so i recently was on an orange river trip with a bunch of youth okes linked to a southern suburbs church youth group…
two of the guys on the trip wore t-shirts (which i addressed with them both – one directly and one a little more indirectly cos i couldn’t remember who had been wearing it) which distressed me a lot
[1] cartoon picture made up of two blocks – in the first block a guy and a girl figure [similiar to toilet man and woman stick figures] standing next to each other – in the second block dude has shoved his arm out and girl is falling through the bottom of the block – caption reads “PROBLEM SOLVED”
[2] second was a block with a cartoon groom and a bride, similiar stick figure vibe to first pic – bride is holding bouquet and smiling, groom has big sad face – caption reads “GAME OVER”
both of them saddened me in terms of the message they were delivering and in terms of the fact that young guys would choose to wear them [the ‘problem solved’ guy told me that he had been given the t-shirt by a bunch of his girl friends which made me maybe even a little more horrified]
are they funny? yes, i guess so, clever word play, well done
but they are horrible, horrible, horrible, especially the ‘game over’ one
the statistics for divorce are something like 1 in 3 marriages or maybe even closer to 1 in 2 these days – and they are largely the same in so-called christian and non-christian marriages – how much of this is due to the fact that marriage has largely become a joke, or at the very least a joked about thing
when i marry people [two down, one to go next weekend] i marry them with my shoes off, linking back to the moses story and the fact that he was standng on holy ground, because i truly believe that is how God views marriage – it is a holy and special and spiritual and sacred thing – when we return to that point of view, we will have a starting point towards having healthy marriages which – altho not necessarily easy, because marriage is not always easy, it requires work and effort and sacrifice and humility and service and surrender on a continual daily basis – can and do work and will be an effective role model in a world where relationships have largely become a selfish endeavour, reduced to a me-me-me-me enactment, or a joke on a t-shirt…
I think this is a beautiful post and I love the bare-foot symbology… think its great to have a compromise between the jokes of a secular approach and the conformity often enforced in church marriage seminars….
Great post, Brett! Amen to that. I think it’s a habit that can be hard to break. Because it is so ingrained in our culture, it can make our marriage really shine when we go counter-culture in the way of Jesus, treating each other in ways that are fitting of the children of God.
Too true that relationships have become something that is often joked about or started under questionable intentions and the fact that in this day and age people would rather break up or divorce rather than putting in the time and effort to sort out things
[…] actually, to be honest, it began a little earlier with this blog i wrote after my encounter with two horrible t-shirts and then the recent one i wrote about young people using the word “rape” to describe a […]