CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE ARTICLE: CLEANING UP THE MESS LEFT BY ADULTERY
• BOOK REVIEW
  Steve Biddulph, Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men's Lives, by Rowland Croucher.
• IF I WERE FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT, I WOULD
  The Christ Centered Wife
  We Are Equipped - The Second Great Principle
  by Mikal Frazier

I want to urge you to read the book review by Rowland Croucher. Rowland is an Australian evangelical leader and author of the book The Family: At Home in a Heartless World published by HarperCollins. He sends out a newsletter similar to this one that deals with all sorts of issues that relate to the Christian faith. Occasionally he even sends out some of our material and has given us permission to re-send messages that he writes. In reviewing a new Australian book on manhood, he offers some critical insights into habits and patterns of males in Western culture. Rowland uses his review of Biddulph's book to present thought provoking commentary on the way we men respond to our families and to life.

Mikal challenges wives to think in terms of what a "Spirit filled wife" can expect. She man not get a transformed husband, but she will find herself being transformed.

Norman

Cleaning up the wreckage left by a tornado, flood or hurricane is a simple task compared to the task of cleaning up the mess left by the storm of adultery. Can the mess be cleaned up? It can be done, but you should know that its easier to clean up the debris left by a tornado than it is to clean up the wreckage of a broken marriage covenant.

I'm not going use my space to moralize. If you're reading this column, I'm going to assume that you already have enough intelligence to know that adultery is sinful If you have any doubt, I would encourage you to check out Malachi 2:13-14; 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 and Galatians 5:19-21 in your Bible.

Anyone who commits adultery dishonors the marriage covenant, backs away from legitimate responsibility and violates a sacred oath. Trust, the foundation pillar of marriage, is shattered, which in turn threatens the continuation of the marriage. In his book, Private Lies, therapist Frank Pitman said, ". . . infidelity is a breach of trust, a betrayal of a relationship, a breaking of an agreement" (p. 20). Pitman's book is a devastating indictment of adultery from a secular viewpoint. To him the great wrong lies in the fact that an affair cannot be conducted in total honesty with all parties.

Can that breach of trust be rebuilt? My answer is that it can, if both parties sincerely want to clean up the mess and if they are willing to work at it over a long period of time. Their efforts will be successful only if they observe the following principles:

1. The person who has committed adultery must be willing to accept a high degree of accountability. A certain amount of freedom must be voluntarily surrendered. In the beginning this means telling where you've been, how long you were there and what you were doing there.
2. The person who was the "victim" of an affair must be willing to take some risks. You simply cannot rebuild trust if you are never willing to trust. You must let go of the natural instinct to build a prison, without walls, against the spouse whose infidelity has hurt you. Is there a possibility that you might get hurt again? Absolutely. But if you're not willing to run that risk, you will not be able to salvage the relationship.
3. Forgiveness is like medicine. It takes more than one dose. When two people decide to work on cleaning up the mess, they want to put the past behind them and go on with their lives, it is easy to verbalize a willingness to forgive. But you have only verbalized your goal. The hurt will resurface many times. Each time it resurfaces, you must mentally declare your intention to forgive. If you do it enough times, the occasions of emotional pain will become fewer and farther between.

For ten years the Men's Movement has gathered momentum, like an unstoppable tidal wave, throughout the Western (industrialised) world. My library now has a whole row of best sellers about men, with titles like 'The Real Man Inside','Brain Sex: the Real Difference Between Men and Women', 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus', 'Point Man: How a Man Can Lead His Family', 'The Intimate Connection: Male Sexuality, Masculine Spirituality'. And so on. But the seminal book is still Robert Bly's 'Iron John: A Book About Men'.

There are now thousands of men's groups in America, where Promisekeepers is booming. Canadian therapist-turned-activist Guy Corneau has single-handedly founded 300 groups in Canada. Australia has hundreds of men's groups, and many are forming in the U.K., Germany, South America, N.Z. and elsewhere...

I spent the International Year of the Family writing a book about women and men and children (The Family: At Home in a Heartless World, HarperCollins), and I get more feedback from the chapters on men and fathering than all the others combined. In my seminars for men, I have a throwaway introductory line: 'Men are the second most confused group in our culture...' (pause, punctuated by male chuckles, and a few guffaws) '... after teenagers!' For three decades women have been getting their act together, following millennia of patriarchy. Men are just beginning their movement, after five generations of confusion (since the Industrial Revolution). Exciting.

The best Australian book is psychologist Steve Biddulph's 'Manhood'. It's Robert Bly popularised, and more readable. Short assessment: after the Gospels, it ought to be the next most important book men read. And re-read. And re-read. And study with other men. And talk about with their wives/ partners.

Now Biddulph wouldn't put it like that. Religion is important - very important - for him, but not necessarily the classical church-type Christian variety. As a consultant to churches I have some sympathy with that, but would not necessarily espouse his mild new age-ishness. (That's another subject, for another time). And evangelical Christians aren't (yet) used to earthy language, though that's changing too. (Best-known Australian evangelist/ prophet John Smith doesn't get invited back to some middle-class churches because he's too shocking, talks too long and uses some naughty words). Oh, and another warning for Christians: Biddulph has a more liberal approach to the benefits of masturbation and Playboy than most of us would encourage...

Biddulph's opening, encouraging (!) line: 'Most men don't have a life. Instead, we have just learned to pretend.' A paragraph later: 'So he spends his life pretending to be happy.' It's uphill from there. James Michener put it memorably: 'For this is the journey that men make. To find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter what else they find.' If the male infant doesn't move from mother to father to mentor, says Biddulph, he'll stay a kid pretending to be an adult, an empty, phony caricature of the man he could have been.

Because men haven't grown up properly, they don't know how to relate to women as friends; they don't know how to be mentoring fathers; they're in bondage to male stereotypes (burn your ties or use them to stake up garden trees says Biddulph). Most of us couldn't cope with the mandatory three to four days of complete solitude every birthday (all the great men in history spent time in the wilderness).

Society is disintegrating primarily because men are not initiating boys into manhood: women can't do that, however hard they try in the absence of their men. So fatherless boys form gangs (see the New Zealand movie 'Once Were Warriors'), or else become wimpish loners (for some of these 'nerds', their best friend is a computer), destroying others and themselves. Nowadays, in America, half of all children will spend time in a fatherless home.

And, says Biddulph, we've inherited a marriage-ideal that is sweet and harmonious: 'the passionate heated European-style marriage has more going for it. Jung said, "American marriages are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all the fighting at the office".'

Some interesting/representative quotes:

• 'Boys in our society are horrendously under-fathered... they grow into phony men, who act out a role... In today's world, little boys often just grow into bigger little boys.'
• 'Women had to overcome oppression, but men's difficulties are with isolation... The loneliness of men is something women rarely understand.'
• 'The leading cause of death amongst men between twelve and sixty is self-inflicted death... Monday [is] the most common day for men to suicide.'
• The seven steps to manhood: fixing it with your father, finding sacredness in your sexuality, meeting your partner on equal terms, engaging actively with your kids, learning to have real male friends, finding your heart in your work, freeing your wild spirit.
• 'The Xervante people of the Brazilian rainforest have eight stages of manhood and spend forty years learning them. They produce perhaps the most balanced men on earth, straddling the qualities we seek - strong and tender, brave and compassionate. They are lovers of beauty and active in preserving it.'
• 'Less than ten percent of men are friends with their father.'
• 'Until you can feel love and respect for your father and also receive the love and respect of older men, you will remain a boy.'
• 'Many men need to become orgasmic - as opposed to just ejaculatory... Sex education teaches us the plumbing - it's necessary, but drab. Love education might be a little more challenging.'
• 'A creep [has] abandoned the difficult path of intimacy for the safer one of exploitation.'

That's enough - and from just the first eighty pages (of 260).

Again, if you're conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist you won't get very good theology here. But you just might learn enough about how to grow from a boy into a man to become more like Jesus, who I reckon was the best put-together man who ever lived. Not a bad ideal.

Rowland Croucher is the director of John Mark Ministries - resources for pastors/leaders. (Bookroom, library, and worldwide F.W.Boreham Trading Post) Home Page: http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm

(For more on this subject, see under 'Fathers' on the JMM homepage and an article soon to be added there on 'Men').

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IF I WERE FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT, I WOULD

The Christ Centered Wife

We Are Equipped - The Second Great Principle

by Mikal Frazier, MA, MMFT, LCP

"Here we go again. I'll play the part again. You'll break my heart again, one more time," laments the old tune. Usually by the time a couple comes to a therapist's office, their reactive patterns of interaction have become so scripted, it does not take long to identify the part each plays in the painful repetitive dramas. So how do you go about ending the continuous insanity in your marriage? As a Christ-centered wife, God has equipped you.

The second and final great principle for the Christ-centered wife is that God has given you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the "how" by which you are empowered to stop the destructive interactions in your marriage. God has promised. In a prayer for the Spirit in your life in Ephesians 3, the Apostle Paul says that God "is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us." Then in Galatians 5 he says that if we allow the Spirit to lead our lives we will have "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." Dear Christian wife, do you believe this is true? If you can find within yourself the courage to take a leap of faith and say, "Okay, I believe, I will take God at his word and I'm willing to try," then please read on. This fruit of the Spirit which Paul talks about is produced unconditionally when we live by the Spirit, when we choose to be filled with the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is not dependent on the quality of our relationships, but the quality of our relationships is dependent on our being filled with the Spirit.

Marvelous changes begin to occur within the Christian wife when she chooses to keep in step with the Spirit as she relates to her mate. When she is filled with the Spirit, it is His power which will determine her relationship response. As one speaker said, "Response is of the Spirit, but reaction is of the flesh." The Spirit-filled wife will leave behind the reactive emotion-driven perspectives which have been writing the "part" she has been playing. What that means is that no longer will she be bound by the old scripts which consistently lead to the same old pain. She has been freed to do something different.

Perhaps you are thinking, "Well, yeah that sounds great, along with all the nice thoughts of 'love not keeping score, always trusting, hoping and persevering,' but I'm living in the real world with a real marriage that is really not going very well." Okay, I will get to that and I will take it in very small steps, but more ground work must be laid.

First of all, have you noticed that any change I am talking about is for you, not for your husband. In considering becoming a Spirit-filled wife, this has to do with you and your relationship with Jesus Christ. When you are truly filled with the Spirit, your love, joy and peace are in no way dependent on your husband's behavior. This is crucial for you to hear. Your joy can no longer be dependent on your husband's behavior. As Charles Stanley points out in his book, The Wonderful Spirit-Filled Life, there may be down times for the Spirit-filled Christian. But you can grieve those losses and disappointments, and then adjust your expectations to be more in keeping with the Spirit.

The absolute core of what I want to share with you is this. Becoming a Spirit-filled wife has absolutely nothing to do with appropriate behavior from the people around you. It has everything to do with your very own personal response to a loving Savior. John Allen Chalk in a study of the Holy Spirit says it begins with a Lordship faith in Jesus Christ. You must make Jesus the absolute Lord of your life. (Wow, that is some absolute paragraph. Well, absolutely! Emphasis intended.)

With Lordship faith in Jesus, many changes will naturally follow. When you choose to be filled with the Spirit, you will no longer attempt to make your marriage your god. Your expectations will become more realistic. You will look to God to fulfill you rather than your spouse to fulfill you. (This will certainly take a lot of pressure off him.)

In future articles I will look at how being Spirit-filled will change how we communicate. I will look at how it changes our understanding of submission and how to submit. Other changes to be addressed are our expectations, priorities and goals. I will attempt to give you small little steps to help you begin keeping in step with the Spirit as you relate to your husband.

Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People says we need a changeless core inside of us in order to make significant change. This changeless core tells us who we are, what we are about and what we value. The Holy Spirit IS that changeless core.

Just as a little experiment would you try, just for one day, to treat your husband only as Jesus would treat him, expecting nothing in return. You can go back to your anger, resentments and disappointments anytime you wish. But just for one day, turn those loose, and relate to him as Jesus would. Is there really anything to lose by trying this? If you find the courage to try, pay attention to the feelings which are going on inside you. If nothing else it is usually terribly empowering to decide to be proactive rather than reactive. Later on I will explore this in greater detail.

To help you find the courage to risk change in this journey toward Lordship faith, turn to Ephesians 3:14-21 and read Paul's prayer for the Ephesians concerning the power of the Holy Spirit. Make this Paul's prayer for you.

(Mikal Frazier is a licensed family counselor with a practice in Minden and Bossier City, Louisiana)

NEXT WEEK'S FEATURE STUDY: "MANAGING CONFLICT IN MARRIAGE"

If you have questions about marriage and family relationships you can "ASK THE COUNSELOR." Address your questions to Mikal Frazier. Her address is mikalfraz@aol.com