New Lyrics to T. Swift's Wildest Dreams

One Christian Family idea I have is to make up new words to songs.  I do this a lot.  Maybe I will do this with other songs.  Being a Taylor Swift fan in her younger years, I find that she is leaving reality in the song, "Wildest Dreams," in which, in my opinion she wants to have sexual intercourse with a man for one night.

God made sexual intercourse as a wonderful gift for humankind, so that one man and one woman can enjoy this gift in the committed relationship of Christian marriage.  Today sexual intercourse is seen by many as something to enjoy in any relationship.  This also seems to be the message of Taylor Swift's song.  This is nothing new to pop music.  But for the Christian families who have adolescent children, and for the parents, it is good to be reminded of the deception of the song by writing new lyrics.  Many of the lyrics I will keep the same, but add an element of truth to them so that the song is not a shroud of lies.  If you want to find the real lyrics to Wildest Dreams, I am guessing you can find them on the internet much easier than this blog.



"Wildest Dreams"

He said, "Let's get out of this town,
Drive out of the city, away from accountability."
I thought heaven can't see me now.
He won't last forever, but this is gonna take away my virginity

He's so tall and has a handsome face
He's so bad but he manipulates so well
I can see the end as it begins
My one condition is

Say you'll remember me standing in STD,
Staring at the HIV babe
Red lips and rosy cheeks
Say you'll see me again
Even if it's just in your venereal disease, ah-ha, venereal disease, ah-ha.

I said, "No one has to know what we do, "
Except that I just put it in a song, my facebook page just blew
a hidden camera in the background,
Nothing lasts forever but this is on snapchat now

He's so tall and has a handsome face
He's so bad but he manipulates so well
And when we've had our very last kiss
My last request it is

Say you'll remember me seeing your wife rip her wedding dress,
Seeing your kids on Prozac, babe
in diapers and rosy cheeks
Say you'll see me again
Even if it's just to wreck your home, ah-ha, wreck your home, ah-ha.

You see me in hindsight
Worshipping me all night
Burning you down
Someday when you leave me
 I bet my idol shrine
Follows you around

I'll see her in hindsight
Worshipping her all night
Burning me down
Someday when you leave me
I bet her idol shrine
Follows me around

Say you'll remember me with my ever fading dress,
Staring at my sunset, babe
pale lips and cold cheeks
Say you'll see me again
Even if it's just pretend

You won't remember me standing in any dress,
Staring at your sunset, babe
Red lips and rosy cheeks
Will turn to dust again
Even if it's just in your (just pretend, just pretend) funeral stone, ah-ha, in your funeral stone, ah-ha
(Even if it's just in your wildest dreams) ah-ha, in your funeral stone, ah-ha.

Pick-a-dates

We went to a small Midwestern Christian college, and there was a tradition there to have pick-a-dates.  What is a pick-a-date?  A pick-a-date is where your roommate calls and asks someone to go on a group date with you and the people in your dorm.  The great thing, I believe, about pick-a-dates is that Christian college kids can hang out together in a group and learn about others through conversation.  There is a lot to be said for group interaction in the dating process.  I did not go on a record number of pick-a-dates, but I went on a few, and so I will list my top ten list.  If you are living in a college dorm trying to plan an event for your dorm, feel free to use any of these in your context.  Some of them were okay, others were life-changing.
10.  My first pick a date was to my hometown bowling alley.  I list is #10 not because it is the worst, but because it is the first.  We had a pick of a wreck, and had to change a tire.  Bowling seems to be a popular group dating activity.
9.  Going to someone's house and hanging out.  This is pretty common.  I just remember the only person who had never seen "Friends,"  the tv show.
8.  The square dance.  This was not really a pick a date, but a tradition at our college.  You square danced with people you just met.  I know one guy who met his future wife this way.
7.  Insert your idea here:  I did not go on ten pick a dates, so I have to fill space.  Some of the rest may be made up.  You pick which ones were made up.
6.  Go to NAIA nationals pick a date.  This was not really a date at all, but I got to see my friend run a !:46 800.
5.  Walk the loop pick a date.  We all walked the loop around campus and then had hot chocolate in the breezeway.
4.  Nutcracker pick a date.  We got all dressed up and went to Indianapolis to see the Nutcracker.  It was fun.  I later married my date.
3.  Children's museum pick a date.  I still like that place and take my kids there.
2.  The T-shirt pick a date.  You meet your date in the library, give her a T-shirt that says, "I went on a Sammy II pick-a-date and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
1.  Jar-prom.  Think opposite of prom.  The main event was an obstacle course in which you heaved yourself and your date on top of a shed, shot a ball in a basket, did the wheelbarrow, etc.  The best pick a date ever.

C.S. Lewis on Sexual Morality

Mere Christianity has been the most influential book in my life besides the Bible, and there is one quote that I seem to always turn to toward the end of the chapter on sexual morality.  Here is the quote,

“We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity- like perfect charity- will not be attained by any merely human efforts.  You must ask for God’s help.  Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given.  Never mind.  After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.  For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still.  It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God.  We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.  The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”

Why wait until marriage?

Let's say a couple has had sex already and they are not married yet - why should that couple continue to wait until marriage?  Why not just get on with it and live together since they have already crossed that line?

I assume that at least a few Christian couples are asking these sorts of questions.  First, if all you are looking for is justification to continue having sex before you get married, you do not have to look here.  It seems so easy, doesn't it, to justify something when we want it real bad.  Sorry, my purpose here is not to give you justification, but endurance.

Steve Prefontaine would run, not to see who was fastest, but to see who had the most guts, who could punish himself in an exhausting pace, and then at the end punish himself even more.  No one is going to win a 5K race with me, says Steve, after running an easy two miles.  He went on, if I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself.

I think this has a lot to say to engaged couples.  It is really not primarily about being a virgin on your wedding day, although that is great.  It is about the endurance of the upcoming marriage.  Endurance is a tone that is set up early.  If a boyfriend cannot go without sex for one week, what will he do when the girlfriend is pregnant and has given birth, or when he has to go on a trip?  Couples that decide, whatever the current circumstances, to stop all sexual intimacy, and wait until their wedding day, are moving a step toward endurance.

A Christian man who is married to a beautiful Christian woman will not end his sexual temptations when he gets married.  That is when they go to a new level.  The endurance put to waiting before the marriage will go a long way to the endurance needed during the marriage.

Waiting is something God likes us to do.  We may not like it, but for some reason he does.
Maybe he wants us to grow in endurance.

The Dowry

Before I asked my wife to marry me I lived in Kenya for 4 months, and there the prospective husband gives the wife’s family a dowry.  Many times in America the Bride’s family gets nothing from the Groom.  I decided to give my wife’s family a dowry.  I write this in hindsight of being connected to my new family for almost 13 years.  Now I see that dowry I gave as even more important than I did then.  Why?  A marriage is often seen as the marriage between two people.  But it is more than that.  It is the marriage between two families (I got that idea from an Indian Christian talking about arranged marriages).  I am FULLY invested in my wife’s family.  By marrying her, I was marrying them.  My wife has two younger sisters and the next in line’s groom also gave the family a dowry.  So when the baby gets married we will have to tell him the dowry requirement.

So what is a dowry anyway?  In Kenya a dowry was cows.  That was and is the most valuable thing to the people of Kenya.  It may not be the most valuable thing to you, but it is to people in Kenya.  So they give cows.  Maybe one cow, maybe ten cows, maybe a hundred cows.

I did not give my wife’s family cows, but I did give them things that were important to me.  I am not going to tell you all of the things I gave them, but I will share a few.  I gave them articles of clothing that meant something to me, sentimental value not marketable value.  I gave them Dave’s Insanity Limited Edition Sauce.  It is the hottest marketed sauce in the world.  Only so many a made each year and it comes in a coffin type box with a warning label.  That may not mean a lot to you, but it means a lot to me.  I also took them all out to eat at Olive Garden (she is the oldest of five kids).  I also gave them a lion figurine I got from Kenya, and who knows, maybe inside that lion is a hundred cows.

So are you thinking of asking a woman to marry you?  Are you planning on giving her family a dowry?  If you do, it may help you and her family to realize that you are marrying into her family.  I can say that my wife’s parents are truly like my own parents, and both of them are my heroes.  I can also say that my wife’s brothers and sisters - and their spouses and children. . . are like my own brothers and sisters and children.  Many the dowry was one small idea that helped continue to foster the idea that when two people get married, two families get married.

So thank you to Chebet Ruto for giving me this idea of giving a dowry to my wife’s family, and in her own words – “It’s Biblical.”

Long Distance Dating

Here is an idea for people who are dating.  My mom and my dad were dating in the early 70s.  They lived in Indiana.  Then my mom went to teach in Florida.  They dated long distance by writing letters.  Would the relationship last until my mom got back?  My wife and I were dating in the late 90s.  I went to Kenya for four months.  We wrote letters to each other and called a few times (the phones in Kenya were not incredibly reliable at the time).  There was even this thing called email that we did every now and then (There was no Skype then).  Would the relationship last for that four months?  Those relationships proved their worth, and that is one of the advantages to long distance dating.  Can your relationship survive the long distance?  “Oceans apart day after day, and I slowly go insane, I hear your voice on the line, but it doesn’t stop the pain, if I see you next to never, how can we say forever, wherever you go, whatever you do I will be right here waiting for you, whatever it takes or if my heart breaks I will be right here waiting for you. . .”  Here are some advantages to long distance dating: 

1.       It is very hard to cross lines sexually that Christ demands that you not cross if you are not with each other.

2.       You find out if there is anything to the relationship besides the physical element.

3.       You can write letters to each other that you may keep for decades and you will show to your kids.

4.       You will have time to think about the relationship.

5.       The relationship goes through a test, and that test will either kill the relationship or prove it and make it stronger.

But how do we long distance date?  Here are a few ideas for long distance dating, if this is something you are thinking of doing.

1.       Go on a semester abroad – many schools have the option of going to another country for schooling at a low cost.

2.       Hike the Appalachian Trail.

3.       Go on a long bicycle trip, such as coast to coast.

4.       Go on a short term missions trip.

5.       Do an internship somewhere else in the world.

How do we survive long distance dating?

1.       Write letters to each other.

2.       Spend lots of time praying.

3.       Set a time to pray for each other every day (my wife and I would pray for each other every day at the same time – noon in Indiana and 8pm in Kenya).

4.       Read books on marriage.

5.       Evaluate the relationship – Who am I?  Who is (s)he?  Is (s)he someone I want to spend the rest of my life with?

Mustard and Spinach

Sexual Purity today is rare, and probably always has been rare.  When I was dating my wife and we were engaged to be married, we faced great temptation.  There may be as many opinions on what sexual purity is as there are people.  Some people say that holding hands before marriage is crossing a line that should not be crossed, or kissing maybe.  After that begins the slippery slope of sexual activity, and with it rationalizations.  So much so that two Christian teens think they are being pure by only having oral sex and not vaginal sex.  It makes those who don’t kiss until the wedding date seem smarter.  So my fiancée and I developed a punishment for ourselves if we crossed lines which we said we would not cross.  If we crossed a line, I had to eat mustard and she had to eat spinach.  We both hated those things.  Some of you are saying that punishing yourselves is a horrible idea.  You may be right, but seeing the mustard and spinach in the car day after day reminded us of our lines.  And when you are engaged to the most beautiful woman in the world, you are at your wits end to find ideas to control yourself.  It is difficult to live up to God's standards of purity, but just because we don't is no reason to throw in the towel.   It helps us to seek out Christ, who is the only one who can live up to God’s standard.  And the more able the Christian teenage couple is to strive toward sexual purity, the more likely that teenage couple will be able to stay true to a lifetime commitment to one person and one person only.   

DTR (Define The Relationship)

This is an idea that comes from our college days of young love.  So if you are at the pre-Christian family stage, being single, and are dating someone or going on dates, this idea could be for you.  At Taylor, where we went, when a man and a woman started dating and it became serious they may have a DTR.  Define The Relationship.  Defining the relationship answers these questions:  Are we boyfriend and girlfriend?  Are we dating other people or just each other?  How do you feel about me?  How do I feel about you?  Eventually DTR can mean, are we looking toward marriage.  There are only so many options for a romantic relationship.  1.  You can eventually get married.  2.  You can break up.  3.  You can date forever.  4.  One of you can die.   There are no other options that I can think of.

Our DTR.  15 years ago I took my wife to the steeplechase pit and sang a song to her.  To me it was a Garth Brooks song, but to her it was a Billy Joel song:  “. . . in all my life I’ve never found, what I couldn’t resist what I couldn’t turn down, I can walk away from anyone I ever knew, but I can’t walk away from you.  I’ve made myself a world, and its worked so perfectly, but it’s your world now, I can’t refuse, I’ve never had so much to lose, I’m shameless. . .” 

What did those teenagers know about what they were doing?  I would say not much at all.  I don’t even think we Defined The Relationship very well.  But that was 15 years ago, and today she still lets me sing to her even though she is the much better singer.

So if you are in a relationship that you should define – Define It.   It may be a conversation that you remember for the rest of your life.

But be careful who you DTR with.  This person may end up being the person you spend the rest of your life with.

Today I am celebrating our DTR by taking my wife to hear some really good music  "one day more. . . "

The 3 Qualifications of a Girlfriend

The Christian family usually starts before kids, and in college both my brother and I came up with 3 qualifications for a girlfriend.  Yes, there were only 3 qualifications, but they are not easily met.  Before I tell you what the 3 qualifications are you need to know that they are in a specific order.  A girl must meet the first qualification before going to the second and so on.  Also, the qualification get harder as you move down the list.  The first qualification is the easiest to meet, while the third qualification is the most difficult and rare to meet.  Here they are, the three qualifications for a girlfriend (I guess they could be qualification for a boyfriend too, but you are free to use or adapt these how you want - that is why I am writing it).
1.  She must be physically attractive to me.
2.  She must love Jesus solely with her whole self (Please do not overlook this as if she is a Christian or not - it is a rare girl who meets this qualification).
3.  She must like me (Many of you who read this will not get this one, I pray that one day you understand it).
My brother and I both now are married to our girlfriends who met these qualifications with flying colors.  A friend of mine in college said that you will be running to Jesus, focused on him, and then someone will pass you, and it will be her.  She passed me, and I have not been able to get my mind off of her since, and she is my wife, and my baby momma.

Marry someone who is a good cook

This is especially true if you are not one, which I am not.  Some people get excited to go to gourmet restaurants, and I have had good food in good restaurants.  But I have also had okay food in good restaurants.  My wife loved to cook, and she does it well.  If you don't think cooking is a spiritual gift, tell me what else the priests did in the Old Testament besides cook.  Even Jesus cooked fish, right?!  My wife makes a good almond crusted tilapia, and also a heavenly chocolate mocha cheesecake.  When we lived in Kenya and everyone around us was eating ugali, I was eating Tex-Mex Chicken.  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  She knows how to cook.  I did not really know this before I got married, but now that I do know it I want to share something with you.  If you are not yet married and you cannot cook, pray for a spouse who can cook.  If you are not married and you can cook, pray for a spouse who likes to eat.