Not Dating Jesus

February 2024

Certain evangelicals love to tell you can date something undateable–mainly, Jesus. 

It mostly flies from the mouths of the young: church youth group leaders trying this mentorship thing for the first time, college students surrounded by fledgling marriages.

A diamond is formed at a temp of 2,200-degrees Fahrenheit and 725,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. Much of that pressure is concentrated on Christian college campuses, notorious for producing diamonds.

Dating, in this culture, is like a rest stop bathroom. It’ll do in a pinch. It’s a temporary place, but the fullness of your experience is waiting at home, with the bidet and good soap. Home, of course, is marriage. 

Advice framed around Jesus as this placeholder for a romantic relationship screws up your idea of what God can be like. In reality, we’re given the metaphor of marriage in the Bible not because it’s 1-to-1 like swapping applesauce for oil in our brownies, but because God is so big and we can only grasp a tiny corner. If we apply current cultural roles like boyfriend to God, it’s like saying because it worked for your brownies, you can definitely swap applesauce for oil to season your cast iron pans.

 In saying Jesus could be your boyfriend, there exists a world where you get everything you need from a spiritual plane. But Jesus himself was always inviting TOUCH! TASTE! SEE! We’re not meant to only live in our heads. He had a physical body to show us things we couldn’t grasp with just a brain thing.

The whole dating-Jesus thing gets pulled in as valid theology by Christian relationship experts whose qualifications include:

• being married

• believing in God

These people love to tell you how to improve your relationship with God, because God is the bridegroom and you are the bride, and lucky you! Here are a real life bride and bridegroom eager to reveal their secrets! They will drop their voices a tone and tell you about the deep intimacy that God wants with all of us.

They love intimacy.
They are so excited to be in on this spiritual group project with sex. 

And they are so eager for me to reap the benefits of this special club. They will tell me not just how to love God like a married person, they will tell me how to let down my guard and find my own human-sized example of God’s goodness. You see how confused this is already? Focus on Jesus because he’s all you need, but date a physical person because he will teach you unknowable things about God. My favorite bad advice is of the ‘fix yourself and you’ll finally be open to love” flavor, which skips any theological veil and runs directly into omitting the possibility of grace-filled love for you. Often, the teaching couple will drop in a sad story about the sin they had to wade through together before their relationship got healthy. The irony that they did not fix themselves before finding love is blinding. 

I trust advice from couples who just sent a kid to college and still laugh at each other’s jokes. I trust advice from couples in well-worn jeans who ask follow up questions about my prayer request. I don’t find much in advice from couples who learned about kissing 15 minutes ago.

In my own tiny Christian college days, I got so worked up about dating. I held off on dates because I was so worried I’d get it wrong. Turns out, the same stuff that makes me a good friend makes me a good dater. It’s all transferable skills. The further I stray from specifically-Christian dating advice, the better it’s been. And it shifts how I see God, too.

God’s not playing mean tricks on me. He’s not withholding love until I learn to clean myself up a bit. Do you know how long it takes to extricate yourself from the idea that you have to be prepared for love? Do you know how nice it is to realize a date’s not that dire?

Jesus can’t be our boyfriend because he’s bigger than that. He’s not a temporary swap. And he’s not an excuse to ditch the material world and the community we’re supposed to join. 

I am mad that the framing for so many women’s groups is still this Jesus-as-lover deal. You’re a princess, you’re a treasure. You’re a precious gem, a flower, a bride-in-waiting. You can’t lead a church unless you move to another country. You can use your gifts to serve the Lord in an office job, but don’t cross those skills over to the church. Careful! Careful!

They had us inventing boyfriends! I have so many lists of traits from girls’ Bible study groups, lists of an ideal man. Curriculum writers thought using the language of cute boys would get us engaged to the topic at hand.

We didn’t know anything about what we needed, so we accepted the framing. We could've been given something richer. I imagine the circle of girls I grew up with digging in to esoteric texts, fascinated by the restorative gospel, or the way Jesus is constantly making people alive, or the way women in the text long for things—grappling with God. 

I will not tell you how many ‘notes to my future husband’ I wrote while even younger than I am now, both prompted by Bible study groups and created solo.
I can tell you that the most fun part of a love note is the specificity. Once I figured that out, I quit writing them to a vague concept.

Marriage isn’t the only picture of God’s love. We are coins, we are sheep, we are dancing like King David in his underwear and God is so delighted by us. His love is richly specific to each of us and our places.

My church is in process of developing our 5-year vision. We formed a Listening Team to be representatives paying closer attention to what God is telling our church. I wanted to join as soon as I heard about it. I threw my name in the ring, others nominated me, too. I had dreams of spending lots of extra time in prayer, maybe a prayer walk or journaling some beautiful imagery as I listened. Of marching up to fellow church members and saying “So, tell me what God’s been moving in you!”

I must tell you now that I half-assed my entire participation. I didn’t even manage to fill out every Doodle polls asking which time I’d be available to meet.
I didn’t bring any notes to meetings. 

At the very first meeting, several of us admitted to feeling inadequate for this. “Who am I to be part of this process? Who am I to be representative of this community?” And, in admitting it to each other, we saw that the work wasn’t to invent anything. 

In this state, tired and (in my case) imploding, we listened for God. 
It was as simple as “Do you notice any patterns in this congregational feedback?” 

We kept seeing, agreeing on, and coming back to oasis. A garden we co-create with God. Counter-cultural rest. 

In my exhausted, dropping-meeting-communications state, I realized I need this place now. We can’t slice apart personal and communal. There’s this common concept in American Evangelicalism especially, of the ‘personal relationship with Jesus,’ and I don’t know how to approach it right now. It’s too tangled with all the weirdness of relating to God like a bad date.

But still, I know Him.

I know God to be conversations after church. To be a story that opens me raw. To be a long walk and pocket notes. To be a pattern noticed. To be a solid thing on Sundays. To be a mystery some Tuesdays.

I grow more traditional, hungry for a way of being that skews communal. Singleness feels like it should, at my church: a non-issue. I still, personally, want to be married, but it is not a moral failing, or incompleteness, I’m not isolated. 

There are things I sit with in the dark. I don’t say the whole thing out loud. But at church I say a piece, request prayer, share more over cookies after service.

I am fed even when I don’t have the words or the guts or the energy to ask for nourishment. The things going on in my life affect me personally, but they are the church’s, too. I am the church and the church is me. I exist in community.

I am a half-assed participant. All of us are. None of us have wholeness to share.

God wants me and you even at our most lost. We’re a jar, we’re a body, we’re a guest room. We’re a seed in the soil, we’re a meal with strangers. We’re a gold coin, existing, and he will sweep the place to finally pick us up. We’re a chick tucked under a hen’s wing, we’re a woman round with promised child, we’re a son embraced after a long distance. 

He has a place for us. On the shelf, in the house, in the family. He is always picking us up and putting us where we belong.

---

Elsewhere

If this resonated with you, you might like the only Christian singleness book that didn’t make me want to puke and the only secular dating book that didn’t make me want to gouge out my eyes.

I’m giving a talk on creativity and noticing at AIGA’s Design People event on February 21, and I’d love to see you there.

Three songs for Valentine’s Day: This for the cynics, this for the hopeful, this for the cynical-but-secretly-mushy. Pick your poison!

Two pen varieties I grabbed on a whim for an Art + Faith book group activity: dual brush/fine point Flairs and metallic G2s. Fun fun fun. Get on it, pen nerds.
(P.S. Sioux Falls artists & makers! Please join us at this group, if you’re craving some deep talks!)

Crunchy cookie supremacy. I distinctly remember my confusion in hearing kids in my Sunday School class rave that cookies that were “Soooo soft.”
My ideal snack food is spicy kettle chips, and honestly, looking at my cookie track record, the hits are suspiciously close to that ideal, whether spicy or “shatteringly crisp” like these chocolate chip numbers.

“search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.” I’m sold.

my candle burns

wrote a great essay on work that is the right size, a thing I’ve been trying to crack recently.

---

Thanks for reading this month. What are you thinking about? Did you have to sort out weird bad dating advice from actual helpful stuff? Reply directly to this email, or leave a comment to share with other readers. If you know someone who’d like this, feel free to forward it on.

❤️, Ten