Decisions, Decisions

When I returned home from my junior year in college, I was headed to Reno, Nevada, to do an internship, and thus, I needed a car. My Dad helped me get a loan and I set out doing lots of research. There is one thing you should know about me… I’m big on getting the best, and I will do research to make sure I’m getting the best. Now, the best doesn’t have to necessarily be the most expensive… in this case, when I say best, I mean the one that will last the longest, with the best gas mileage, and in doing this, for the first time, I found myself engrossed in a sea of Carfax material, Consumer Reports guides, Internet research, and much more… Here was the catch to buying a car though, since I’m a poor college student, and more particularly, since I’m a 21 year old male in the state of California, I needed to have my Dad co-sign on the car so that my insurance would be significantly cheaper. My Dad left 2 days after I got home… So, I had 2 days to find the best car… I searched Craigslist, Cars.com, Auto trader, you name it, I went there. I found nothing the first day, and as the second day approached, I continued to search. I found a nice Saturn at a dealership with low miles, but was hesitant to go since I had not really researched Saturn and was hoping for a Toyota or a Honda… so I continued to look, and finally my Dad looked at me and said…

“Josh… Stop, you need to realize, that even after you do all of this research, even if you find the best car… the one with the fewest miles, best ratings, best price, etc. And it still may break down at some point. At the end of the day, it’s just a car, and I think that God will honor your research… And if you pick wrong, it’s okay, you’ll learn from it and move on…”

I ended up buying a Mazda Protégé, at a really good price, and it’s been a great car…

You ever find yourself doing the same? Maybe not in the realm of buying cars… but what about in the area of dating?

I know I had always been told to only pursue the “best”… but what does “best” look like? How do you know when a person is the “best”? I recently had my best friend struggle with this. He had many fears when entering a potential relationship. They both confessed they had feelings, but he was afraid to hurt her… he was afraid that she wasn’t the “one” and thus that things would end in a break-up and she would be hurt. One day, as he struggled with his decision, I called and asked him…

Me: If you were sure that you wouldn’t hurt her, would you go for it?
Him: yeah man…
Me: You need to realize that in every relationship there is going to be some risk involved… you could possibly hurt the other person… but they sign up for that when you begin dating…

No matter how much time you spend talking about things before you become “official” or how much you know about the other person, you still, at some point, have to take a risk in beginning a dating relationship. You may be able to narrow the gap, and I strongly recommend doing this, through spending time with the person, and also getting the opinion of people around you, especially your parents… you’d be surprised, even though they may have gone 30 years since they last dated, they still have amazing advice…

I know that when I was a teen, I had this idea that dating was bad. That Christians don’t date, the world dates… And then some years later, I read the Joshua Harris books and learned that maybe “Courting” is the way to do. I was convinced that Courtship was the Christian dating… I bought into this concept that Christians must do everything differently.

Now please do realize that I was never taught any of this, but these were simply my perceptions…
Dating was when a girl and guy liked each other, they would “date”… not long after, they would probably be talking about how they the other person was the “one”… but odds are, they would break up, cause they had not put a lot of thought into dating each other, they hadn’t taken the time to see if they really were potential future spouses…They hadn’t done their “research”… And it would end in heartbreak, the both would cry a lot, and swear off dating for… ever….
And then two weeks later, they would be dating someone else and confessing their undying love for that person… And the cycle would begin again…

Courtship was based partially on the concept that you should wait until you’re ready to get married to consider dating/ courting… Then, when you were at an age where you were ready to get married, and you found a particular person to be attractive, you would talk to them and confess your feelings, but rather than simply dating the person, you would make it clear from the beginning that this relationship was intentionally for the sake of finding out whether this person was to be their future spouse. It started with Marriage as the goal, and went from there… Those that I know who have followed this have typically dating for anywhere from 6 months to a year and then gotten married. The concept was, if you were willing to save yourself, not only physically and sexually, but also emotionally, then it would make your marriage better as you would be able to enjoy your spouse fully…

This concept is great… it really is, and for some time, this is what I dreamed of my future relationship looking like. I would wait until I was 22 or 23 years old… until I had finished college, had my life in order, and then I would begin to look for “that” girl. There were a few problems for me though…

One, I had hormones that wanted desperately to date girls I found attractive… I’m kind of one of those guys who is big on romance. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to find a girlfriend so I could spoil her, so I could hold her hand, so I could not have to feel pressured about who to ask to prom…

Two… After I was finished with girls for a while, having had a potential relationship blow up in my face, I was ready to simply be single for a while… and then I met a girl who changed everything… I met her at a camp in the Santa Cruz mountains and we hit it off immediately… we spent the entire week doing everything together… and we talked every night afterwards for the following two weeks before I went down to visit her..
What do you do, when at 19, when you’re not ready to get married yet, you meet a girl who takes your breath away? A girl that God has placed in your life… What do you do then? Well, dating says, “go for it…” while Courtship says, “Wait until you’re ready to get married…” Courtship champions a friendship relationship first until you’re in a place where you’re ready to begin a courting relationship… the hope is that you can narrow the “gap” and thus minimize the risk involved in moving forward together in hopes of also minimizing the heartbreak should things not work out…

I don’t know what many of you think of this or what you would do in this situation, but I went for it… I didn’t really pay attention to the whole dating/ courtship thing and instead, I did what I thought was best in the situations that arose… I began, a month after meeting her, when we both had expressed feelings for one another, but weren’t “official” yet, I told her that this relationship was for the intent of finding out whether or not I thought she was a person I could spend the rest of my life with… She whole-heartedly agreed.

Three... I was talking with a friend while getting Jamba Juice… I talked to her about a relationship she had been a part of that fell apart. Her Father had imposed strict rules and demanded that they pursue courtship from the beginning… Her Father told her she could not date… and you know what almost happened? She almost married the wrong person… She told me this one day…

“One of the flaws of courtship is that you’re constantly looking for ways to make it work, rather than looking for signs that it doesn’t work.”

How true is this? In a marriage relationship, you should be doing everything you can to make it work, but if you’re struggling through your pre-marriage relationship, you may be trying too hard to make your will fit God’s. You may be trying to justify a certain significant other as being “good enough”.