Author: Mark Forstrom (Page 8 of 13)

Saturday was one of the greatest days of my life.   Thanks to everyone who participated in the youth group reunion — either by your physical attendance or by your updates, thoughts and kind words.

I was profoundly and emotionally affected by the whole experience.  I need to blog about it to help me process it all –and for those of you who weren’t there, I want to tell you how it went.

For months I personally invested a lot of time, effort, and mental energy getting ready for this reunion.  It was the right thing to do and I was going to get it done.  The preparations were all very task-oriented and I like tasks:  planning, communicating, reserving, organizing, displaying, etc.  I spent the last two nights at church, maximizing the time needed in making the final preparations.

At 7 am Saturday morning we loaded up all the memorabilia and refreshments for the “Meet & Greet”, which was held at our old church building.  (Thanks to Faith Bible for letting us use their facility.)  We set up 20 tables in their gym and displayed a year’s worth of memories on each (photos, t-shirts, trip booklets, etc).  Haley Neiderhizer, our intern, surprised Mark and I with giant photo posters of us for people to sign.  It was neat that she gave people a way to express themselves.  Gina, my admin, set up the refreshments.

At 10 am, people from the “early years” started arriving, and it was fun to see people reconnecting and reminiscing and sharing long-forgotten stories.  As the “Meet & Greet” progressed, alumni from later years arrived.  It was delightful watching these students and sponsors reconnect with each other.  My enjoyment was watching them enjoy it.  This event was planned just for them!

When the “Meet & Greet” ended at 3 pm we had a mere three hours to clean up and transport everything back to our new building for the Banquet.  We set up the memorabilia display tables once again and checked on the decorations and food (Ken Owens and his team did a fabulous job!)

Alumni started arriving just before 6 and I again enjoyed watching them enjoy their event.  During the delicious dinner, we projected the 100+ current family photos that had been submitted by alumni and we played a youth group worship CD that was recorded in 1997.   Everything was going just as I had planned.

The after-dinner program was to be simple.  We would sing worship songs from over the years–using an overhead projector for the earliest ones!  We would recognize the sponsors for their service and present a special gift to Charley Snodgrass, who has been a sponsor for 25 consecutive years.  And then Mark Eades and I would each share about 15 minutes of reflections.

When Mark E got up to speak, rather than address the alumni, he started addressing me.  I could sense that something was going on that I had not planned.  Little did I realize that the party that I had planned was about to be sabotaged!  Suddenly, he announced that a special guest from my past had arrived to join me for this celebration of mine!  Just as suddenly, my old friend Brian Carroll emerged from the side room and came up on the stage.  He had driven 20 hours from Texas just to surprise me.

But I think the greater surprise to us all was the emotional impact that occurred within me at that moment.  It wasn’t about Brian — because I’ve never gotten emotional over him before — but it was about what he represented.  Since we became friends in college, Brian has been influential in my life — helping me to grow, challenging me to godliness, calling me on my sin, modeling Christlikeness to me.  When he walked in, it reminded me of how significant relationships are.

And then I looked across the room full of people and I realized that what was true about Brian was equally true about every person in the room — and many more who couldn’t attend.  During our youth group years together each of these precious people had shaped my life and I had shaped theirs in some way — on a retreat, in a bus, on a trip, in a stairway, etc.  I realized at that moment that this reunion was not just for them, it was for me too.  It wasn’t about well-managed tasks resulting in a party, it was about celebrating life-altering relationships.  That is what had brought us together this day.  A day that I will never forget.

In 2012, our church had a panel discussion addressing questions about marriage, dating, and sexuality from a biblical perspective.  Here are my answers.

QUESTION: Is dating without marriage in mind ok? What is the purpose of dating and marriage?

Let me answer the last questions first. Marriage is the joining of a husband and wife in the most intimate of human relationships, the ideal context for childrearing, and the ideal setting to depict the love, commitment, and affection of Christ for His church.

First of all, it’s worth noting that dating is not found anywhere in the Bible, in fact the norm there is for the parents to arrange the marriages of their children – which by the way I think is a brilliant idea – although my two teenage daughters might disagree. In all of scripture, the closest thing we find to dating is in the Samson account, and we all know how miserably that turned out!

Seriously though, dating is the reality in our culture. So what is the purpose of dating?
For those seeking to find a husband or wife, dating – or courtship – provides opportunities to learn about the character, personality, and interests of the other person, which are essential things to know when selecting a spouse.

So is dating without marriage in mind ok? Depends what you mean by dating. If it means going out on occasional dates as friends, fine. But I say dating is NOT OK in at least the following five circumstances:
• If it’s Recreational Dating, using the other person for your own immediate satisfaction.
• If it involves any kind of sexual intimacy.
• If it isolates the two of you from healthy interaction with family and friends.
• If having a boyfriend or girlfriend is merely a way to gain or retain social status.
• If it strings the other person along in an undefined, nebulous, pseudo-commitment.

QUESTION: What are some practical steps for living out a Biblical view of sexuality?

The only proper context for sexual expression is within marriage. This is God’s gracious design as a way for husbands and wives to experience great intimacy and mutual delight. Those who are married should make the pursuit of intimacy – including sexual intimacy — a priority in ways that bring mutual satisfaction. This is biblical. See 1 Cor 7.

Since sexual expression has no proper place outside of marriage, this creates a problem for those who aren’t married. What do Christ-following singles do with the reality that they have raging hormones and sexual desires, but don’t have marriage as a way to express them? This is an important question.

The first step is to bring these things to God. This doesn’t just apply to sexual appetites, we must do this with any illegitimate craving, temptation, anxiety, frustration, unmet expectation, or desire that can’t be righteously fulfilled – we must surrender them to God.

The second step is to make choices that will reduce our sexual appetites. Fred Stoeker uses the illustration of our sex drive being like a Sumo wrestler. If you feed the Sumo wrestler, it will conquer you. If you starve it, you will conquer it. So what can you do to reduce your sexual frustrations?

• Stop viewing pornography. Statistically speaking, hundreds of you struggle with this – guys mostly, but also girls. It doesn’t satisfy, it leaves you empty, it takes more and more to thrill you, but you feel less and less satisfied and more and more helpless. Porn gives you a false idea that sexuality is about taking and consuming, rather than giving and serving the way God designed sex in marriage. No women could ever live up to the expectation of porn. It’s all about you, but there’s nothing real about it. Enough is enough. How about getting victory over this starting today? 1. Secret sins never go away. 2. Tell me or someone who you can make yourself accountable to. 3. Read “Closing the Window” by Tim Chester.
• By the way, women, romance novels have been called emotional pornography. Are you meeting unfulfilled desires by living in a fantasy world of literature. Are you creating expectations and desires that no real man could live up to? Think about it.
• Entertainment. Our culture is sex saturated. What kind of sexual messages are you exposing yourself to through movies, tv, music, jokes with the boys. How about changing what you expose yourself to?
• Modest dress. Both guys and girls. Dress in a way that doesn’t feed someone else’s Sumo wrestler.

QUESTION. If someone has a very detailed sexual past, how do they fully move forward in Christ’s forgiveness and grace?

Sexual sin naturally produces much embarrassment, guilt and shame. Satan, the great “Accuser of the Brethren” in Rev 12:10, would want to keep us perpetually enslaved by this guilt and shame, sidelining us from abundant living. We wrongly think God must have lost His patience, resulting in a false sense of being alienated from Him. Ironically this perceived wall between us and God puts us in a much worse condition than the sexual sin itself. When such debilitating thoughts arise, keep in mind these scriptural truths:
• If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Do you believe this? Will you accept His cleansing?
• While we were his enemies, Christ reconciled us to Himself (Rom 5:10). He loved you as an enemy. Couldn’t He love you despite sexual weaknesses? Yes!
• If he could forgive the blatant in-your-face sins of the soldiers who were nailing Him to the cross (Luke 23:34), then couldn’t he forgive you for your sexual sins? Yes!
• Nothing can separate you from the love of God (Rom 8:38-39).
• If God can remove your sins as far away as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12) why do you keep them near at hand?
• If you were dead in your trespasses and sins before God’s grace rescued you (Eph 2:1-10) why not divert your attention away from your deadness and trust Him to make you “alive in Christ” now?
• Are you living in the Room of Good Intentions or in the Room of Grace?

On our Winter Retreat this weekend, our teaching theme presented the “Sacred Pathways” described in the book by the same name by Gary Thomas. I’m going to summarize the book here so others will know what we talked about–I think every believer would benefit spiritually by learning the insights presented in this book.
So here’s a quick overview to clue you in. Gary Thomas is one of my very favorite authors. He is, a marvelous church historian who gleans spiritual gems from the forefathers of our faith and puts them in easy to understand language. In his historical research, he has identified nine spiritual “temperaments” or ways that people are wired to best love and connect with God. Knowing how you’re wired to worship helps you experience God in more meaningful ways. The nine pathways are

• The NATURALIST — worships God through experiencing God’s creation
• The SENSATE— worships God through the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, & taste)
• The ENTHUSIAST — worships God expressively through joyful passion and expectation.
• The INTELLECTUAL— worships God by studying Truth and establishing firm beliefs.
• The TRADITIONALIST— worships God by enjoying historic practices of the church, symbols, creeds, or hymns.
• The ASCETIC— worships God by living a life of simplicity, solitude, and self-denial.
• The CONTEMPLATIVE— worships God by meditating on an intimate, loving, personal relationship with Him.
• The CAREGIVER — worships God by loving and serving others.
• The ACTIVIST— worships God by making efforts to change the world.

All the “pathways” are valid and necessary in the church. We’ll each have several that are dominant–and knowing that helps us to avoid judging others’ ways of worshiping. It also helps to know that it’s ok for me to worship in a way that may be different from others. It’s also useful to try other pathways to expereince God in new ways. During the retreat after presenting each pathway in detail we had a time to experience each one (nature prayer walks, contemplation, prayer for each other, packaging meals for Kids Against Hunger, etc.)

Everyone received a copy of Sacred Pathways. I’d recommend eveyone get a copy and take the assessment. I have a case of books if anyone’s interested in purchasing one for $10.
By the way, in case you’re wondering about my pathway mix–I’m an Ascetic, Contemplative, Intellectual, who’s becoming more and more of a Traditionalist!

Last Sunday was the series finale for LOST and before too much time goes by I want to write my reflections about it.  I must admit that I have been a Lost addict for the past two years, when a friend loaned me the first two seasons on DVD.  After that we Forstroms (minus Cindy) found ourselves utterly captivated.

We don’t have tv service so we’ve watched seasons 3-6 on abc.com.  It became our Wednesday-night-after-youth-group tradition and the girls and I had great times together watching it together.  We enjoyed trying to figure out the unexplained mysteries and found the character development extremely interesting.  There seemed to be a lot of religious and mythological symbolism, which made us curious about where the show was heading.

THINGS I’M GLAD ABOUT.

• Experiencing this with my girls.  It was like a weekly “Daddy Date” and it gave us a lot of time together and ongoing conversations about where the storyline was going.  I’ll never regret the time spent with them.  We’d stay up as late as we needed to to have our weekly LOST experience together.  Homework always took a back seat to LOST!
• I was captivated by the complexity of the storytelling, the beautiful scenery, the haunting musical score, the compelling characters, and the intrigue of the mysterious storyline. 
• I thoroughly enjoyed having conversations about it with other friends and co-workers who were likewise addicted to the show.  It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what this-or-that meant or where that came from, or what ever happened to so-and-so. 
• There was so much to remember and try to unwravel.  Right to the end we kept wondering who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and who was behind it all. That made it especially intriguing and fun.

THE FINALE

Part of the weekly enjoyment of the mystery was my assumption that — in the end — the mysteries would be explainable and have meaning.  I was somewhat disappointed to find that the finale left many of the questions unanswered (which I somewhat expected, since there were so many loose ends).  But my real disappointment was to discover that many of the show’s unexplained mysteries were irrelevant in the end anyways.  It didn’t really matter who the good and bad guys were.  It didn’t really matter who died, who’s name was on the wall, who took over Jacob’s job as the “island keeper”, who travelled through time, who destroyed the submarine, who escaped on the airplane, who stayed behind, whether the island sank or time-shifted, who lived-together or died-alone, who pushed a button every 108 minutes, who bought a fried chicken franchise, who rode in a wheelchair, etc.   Not much of what happened during the 121 episodes seemed to matter much in the end.  At the end of the finale all the characters mysteriously converged together in some alternate-reality in an ecumenical churchlike building and they were all at peace.  In the end the only relevant thing seemed to be how they had bonded with each other during their experiences.   This existentialist ending left me feeling strung along or duped.  I felt unsatisfied.

The ending also made me wonder about some things.

THINGS I’M QUESTIONING. 

• Whether I would have watched the show had I known the mysteries were going to be largely unanswered and irrelevant anyways.
• If spending 100 hours watching Lost was good stewardship of my time.  
• If I became desensitized to the depictions of sin in the show (language, immorality, torture, murder, etc.), justifying them because I thought the show would end with a beneficial “moral to the story.”
• Whether my passion for LOST was at times greater than my passion for God.  Beyond the 100 hours of the show I certainly spend many more hours contemplating Lost’s mysteries and talking about it.
• What is it about LOST that appealed to me so much and kept me so hooked?  Was it the quest for the mysteries’ answers (which mostly never came anyways)?  Was it the character development (which actually worked backwards so that in the end everyone’s characters melded into emotionless melancholy in some alternate-reality world)?
• If I’d have known the ending at the beginning would I have been so captivated by it?

Will I spend another hundred hours and watch the whole series again?  This one I can answer:  No.