from the moment the beautiful Val and i got married [and i do mean the moment – an impromptu wedding speech largely aimed at singles and marrieds stretched to 51 minutes apparently] i felt like God had put RELATIONSHIPS on my heart as something that he wants me to focus on, to fight for, to champion.

since being married we have been invited to speak at a number of camps and churches on the topic of relationships, and while we are clearly not the experts by any stretch of the imagination, we have seen some stuff and learnt some stuff and probly have a bigger bag of ‘stuff to not do’ that we are well aware of. so we have shared and chatted about and thort thru a whole bunch of relationship stuff and i felt like it was a good time to share some of it on here.

you may not agree with all of what i say, but i hope there is something for you to take away from this if you are in a space of being single or dating. i will be taking it from the point of people who are living as disciples/followers of Jesus, because that is my context, but even if you are not, i imagine there will be some healthy and helpful ideas or things to think about.

i am not a big fan of statistics at all, because i think generally they mean what you want them to mean and are not all that reliable. But one statistic grabbed me a few years ago and even the slightest bit of truth to it causes it to be a very tragic piece of information. In americaland (and i think the stats for south africa are similiar) the percentage of marriages that lead to divorce in marriages of christians is almost EXACTLY THE SAME as that of people who do not call themselves christian.

What that says to me is WE ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG! And the old adage says that if we continue to do what we have always done we will continue to get the results we have always gotten.

Something needs to change. In the way we do dating. In the way we do relationships. For too long we have simply done what everyone else is doing. Where as Christ followers we have been told to “not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind” – and so this is what needs to happen. And that is what i am going to be looking at here.

How can we do dating and relationships different so that we end up with better results? Not just than the world, but than christians up to this point. I really believe that if we can bring the Jesus-following aspect of our lives into how we do relationships WE WILL SEE A REVOLUTION! And it will be so attractive to the world.

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