I have had many things over the last month that I have wanted to blog about but alas, no time! However, today, I have nothing (not a misprint) to do! It is a beautiful autumn afternoon, my house is in order, kids are quiet and hubby is off somewhere outside "piddling". Let me follow that tangent for a minute....have you ever noticed that men "piddle"? They walk around aimlessly picking up a stick here and there, looking at this or that without any real focus for getting anything accomplished. For the life of me I couldn't do this! It is not in my nature or in the nature of any woman, especially with children, to expend energy for no purpose!! If I'm going to use up my very precious energy I'm going to be doing something efficiently. Just one of the differences between the way God created men and women, which offers a nice sequeway into the topic I wanted to address in this post and if anyone truly reads this, it might be lengthy so be patient!
The topic that has been on my mind over the last few days is one of Courtship. Courtship being a model for guiding young men and women in choosing a spouse. Kraig and I are firm believers that courtship is the biblical way to approach marriage however, there seems to be very little information out there about the steps of courtship and how to go about the actual process. So, I thought I would map out some rules basically for my own benefit and if it happens to benefit someone else then wonderful!!
I guess to begin I should provide some background information on why we came to this conclusion. It is important to note that Kraig and I dated and we did not follow this for ourselves. I think that is one reason why we are looking to something different for our children. Dating took up a lot of wasted time in our teen years and led to some poor choices overall that we look back on now and regret. The fact that we have a successful marriage now is due to God’s grace ALONE! We did everything we could to mess it up! With marriages ending everyday in divorce, in and out of the church, we wanted to settle the issue long before Landon and Lausyn were interested in the opposite sex. We had to ask ourselves, how do we set them up for success in marriage? No doubt, marriage is hard enough when you have a firm foundation much less when you don’t!
We narrowed down our reasons to three: First, dating is never mentioned in the bible. Dating is something that our society has developed to allow two adolescents with adult bodies and adult hormones the ability to feel like adults by being alone on "dates" thereby opening the door for dangerous temptation. Isn't this really unfair to our children? As parents we still bear the responsibility of instructing, guiding and safeguarding our children until they are adults and the definition of adulthood will be different for each child. For some it might be 18, others 20 and still others 22 or older. The fact of the matter is that we never stop being parents to our children even after they begin families of their own - we just parent in different ways. The second reason why we have chosen courtship rests on the high rate of failure for marriage within our society today. Studies confirm that in cultures where arranged marriage and courtship is prevalent that the divorce rate is extremely low and people contend that they are satisfied, even happy within their marriages. Lastly, courtship takes the emphasis off of the physical and emotional aspect of choosing a spouse and places it on the logical process of choosing and choosing well.
To be continued...
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