Oh Kendall.  Ugh.  Did you stop to think that this would be the first thing many of us would see when we hit the blogs with our coffee in hand?  Blech.  What a terrible way to start my morning.  CNN meets Cosmo.  Awful.  Hard to believe. 

Sitting here typing this in a Muslim country, it makes me have a lot of sympathy for all those around the world (not only Muslims, but also Global South Christians) who are continually decrying America & the West’s moral decay.  This could be filed as exhibit A.

I hope this woman doesn’t have any daughters.  I can’t imagine that she could write this if she did.  I wish I could muster the grace & faith to pray for her, but right now the disgust is too great.

Kendall, how did you find this anyway?  (It reminds me a bit of that infamous Oprah show you blogged about… Cameron Diaz I think it was.  Wasn’t it Bishop Salmon who gave you that hat tip?!)

Do you think I should post a warning, Karen? I debated it.  Alas, it is an example of some contemporary thinking in this area.

Tough call Kendall about a warning.  I don’t think the piece itself is much worse than the excerpt you posted.  I do think it’s important to see that this kind of stuff is out there on supposedly “mainstream” news sites and not just reserved for some of the women’s magazines that I’ve avoided for 30 years.

Maybe a disclaimer something along the lines of what you posted on that Oprah interview with Cameron Diaz so long ago… 

But one question even harder to answer is do we want to be giving CNN hits for this piece?  Will it not encourage more of the same?  I have no easy answers for you.  Only questions about what is ethically best.  May the Lord continue to give you wisdom in what you post.  I appreciate your care in what you select.

The sad thing is that as a 55-year-old man in 2003, I had to have FWB explained to me by my then high school age daughter. I heard the term on an MTV show she was watching (which was quickly shut off) and didn’t know what “friends with benefits were.”
  My daughter explained it to me and then added that some of her high school girl friends had those kind of FWBs. It sent chills down my spine at the time, but it prompted a long talk between me, my wife and our daughter about the importance of commitment, marriage and the sacredness of such a relationship.
  It was similar to the discussion we had with her when she tried to argue that, and to put this delicately, the type of relationship Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton had was “not sex.”
  That prompted another long conversation about just what was sex and what wasn’t.
  It was so much easier when I was growing up. Now she lives out of state, has seemingly kept her moral values, but she travels in a world completely without limits.
  As a father of a daughter, I wake up in a cold sweat one out of five nights each week worrying about her safety and future.

Step one.  I should have and I demand (as a man or as a woman)complete sexual freedom, to be able to sleep with whomever like, whenever I like, with no commitments necessary.

Step two.  If I get pregnant, or if someone I slept with gets pregnant, I should have and I demand the right to end the inconvenient pregnancy by simply paying someone a few hundred dollars.

Under a regime of moral relativism, everything is judged from a perspective of my own personal rights.  And thus fornication, adultery, and even murder of innocent children is twisted into a societal “good”, the good being my abililty to maximize the exercise of my “rights” and my “freedom.”  But if I have the right to have sex when I want, and to kill an unborn child if that is my wish, why shouldn’t I have the right to steal whatever I want, or to kill anyone who I find irritating?  If my rights are paramount, what limits their exercise except my own powers and abilities?  This woman is one end of a spectrum occupied on the other end by the likes of leaders of totalitarian regimes.

.Edited slightly—ed..

Karen B., you may find the Fatima prayer useful during those occasions when a call to pray for someone collides with disgust:
Oh my Jesus,
Forgive us our sins.
Save us from the fires of hell.
Lead all souls to heaven,
Especially those in most need of thy mercy.

Blessings.

Thanks Rick, appreciate the prayer suggestion.  Apologize if I came across as Pharisaical.  I wasn’t meaning to sound so high and mighty.  Disgust may not be the best term for it.  Grief is probably more accurate.  After I got over my initial shock of seeing such immorality promoted so brazenly on a site I normally associate with “news,” the grief for the author set in.  How terrible that she is so starved for true intimacy that she has to substitute “friendship with benefits” for a lifelong relationship of love, trust and fidelity.  I’m single, so I can’t speak from experience, but am blessed to know a number of couples that show marriage at its God-given best.  So I have a pretty good idea of what this poor woman is missing.

What’s FWB stand for? Kendall has done the right thing here and should do it more often. This IS America, boys and girls, because this is what public schools and colleges foster as necessary social attitudes, and such postures are supported by vast numbers of parents. The groans of horror one hearts on a blog like this is the groan of a minority - and not a very big one either. The culture of excess, or self indulgence, of narcissism that has produced the honmophile agenda (which is now poisoning the social systems) is the very same culture that has produced the article above. They are ALL cut from the same shoddy, brightly-colored cloth. And it is worth noting that t his same mind set is the same one that has produced the careless excesses that caused the present financial disaster. All bad charact er starts here: the inability to say No to oneself.  Larry

This woman will wake up some day and know that everything she just wrote is a lie.  We need to be there as the Church to help her pick up the pieces. Only Jesus will be able to heal her from her wounds and her sin.

Aack.  I read Larry’s comment in #8, then re-read my own #7, and realize it could be very misleading.  When I wrote:

After I got over my initial shock of seeing such immorality promoted so brazenly on a site I normally associate with “news,”

I was of course referring to CNN, NOT T19!!!  Larry, I do agree Kendall has done the right thing.  The concerns I shared were not intended as criticisms of him.  It’s just very hard to read this stuff and know that so many have been deceived to believe that all that matters is worldly pleasure.

I just read the full transcript of Abp. Peter Jensen’s address to the Sydney convention (posted below by Kendall) this morning too. 
http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/mission/missionthinking/the_2008_presidential_address/

I highly recommend it.  One thing +Jensen said particularly struck me in the context of having just read this awful article at CNN.  He talks about the need to engage with the world and the culture:

T.C.Hammond, played a pivotal role in saving Moore College and hence the Diocese, from liberalism.  He was a deep theologian with an enormous fund of knowledge and a sharp wit.
He enabled his students to accept the authority of the Bible in the light of scholarship ancient and modern. He taught them that the Lord rules the church through the scriptures. He taught them how to choose between God’s word, and the surrounding culture;
not by denying all truth in culture, but by giving priority to the word.
We cannot flourish if we abandon the word of God as our regulative principle, in favour of the word of this world, this culture. His challenge is sharper than ever:  trust God’s word.

R.B.S Hammond was a preacher and a man of action.
There was a wall plaque to him in the old St Barnabas which said this:  ‘The Need of the World was on His Heart. [...]

We still need to be mature Christians, obedient to the word of God; we also need to understand our own times. And we especially need to be such Christians right now.

Posts like this from Kendall help us understand our times, and certainly this has “put the need of the world” on my heart this morning.  I don’t move in the same circles as the woman who wrote this article.  But I do have dear Christian friends who do.  And I am moved to pray for them this morning in a new way, that they will be able to reach out with hope and love and truth to those who have become trapped by the lies of the world, the flesh and the devil.

It’s good for people to realize what is out there.  I have two daughters now in their mid-20s and we have been dealing with the “hook-up” culture since their late middle school years.  Parents need to know what their children are confronted with if they are to have any hope of helping them through these years in the face of a toxic culture.  Be aware of what the culture is teaching, talk to your children, and pray a lot.

The woman who wrote this should at least provide a going rate table for those gals who want the benefits to be cash on the barrellhead.  As Shaw once quipped ” we’ve already established what you are, ma’am.  now we are just haggling over price”

While not quite as bad as Fox News, CNN is about worthless these days. They used to be fairly reputable, but they are descending quickly into infotainment.

Beg pardon, Helen, but don’t you see that she isn’t going to “wake up” and find herself dreadfully mistaken. What is there to wake up from? Cheap easy sex, sex without responsibilities, low cost sex, pleasure and little or no pain? Why isn’t this already awake, so to speak, esp if the entire country favors being prone to such engagements? As Katherine said, the hook-up practice now fills the schools, from high school to college, and by the time a girl graduates from college, she has been laid so many times she has long lost count. Why should any man not continue on this pleasurable path as long as he can? Low cost sex without responsibilities? 

  Now it is possible that she had earlier moral trainiing that she has simply set aside; this may come alive later when sex has lost its zing. But why should she not get married when she feels like it, if she can find an acceptable man who will accept her for what she is and has been? And will he be any better? Make money, have a kid or two, retire early, die old? Why not? What can you say to her that will convincingly counter the present reality? That she is sinning and will regret it? Please. This is America, people, this is the way it is, and it is everywhere. God may be on our side ( or we on His) but the greater legions are not with us.  Larry

Ah but Larry, you miss a crucial point of the article.  She herself admits that sometimes her heart and emotions don’t quite cooperate.  God made her to desire more, to desire love & emotional safety and true intimacy.  She’s got a God-shaped hole in her heart just like the rest of us.  She may deny it, try to drown it by chasing after other things.  But it’s there.  And I think she herself glimpses it at times.

Read her words again.  There’s a conscience in there and emotions and desires that she finds pesky and can’t quite get rid of:

Dudes are seemingly born knowing how to detract emotions from physical activity. In fact, with many of them, I think it’s their default setting. They can spend the night with a woman and then meander off into the sunset without giving the assignation a second thought. 
But women can have a harder time of it. We worry that we’re being “used” ... or feel like we’re being promiscuous

And then:
The trick is to accept what you’ve got with this person and avoid trying to make it something it’ll never be. I’ve certainly been guilty of trying to turn a completely fine FWB into a BF. 

I assume BF stands for “best friend.”  Don’t you hear the longing in there?  She wants much more.  She’s trying to convince herself to accept what she’s got.  But she knows it’s not really all there could be.  There’s much more…

I can only pray the Lord will use this longing for more to open her eyes (and the eyes and hearts of so many like her) to all that He longs to offer her in Christ.

I find this article so depressing, but I am not surprised.  The Timesonline (UK) has articles that are just as depressing if not more depressing.  I once thought that there was a natural “bottom” in terms of commonly accepted social depravity and that people would be so repulsed that the trend would change.  I assumed that the ugliness of our culture would have a limit.  I haven’t had that assumption (or hope) for some time.

Karen B. - I took the BF to stand for Boy Friend - in other words, she wants a relationship with a man who cares for her, not just the physical relationship. But I don’t know - Best Friend or Boy Friend, in both of those there is a longing for a caring relationship.

Yes, Karen, women do have a nature proper to themselves. Evolution has made it what it is. It is also true of men, but a man’s nature is substantially different because evolution requires something else of him. This isn’t a God shaped hole, it’s an evolutionary hole (unless this is what you mean by God shaped, in which case we agree). But humans are almost infinitely malleable. You can teach a human practically anyting which overrides his “natural” nature. WE have spent years in America teaching women to be men and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. And so she says that she has to accept…etc. She isn’t going to get wht she innately wants, so she will accept getting laid as good enough,  and the truth is, if you practice this, you will believe it, and if you believe it, it will become a fact. Fact: She has the morals of a streetwalker. Any sign that she intends to change this? On the contrary, she justifies it. God has given us moral freedom because the moral world is meaningless without it. She is free to choose. We know what she has chosen. Will she ever feel guilt, repent, serve her penance, pray for absolution, or will she simply feel overwhelming regret when she turns 50, discovers she is alone, and the old body doesn’t heat up much any more? Or will in fact this moral stance work perfectly well for her, year after year, until she finds a husband which she has to accept….etc. After all, she has been here before. And they will be ok with each other because the ol’ hormones aren’t cranking the flywheel any more. In short, when she’s tired of riding, she’ll just get off the train. Why not?
 
  What a grim gray world! I think about it and feel black despair because this self indulgent world is everywhere.

  Still, you’re a woman and know more about this than I do. Bless your heart, I hope you’re right.  Larry

Good for posting this, Kendall.  It does speak to where people in the culture are.  The church has to find a way to respond with its sensibility in a language such a person understands.  The question:  how would we do it so she doesn’t just say, “you don’t understand.” 

How would someone convince this person of the error of her ways?

And because we have no ready answer to this woman, the essay above on Christian apologetics is one of the really important blog entries we have seen. We need a new and vigorous generation of apologists because the Christianity looks so weak and powerless, so effeminate (See the extended entry and the pastors description of the right sort of church; he has defined everything as positive which in fact makes Christianity look weak, effeminate, spineless and unattractive.) What has Christianity to give to this woman? Not much, if she doesn’t grasp guilt, shame and remorse, as she apparently does not.

    Her nature wants emotional comfort and protection from a man, and she wants the good sex that she hopes goes with it. Good luck dear: You and the feminists have made men see that granting what your heart wants is unnecessary to get what THEY want, because your posture should make us say of you: How like a man, how very like a man you have become. So. What is the church going to say to this woman that gets her what she wants? Since she has no guilt, and no sense of sin, what then? The Beatitudes? Won’t fly and good reason. For the same reason, men don’t bother to go to church much any more. Time to see Christ as something more than a divine wimp, peddling a saccharine sugar candy called “love.” Christian love is not THIS and she needs to be told in hard words that God’s love, however merciful, is The Law, told in hard words that she can neither run nor hide when the night inevitably comes.
In short, she needs to learn what fear is.  Larry

The church has to find a way to respond with its sensibility in a language such a person understands.  The question:  how would we do it so she doesn’t just say, “you don’t understand.”

I think Karen B. is on the right track.  Her behavior betrays her longing for something she can never find.  The message would involve showing her the hopelessness of her situation.  Something along the lines of, you are looking for figs in a thorn tree.  But she has to understand that she really wants figs and not thorns.  It is directly analogous to leading people to Christ.  We have to understad we are drowning and in need of a savior.  Didn’t Thoreau say that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?  She is unhappy and on a futile quest and she doesn’t even know it.  So the trick is to bring her face to face with her unhappiness, and then show her where happiness lies.  My $.02, anyway.

In college this is sold as “hooking up.”  Perfectly natural.  You should see the kind of stuff that gets written in the sex advice column in my son’s college newspaper as being perfectly natural expressions of behavior and should be engaged in frequently.  On the other hand, all the colleges are bemoaning the high incidence of “date rape.”  What do they expect when they are sending two totally contradictory messages to their student body as to what is acceptable behavior?

The real world is in #22’s entry. What is immoral to us is perfectly moral to them. Why should it not be? I read my own college newspaper and my response is precisely the same as Jim’s : a kiond of horror at a world so corrupt, so vice ridden that all morality has been stood on its head. But they don’t see this and have no reason to do so. The 60’s lay down the present rule: If it feels good afterwards, it is good.

    And #21, how would you show her the hopelessness of her situation when she doesn’t see it as hopeless? She has settled for “good enough.” And most of us do, but at a different level than hers.
She must see with her own eyes a relationship that matches her heart’s request, and it must be one that she can believe is open to her too. Does the church have anything to do with this? If so, what?
One answer - let’s get this through our heads - is to make church a place where real men actually want to go. Christianity doesn’t HAVE to be the religion of weakness, passivity, feminine-in-the-worst-sense, love-as-spun-sugar.  Larry