He’d intended the whole time. Feminists forget: lectures we don’t need. Busybodies we don’t need.
What we need is less envy, less spite and more grace, more couth and a heap more willingness to do the things we sometimes do not wish in order that we might garner the things we need.