There are differences in aspects of the Lord’s Day among many Christians, but my goal is to not wade into that debate. Rather, I want to simply present how we approach it positively. The Lord’s Day is a gift: a weekly blessing of gathering with God’s people, worshiping the God who saved us, and enjoying real spiritual and physical refreshment.

My goal is to help you establish rhythms that make your Lord’s Day more restful. And that rest does not begin Sunday morning.

THE DAY BEFORE

So much of life is playing the Game of Anticipation: thinking through what will likely happen next and preemptively preparing for it. Cyprian and I practice this when assembling IKEA furniture. He watches ahead and figures out whether I’ll need a dowel or a cam next, waiting beside me with the screwdriver before I ask. I’m a checklist person; I have travel notes saved from the last six years. Referencing past lists has saved me from wearing my favorite dress to the same event two years in a row.

This kind of forethought needs to be part of your weekly Sunday preparation. It may feel forced at first, but with time it becomes natural. The children go along because they know what’s expected. On Saturdays, this is what we do.

Our preparation actually begins Friday; that’s our family night, the night we let the kids stay up later. Because on Saturdays, everyone is in bed by 10pm at the latest. We want them rested and alert for worship, not struggling to stay awake during the sermon because they were up too late. If they fall asleep because the preacher is monotone, that’s a separate issue.

The first thing we do Saturday is a deeper clean of the house: mopping, wiping cabinets, making invisible piles actually disappear. This sets things in order so we can rest from housework on Sunday and have a comfortable space for hospitality.

Mid-afternoon, everyone lays out their clothes, parents included. We wear our Sunday best, not because Scripture requires it, but as a tangible way for our children to see that this day has been set apart. Collared shirts and slacks for the boys (some have taken to wearing suits on their own initiative), dresses or skirts for the girls. And you must not forget the shoes, O Best Beloved. That is the number one way to have a stressful Sunday morning.

Next, we gather each child’s bag for the service. For school-aged kids, the staple items are a blank sketchbook and something to draw with. We are firmly on Team Colored Pencils. We’ve tried markers: too tempting for drawing on property they ought not. Crayons led to wax shavings and, occasionally, melted crayon in the carpet. For toddlers and preschoolers, a few quiet toys, a busy book, or some board books work well. We also pack a water bottle for each child, less likely to spill, and it eliminates the excuse to get up for a drink.

The last Saturday task: shower or bathe. Saturday showers are mandatory. We want to look our best in our Sunday best.

THE MORNING OF

With so much prepared the night before, Sunday morning has a chance to be peaceful. Having a special breakfast planned makes a real difference. “Special” doesn’t mean complicated; it just means something you don’t serve regularly, like specialty bagels, jumbo muffins, or an overnight casserole. On Sunday mornings I need my hands free to help keep a low-stress, cheerful atmosphere.

Fill the house with worship music. Classical, hymns, psalms, folk versions of hymns, whatever your family loves. It shapes the mood of the morning and prepares hearts for corporate worship.

If you know the sermon text ahead of time, review it beforehand, either on your own or as a family. Our pastors preach through books of the Bible, so we can often anticipate the next passage. When we lived in South Carolina and worked slowly through First and Second Samuel, I came to know those books far better because I’d looked ahead. I often do my passage review on Saturday since our mornings move slower, which gives me about 24 hours to sit with it before Sunday.

DURING THE SERVICE

One of the best tools available to you is the liturgy. Let it serve as your guide. Our children use the bulletin like a checklist: prayers, songs, sermon, Lord’s Supper. It helps them feel connected when they know where we are and what’s coming next. I do not give them estimates on how much longer the service will be. I just say, “However long it takes.” I know it drives them a little crazy, but I’m trying to head off the habit of watching the clock. I want them to be content to be present for the whole thing.

We tell our kids to do what everyone around them is doing. If everyone’s standing and singing, you’re standing and singing. If everyone’s praying, you’re praying. The goal is participation, not just attendance. East River is a family-integrated service because we are one church, many parts and ages, but one body.

To build the habit of attention during the sermon, we challenge each child to remember one thing for our lunchtime conversation. They often draw whatever they want to share later, either in their sketchbook or on the back of the bulletin.

Now for the *Game of Anticipation* applied to staying seated. What’s the number one reason to get up? I asked Cyrene, age five. Without missing a beat: “I need to use the restroom!” Combat this by making everyone use the restroom ten to fifteen minutes before the service starts. If you arrive close to the start time, go before leaving the house. It will take a month of Sundays, but they’ll get it.

When Cyrene and I talked about why we don’t want to leave mid-service, she said: “Because we don’t want to miss it!” I tell my kids: “This is like going to a live concert and leaving halfway through to use the bathroom. You’re missing part of the experience. This is a taste of heaven. We don’t want to miss a thing.”

If you know your child has a cold, grab tissues before the service. Keep a travel pack in their Sunday bag if you have a perpetual runny-nose child. Broken crayons, empty communion cups, used tissues can all wait. “Put it in a little pile under your chair and make a beeline for the trashcan as soon as the benediction is over. It will not self-destruct in the meantime. Neither should you.”

Before running off to fellowship after the service, have your family quickly tidy your row. Pack up, throw away trash, clean up any spills. It’s a practical way to love the space and each other, and it teaches children that this is our church; we’re stewards of it.

THE REST OF THE DAY

Having lunch ready when you walk in the door makes the transition home smooth. I flip our largest meal from dinner to lunch on Sundays and prefer it to be hot, so I plan crockpot meals: BBQ pulled pork, chicken tikka masala, beef stroganoff. In summer we grill; in winter, chili or soup. Interview your family and make a list to rotate through.

And since you’re already cooking, double or triple it and invite another family or two. Carry the fellowship from the service right into your home. We generally follow the rule of three: three families, three couples to carry the conversation. Be intentional about including families with children around your kids’ ages. Also include singles and widows. Mix old friends and new.

Sunday isn’t a day we do deep housework, but basic clean-as-you-go habits keep Monday from being a disaster. Monday is a bit of a catch-up day, and we’re ready for it because we’re launching into the week from a place of refreshment and renewal.

What matters is the heart behind why you do what you do on the Sabbath. The methods may look different in your home than mine, and that’s fine. This is twenty years of motherhood in a first-generation Christian household, not prescriptive but instructive.

Ultimately, what we’re after is for our households to say: “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD.”

*Editor’s Note: This was my attempt to cut my wife’s teaching transcript and notes by two-thirds to a size people might actually read online. I did my best to retain all her major points, illustrations, and applications. We will post the entire unedited piece later this year.

But not everything is a daddy issue, at least not directly. Over the last fifteen years, I have become much more aware of the destructive force of negligent or overbearing mothers in the lives of men. In fact, I think many of the problems we are seeing right now are tied to men who had strange and badly ordered relationships with their mothers. That is often what happens when fathers remove themselves from the picture or are forcefully removed through unjust courts.

Children need both a mother and a father, and a husband and wife need each other. They help steady one another. They check each other’s excesses.

Sometimes a father has to step in and tell a mother she is coddling her son too much. Sometimes a mother has to tell a father, “What he needs from you right now is some good old-fashioned masculine encouragement.” The reverse can happen as well. I have known many women who struggled to be the warm and encouraging mother their children needed. That seems to be part of what Theo Von is describing in the video below. But what appears to be even more common is what is sometimes called a son-husband.

What is that?

Some mothers lean on their sons in ways they should not. What begins as closeness can slowly become badly disordered. The boy is no longer simply a son. He becomes his mother’s listener, her comfort, her little protector, even a kind of substitute husband. The lines get crossed.

It usually happens in a home that is already out of joint. Maybe the father is absent, passive, weak, or simply failing to act as he should. Maybe the mother is lonely, overwhelmed, undisciplined, or simply self-absorbed. Whatever the cause, the son gets pulled into a place he was never meant to occupy. He begins to carry things that do not belong to him, including his mother’s complaints, her fears, her frustrations, and sometimes even her quarrel with his father.

That does real harm to a boy. It weighs him down and scrambles his sense of things. Whatever sense of importance he may feel in the moment, he is being robbed of the freedom to simply be a child. And when that boy becomes a man, the effects often remain. He may have trouble separating rightly from his mother, trouble establishing his own household, trouble loving a wife with clarity and firmness.

Part of what makes this so destructive is that it often hides under the language of closeness. People may call it a strong mother-son bond. But there is a kind of closeness that is not fitting. A mother is meant to raise her son toward maturity, not draw him into her private burdens. When she does, she binds him to herself in ways that can cripple him for years.

A son hears too much, carries too much, and before long finds that it is shaping how he sees his father and himself. At some point, a line has to be drawn. That is not easy, especially when a boy has been raised to think it is his job to keep his mother steady. But it still has to be done.

Mothers must not make stand-ins out of their sons. Fathers must be vigilant and maintain right order in the home. A boy needs love, discipline, protection, and room to grow into manhood. Calling him his mother’s rock is not sweet. It is a confusion of roles, and it can leave deep marks on a man for years.

The damage this creates down the line, especially in how those men relate to women, is significant.

We have talked a great deal about daddy issues and the destruction caused by deadbeat fathers. Fine. We should. But we also need to be able to talk plainly about mommy issues and the danger of mothers who do not know where their place ends and their son’s begins, especially in single-mother homes.

P.S. I saw this clip on X and pulled it. It's an uncomfortable watch. I wish this guy had a good friend to work this sort of stuff out in a more private setting.

Will it be the true God, the biblical God, the God who made this world, who made you, who sent His Son to reconcile us to Himself, and who sends His Spirit to convict us of sin and lead us into truth? Or will it be some idol of our own making? A statue we bow down to, an AI agent that flatters us, or plain self-worship? One way or another, it will be someone or something.

Everyone is also a builder. We were made by God to be fruitful, to multiply, to subdue the earth, and to have dominion over creation. This is sometimes called the cultural mandate, because the work of building produces culture. Out of it come poems, music, stories, technology, and systems of government. What you build is the question that remains.

This building usually begins at the most basic level with families. But families do not just build houses. They build households. A household is the whole collection of what flows from a life lived together: traditions, businesses, relationships, love, and a shared story. You will belong to a household, and you will participate in its work.

If you are reading this, you were born with a mother and a father, or maybe you were raised by grandparents or step-parents. Either way, you belonged to a household. And now, whether you have been married for thirty years, are just engaged, or are single, you are building your own. Even if you are alone and disconnected, a single individual is still a seed of a household, the acorn that can grow into the oak.

You are going to worship, build culture, build a household, and magnify someone’s name in doing it. Will you worship the true God? What kind of culture are you building? Whose name is being made great by your household?

That is where I want to go: building a good name. This is a concept that has been lost or obscured in our time. So I want to begin by explaining what Scripture means when it speaks of a name.

The Name of God

When Scripture speaks of the name of God, it is not referring to a mere label or title. In the Bible, the name stands for the fullness of who God is: His attributes, His glory, His presence, and His authority. To know His name is to know Him as He has revealed Himself. To call upon His name is to call upon God Himself. To profane His name is to despise His majesty.

We see this throughout Scripture. In Psalm 8:1, David cries, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” He is not saying the syllables of God’s name are majestic, but that the reality of His glory, holiness, and power, everything His name represents, fills the earth. Likewise, Psalm 113:3 declares, “From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the LORD is to be praised!” To praise His name is to praise Him.

God Himself makes this clear in Exodus 33 and 34. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, the Lord answered, “I will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’” And when He passed by Moses, He proclaimed His name by describing His character: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” His name and His attributes belong together.

This is why Proverbs can say, “The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe” (Prov. 18:10). The name is shorthand for God’s presence and power. To trust in His name is to trust in Him.

The Third Commandment comes into focus here: “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain” (Exod. 20:7). To take His name lightly is to treat God Himself lightly. To swear by His name falsely, or to call upon His name carelessly, is to insult the majesty of God.

This is also why salvation is tied to the name of God. Joel 2:32 promises, “Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” Peter repeats this at Pentecost, and Paul in Romans 10. The New Testament applies this directly to Christ: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Jesus bears the divine name, and His name represents all that He is as Savior and Lord.

As Herman Bavinck put it, “All God’s attributes are summed up in his name. Hence to praise his name is to praise God himself.”

The name of God is not empty words but the reality of God Himself. It’s His being, His attributes, His authority, and His glory. How you treat His name reveals what you think of Him.

Our Names

When we think of names in everyday life, we usually think of how we refer to one another. My name is Michael. If I am walking through a store and someone yells, “Michael!” I will turn around to see if they are calling me. If my wife is speaking to me and I have zoned out, she may say, “Michael, are you listening?” Hearing my name gets my attention. It makes me respond.

That is what names do. They evoke a response. Sometimes the response comes not from the person being called but from others who hear the name. Mention a despised politician, and people groan inside. Some names are so poisoned by their association with evil or corruption that no one dares to name a child after them.

But the opposite is also true. Many of us carry names from our ancestors, our fathers, grandfathers, or maybe a beloved aunt. Parents give those names to their children not only to honor the ancestor but in hope that the child will carry on the goodness attached to that name in the household. The name is both memory and mission. It points back to a legacy and forward to a hope.

So even among us, names are powerful. A good name can be a blessing; a bad name can be a curse. That is why Proverbs 22:1 says, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.”

Big corporations understand the power of a name. They just do not call it a name. They call it a brand. A little comparison will help us see why names matter so much for what you are building.

Identity

In the modern world, a brand is more than a logo or slogan. It is the identity of a company. It is the sum of what people think when they hear the name. In Scripture, a name carries similar weight. Again, Proverbs says, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.” A name is the distillation of a family’s reputation, character, and legacy.

My last name is Foster. It comes from the English shortening of Forrester. Many of our last names are derived from the skills or vocations our ancestors devoted themselves to. We were called and named by what we did. Even today, a man is not only known by his work, but often comes to know himself by his work. That is why it is hard for many men, when asked to tell about themselves, not to begin with what they do for a living. It is also why many men decline sharply after retirement. They lose themselves because they have lost their name in their work.

Both brand and name are shorthand for identity. Your name is, in a very real sense, your personal brand. To attack someone’s name is to attack him and his posterity.

Reputation

Companies invest billions to guard their reputation, because once trust is lost the brand collapses. Proverbs makes the same point about a name: “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot” (Prov. 10:7). A man’s word, his honesty in business, and his treatment of others either build or tear down his name.

Once upon a time, Disney had a great brand. Its reputation was so strong that people went to see a movie simply because it was a Disney movie. But a good name can be ruined by a company’s own choices. That is how names work. People will buy on the strength of a good name even when quality dips, but not forever.

A brand lives or dies by trust in the marketplace. A name lives or dies by trust in the community.

Inheritance

A strong brand outlives its founder. Think of Apple, Ford, or Disney. These names carry forward for generations, often stronger than the men who started them. In Scripture, a wise man thinks generationally about his household. His choices attach to the family name and shape how his children and grandchildren are received. “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children” (Prov. 13:22). That inheritance is more than money. It includes the history and weight of the family name.

A good name opens doors. A man may be trusted simply because he carries the right family name. But it is not the name alone that matters. It is what the name represents. Perhaps he has no credit history, but he has a good name. His family does not break promises. They repay debts, and not just on time but early. Because of his name, people are willing to lend him what they would not lend to others. His name is better than his FICO score. His name is his credit rating. That is a powerful inheritance.

A name is generational equity. A brand is corporate equity. Both can enrich or impoverish those who inherit them.

Moral Code

In the business world, people talk about a brand’s promise. If that promise is broken, the brand becomes hollow. Proverbs teaches us that the foundation of a good name is not clever PR but righteousness. “Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man” (Prov. 3:3–4).

Charles Bridges comments that steadfast love and faithfulness are joined together in the life of the godly. The absence of one buries the commendation of the other. A man may be merciful to the poor, but if there is no truth in him, his mercy is compromised. Another may be upright in his dealings, but hard as flint. Mercy without truth is sentimentality; truth without mercy is cruelty. Joined together, they crown a man’s name with glory.

These virtues cannot be occasional. They must be written on the heart. Scripture repeatedly connects the favor of God with the favor of men. This is why Joseph found favor in Egypt, why David was honored in Saul’s household, and why the early Christians had favor with all the people.

Christ Himself is the pattern: “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). The highest crown of a good name is conformity to Him.

A good name is lived rather than managed. A good brand is proven rather than crafted.

Worship is inevitable. So is building. So is the making of a name. The only questions are which God, what culture, and whose name you are magnifying.

There are plenty of successful households that excel at building culture, but it is an evil culture because it does not flow from true worship. Their names are associated with empty materialism, with people who chase wealth as if it were an end in itself. Or worse, their names are tied to moral depravity. Think of the Kardashians. They have built a household name, but what kind of name is it? What are they building it for? That is the question each of us must face: What name are you building, and who are you building it for?

How tragic it would be to succeed in building a powerful and influential household, but instead of magnifying God in holiness, righteousness, purity, truth, and all the good things that lead to life, to end up building a bad name. Proverbs 10:7 says, “The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot.” A bad name decays generation after generation. A corrupt father raises a worse son, who produces an even more despicable grandson. Instead of generations blossoming in holiness, they rot in depravity.

But a good name is the opposite. A good name is a blessing. When people hear it, they are refreshed. At funerals, a good name lives on in the testimony of others: “I miss them, but I look forward to seeing them again in heaven, because I know they knew the Lord.” Their conduct made it plain. A good name should press us to cling to steadfast love and faithfulness, to mercy and truth. Proverbs 3 says that if you bind these around your neck, the byproduct will be favor with God and man.

If you make that your ultimate pursuit, God Himself will give you a good name. And a good name is worth more than riches. Jesus said something similar in Matthew 6: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Yes, you should care about your family’s name. But the first step in caring for your family’s name is to care about the name of God.

Paul warns in Romans 2 that Israel’s hypocrisy led to this indictment: “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” That is the danger of claiming to belong to God while living in a way that brings His name into reproach. If you love God, if you love His perfections, you will want to live so that His name is honored. And one of the blessings that flows from defending the reputation of God with your words, thoughts, and deeds is that He gives you a good name with Him and with others.

What is the sum total of your household? What is your household’s name? Is it a good name?

The ninth commandment says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exod. 20:16). Proverbs adds, “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape” (Prov. 19:5). One application is our moral obligation to defend the good name of our neighbor. To attack a man’s reputation falsely is to rob him of one of his most precious inheritances. It is no small sin. It takes a lifetime to build a good name, and it can be destroyed in an instant by moral scandal. Many pastors have labored for years to build a good name, only to throw it away through sexual immorality or financial fraud. Some live double lives, outwardly projecting a good name, while the reality behind closed doors is rot.

Our children especially need to be taught about the importance of a good name. One of the great sins Proverbs warns about is bringing shame on your father and mother. “A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother” (Prov. 10:1). “A foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him” (Prov. 17:25). If you were born into a good family, or into a family that is reforming into one, add to that family name. Strengthen it. Defend it. First, by worshiping God and caring for His reputation. Second, by living consistently with parents who fear God. Do not tear down what others have worked so hard to build. That goes for children, husbands, wives, friends, and church members alike.

Building a name is building a legacy. Maybe you will not leave your children a large financial inheritance. Maybe you will spend everything caring for a sick family member. That may leave you bankrupt in money, but you can still leave them rich with a good name. Wise builders magnify God’s name by building households marked by mercy, truth, righteousness, and love. Fools magnify themselves, and their names rot away.

Are you in the Word? Are you intentionally & actively hiding it in your heart?

Are you praying? Not just thinking & scheming on your own, but casting your cares on the Lord?

Are you singing praises to Him? Are you filling your home with hymns and tuning your heart to truth?

January seems to be the main month where there’s a big push & emphasis to build holy habits. But sometimes life derails us. The tyranny of the urgent distracts us. We prioritize what we shouldn’t and fail to keep first things first.

So here’s an April Heart Check-In: Let us set aside every weight, and sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance this race set before us. By God’s mercy and grace, slow and steady wins the race.

If you’ve veered off the path or sat down & dozed off, it’s time to repent. It’s time get up, dust off your feet and move forward with our scrolls in hand. Let us press toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Jesus Christ.

You’re not walking this path alone. I’m on this path too. And I’m praying for you. I’m cheering for you. Rooting you on.

You have other friends and family on this road as well. Reach out to someone today--a sister in Christ--and share this encouragement with her. Let’s exhort one another, stoke the coals, and fan the fires of our faith.

And may we pass the baton to the next generation. Our children are watching us. Let us be an example for little feet to follow. “Follow me as I follow Christ.”

So lace up your shoes, pull back your hair & gird up your loins. Let’s run this race and finish well.

I’m talking about the normalization, and even celebration, of sexual promiscuity and degeneracy in “female literature.”

First, how does a middle-aged pastor come to research a subject like this? It’s a fair question.

I’ve had a general awareness of it for a long time. My mom used to read romance novels, often with a fantasy or horror edge. At one point I picked up one of Anne Rice’s novels and remember thinking it was pretty messed up. I think that convicted her, because after that she started reading more “Christian” romance.

Then my senior year of high school, I got really sick and missed a couple weeks of school. We didn’t have cable. After reading through my comic books a few times, I finally broke down and worked through a stack of those Christian romance novels, Redeeming Love being one of them.

Even as a brand new Christian teenager, I remember thinking: while these weren’t as explicit, they were clearly trying to help women scratch a particular itch. I’ll come back to that.

Just a few years later, I studied human sexuality more seriously at Northern Kentucky University, and became more familiar with the real differences between male and female arousal. I’ll come back to this too.

Then, of course, everything blew open when Fifty Shades of Grey became a massive bestseller. There were debates everywhere about it. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, it just made explicit what had already been there in softer form.

So, I have had a general awareness of the topic since high school and have, from time to time, exhorted women to flee from perverted literature.

But that’s not what brought this back to the front of my mind recently.

I intentionally subscribe to a wide range of YouTube channels, partly to avoid living in an echo chamber, and partly to keep my own vanity in check. I listen to a lot of content on writing and publishing. Two of the channels I follow are run by women who often delved into those topics: Joomi Kim and Hilary Layne. Neither, to my knowledge, are Christians. Both can be very insightful. And they’re also, on the whole, really honest and straightforward.

And recently, both of them spoke openly about this rising trend. I’ll be referencing a lot of their thoughts throughout so here are links to those videos: here and here. Layne’s video is especially insightful and loaded with lots of evidence to support her thesis.

Anyhow, that’s what finally pushed me to write this, something I probably should have done a while ago. I want to briefly do three things. Explain why this is a uniquely female danger, how this a growing problem, and why and how it’s being downplayed.

Female Sexual Arousal

Men and women are both sexual beings. There is overlap in what stirs desire, but the differences are real and they matter.

Research on female arousal consistently shows that women typically require what researchers call mental mapping before arousal takes hold. They are looking for a story: an emotional narrative with relational stakes, with characters they can invest in. Desire builds through context, tension, and attachment.

Men are far more responsive to visual stimulus with minimal context. This helps explain why online pornography consumption skews heavily male, and why the type of content consumed differs so drastically between men and women.

Even in studies where both sexes report a baseline preference for normal sexual interaction, the divergence shows up quickly. Women tend to prefer material that is less explicit and more relationally developed. They’d like there to be some sort of story. Men tend to prefer higher degrees of explicitness with far less interest in narrative buildup. As Layne points out, “Your simple, straightforward two people [having sex] video isn’t really going to do much of anything for a woman, generally speaking... a woman will want to know the whole story.”

Strong data also shows that women are more likely to engage erotic content through text-based or imagination-driven formats: fan fiction, romance novels, and audio erotica. Women are underrepresented in datasets tracking visual pornography use not because they’re disengaged, but because they engage through a different medium.

Explicit content aimed at women doesn’t primarily live on screens. Story is the medium best suited to the architecture of female arousal. That’s exactly what I stumbled into as a teenager reading those so-called “clean” Christian romance novels. They weren’t graphic, but they were deliberate. They built emotional tension, relational fantasy, and psychological immersion, scratching the same itch through a different form.

What we’re now seeing with the rise of BookTok and the explosion of modern romance publishing is not harmless escapism. It is the industrialization of that same dynamic.

Romance and erotica have surged dramatically in recent years. Self-published titles now make up roughly 70% of romance e-book sales. The genre accounts for about 20% of all book sales. Much of that growth is driven by increasingly explicit content, written to bypass the visual and go straight to the imagination.

The content is getting more graphic, more immersive, more addictive. It is engineered to do exactly that, in the form most effective for the female mind.

In her video, Layne points to author Sarah J. Maas as the clearest example of how this engineering works. Maas times explicit scenes to coincide with emotional climaxes in the plot, so that narrative release and erotic release fire simultaneously. The result, as Layne describes it, is that the story and the explicit content become inextricably linked, with the erotic material delivered in precisely the way most likely to capture the female reader’s infatuation. The fiction is a purpose-built arousal delivery mechanism masquerading as storytelling.

The genre’s trope taxonomy makes this plain. Male pornography is categorized by sex act. Female erotic fiction is categorized by relational dynamic: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, dark romance, morally gray love interests, forbidden age gaps. The escalation pattern follows the same trajectory documented in male pornography addiction. Women who identified as addicted to erotic fiction reported escalating tolerance, need for harder content, desensitization, depression, difficulty focusing, and relational damage. Some of this content is dark, weird stuff.

Things have escalated to the point that Layne quips:

“Barnes and Noble and every other major and independent bookseller, especially all those new romance bookshops, have now just become another kind of adult entertainment store and know that’s not a good thing.”

The cultural permission structure surrounding each is not. Men who consume pornography compulsively carry shame, as they should. Women who consume erotic fiction compulsively are told they are empowering themselves, and that is a profound harm. The research infrastructure reflects this asymmetry. Decades of studies document pornography’s harm to men. Almost none exist on erotic fiction’s harm to women. The feminist framing around the genre has made serious critical inquiry nearly impossible. Anyone who raises concerns is accused of attacking women’s sexuality.

The Removal of Shame

There is a strong move to remove both responsibility for and shame related to female degeneracy. You see this in books that recast female sexual immorality as an expression of liberation. In Joomi Kim’s video, she highlights this across several popular titles, beginning with All Fours by Miranda July. Kim explains that the main character ends up cheating on her husband repeatedly, with both men and women, and afterward “feels zero guilt about it” — thinking it was “the secret to everything, this bodily freedom,” that “promiscuity was my birthright as a woman.” Kim repeatedly points out that if such thinking were expressed by a man, he would be nearly universally condemned. Female sexual promiscuity gets recast as something normal and praiseworthy.

She also discusses how many of these books invert what critics call “the male gaze.” In Fleischman Is in Trouble, a newly single man notices women who are “self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted, women who weren’t needy or insecure or self-doubting.” Kim notes the author finds five different ways to say “independent” — and argues no actual man would lead with that. It reads like a woman’s wish-fulfillment projected onto a male narrator.

Kim lists instance after instance of female characters committing acts of sexual degeneracy to celebration. That is what this literature is doing: removing shame. As Layne puts it, “Shame is not a bad thing. Shame is how our brains tell us we’re doing something that will harm us.” The effort to desensitize women to shame, she argues, has been more intensive than the same effort directed at men, because historically women led the charge against indecent and sexually explicit material.

The secular case is being made loudly and at scale right now, in the books, the content, and the cultural air young women are breathing: sexual promiscuity is strength, an expression of independence, a birthright, and shame about it is a symptom of oppression rather than a functioning conscience.

A parallel move inside Christian circles deserves the same scrutiny. It runs like this: yes, sexual immorality is sin, but through forgiveness and redemption the consequences are minimal, and in the end she still gets everything she wanted. The wound heals clean. Grace is real, but it costs nothing in the telling.

Back to Redeeming Love. I read it years ago and have no interest in revisiting it, but I remember it well enough. There are extended marital sex scenes written to be felt, not just narrated. The central plot involves a man who, out of supposedly godly love, kidnaps the woman, marries her while she is barely conscious, and holds her thirty miles from civilization until she falls for him. It’s weird. The book frames this as romance. Christian women have been handing it to each other and to their daughters for thirty years. It was subtle, but it was also years ago. Things have progressed down a crooked road.

Anyhow, the problem is not one novel. A great deal of what passes for Christian women’s literature traffics in the same tropes and the same arousal architecture as its secular counterparts, with a redemption arc bolted on. The explicit content is softer. The delivery mechanism is identical. And increasingly, none of that distinction matters, because many of our young women are not stopping at the Christian version. They are finding BookTok and going straight to the source.

Several years ago, a local controversy made the rounds. A handful of elders’ wives from a nearby church posted, proudly, that they were going to see the sequel to Magic Mike. This was a fairly conservative church. People were a little shocked.

More revealing was how many people rushed to defend it. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. Guys do stuff like this anyway. Harmless fun.

If the elders themselves had gone to see that kind of movie, it would have been a scandal, at least in this part of the country. But when women do it, a strange normalization kicks in. There are quick excuses, laughter, the whole thing reframed as innocent or playful.

The behavior is shifting, and so is the moral reflex underneath it.

Most of this isn’t arriving through movies. It’s coming through literature, through stories that dress up lust as romance and package sexual fantasy as emotional depth. Ignoring it is a choice with consequences.

We should care about what forms the imagination of our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our friends. What shapes imagination will, sooner or later, shape desire, and desire does not stay contained.

Porn is twisting our men. We are right to decry it. It warps their understanding of female sexual enjoyment, fetishizes sex, diminishes their self control, and encourages depraved desires. We should war against it. However, we must understand that what is being called women’s literature is twisting our women. It warps their sense of male romance, fetishizes sex, diminishes personal responsibility, and encourages depraved desires. And yet the cries are few and far between. This is a growing danger and one that deserves much more attention.

What is that? Newport explains the underlying presupposition:

“You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.”

I see this mentality everywhere. Let me give you my favorite example: the news. I think the news is mostly a waste of time. Why? Postman captures my thinking, “[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.”

A news alert flashes across the screen: “Huge Earthquake in China.” So what? What does that have to do with me? I live in Ohio. I don’t have any direct connections to China. I’m not a global aid worker. This information is irrelevant to my life.

Now, this is the point where a Christian will argue, “But but now you know how to pray for them.”

Okay, I suppose that is a slight benefit. But let’s consider that in the light of opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is an economic principle which can be applied to any investment. It describes the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Here we are talking about how you spend or invest your time. You chose to spend an hour or, perhaps even, hours on news for the gain of seconds or minutes of prayer for folks in China. That’s the cited benefit. But what better opportunities did you lose out on? Where else could have you spent that time to get better benefits?

The question isn’t if there is “any benefit.” You can cite a small benefit from most activities. The question is what is the good, the better, and the best use of your time. That takes discernment. Newport recommends you take what he calls the craftsman approach:

Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impact.

This has become my guiding principle. I only add “faithfulness to God” ahead of success and happiness. As my responsibilities have increased, I’ve gotten brutal in my application of this principle. If the benefit from an activity/investment doesn’t offset the opportunity cost, I kill it. At least, that is what I’m pushing for.

Time and attention are our most precious resources. Choosing where to invest them is the key to a productive and, often, a happy life.

Commenting on Ephesians 5:16, Matthew Henry writes:

It is a great part of Christian wisdom to redeem the time. Good Christians must be good husbands of their time, and take care to improve it to the best of purposes, by watching against temptations, by doing good while it is in the power of their hands, and by filling it up with proper employment, one special preservative from sin. They should make the best use they can of the present seasons of grace. Our time is a talent given us by God for some good end, and it is misspent and lost when it is not employed according to his design. If we have lost our time heretofore, we must endeavour to redeem it by doubling our diligence in doing our duty for the future.

This is our task. Let’s get to it!

Personally, I’ll continue to attend General Assembly and stay involved here and there, because I care deeply about the state of that denomination. But as we explored it as a potential home, we grew concerned about the condition of its church courts. One of the main draws for us was the court system, but what we’ve seen, at least from our vantage point, looks more like lawfare in some cases, along with an inability to consistently discipline ministers.

Now, that’s clearly not true everywhere.

There are presbyteries with godly men who are working hard to maintain the health of the PCA, and we’re thankful for them. But for now, our focus is on strengthening our own church, along with the two church plants we’re already supporting, and likely a third plant sometime late next year. We’ll continue to evaluate our options as we go but it’s no longer an active item on our session’s agenda.

And yes, for those who always ask, every time I post something like this, we have considered the other alternatives.

For the next couple of years, we plan to remain an semi-independent Reformed church, using an external accountability board to help, if the need should arise, resolve disputes between elders or to hear cases if a member wishes to challenge a judicial decision. We do see independence as a temporary arrangement, not a permanent one.

By the way, when I say “semi-independent,” I mean that we’re not really isolated. We already function as a small family of churches when you include the two church plants, and we’ve built strong local relationships with churches across several denominations. We’ve been intentional about that from the start, and it’s been a real encouragement to see it take shape… whether through shared efforts in church discipline, mutual encouragement, or, at times, even financial help.

We’re still a young, fast-growing church with a lot of needs in front of us. That has to be the priority right now. We’re not willing to step into something that could compromise our ability to focus on that, and based on what we’re seeing, that risk is real.

No matter what, we’re going to keep building the kind of organic connectionalism that’s already taking shape here locally. We’ve been encouraged by the number of new churches being planted across the tri-state, along with the ongoing work of reformation and revitalization.

It does seem to me that we’re in a kind of transitional moment in the American Reformed church. There are a lot of good men, both inside and outside the major denominations, so I remain optimistic about the future. The work of building, and the work of reformation, is rarely the work of a few years. More often, it’s the work of decades.

That work is happening in various camps. It’ll grow into something sizeable and stable. It’s just going to take time, along with a patient, steady commitment to a long-term vision of healthy, connected churches.

Owned Space

I, like so many others, was greatly helped by Aaron Renn’s original newsletter on The Importance of Owned Space. It strengthened my argument for biblical localism, especially as it relates to building sanctuary churches and communities for Christians. Renn writes:

“One of the biggest problems faced by Christians in America (and also by political conservatives) is that they exist almost entirely inside space that is owned by others—legally owned in many cases, but more importantly socially and culturally owned.”

And for the last 6 years, I’ve been dedicated to addressing this, both ecclesiastically and economically, at scale in Batavia and a few other communities. Our church has bought a large building and property. We encourage our members to buy homes and do what we can to help them. We encourage the start-up of businesses and support them. The company I work for has bought several buildings on Main Street in Batavia. We want our Christians to own things. It helps us be salt and light, and it makes it clear that we are committed to the good of the community for the long haul.

Another benefit is that it creates a deeper tie to, and care for, the place you reside. To a great degree, my family’s, friends’, and congregants’ well-being is tied up with the well-being of this county. We want to see quality housing, restaurants, and employers. And we are seeing rapid growth in Clermont County, OH. We are one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. Not all growth is quality growth, especially when it is rapid.

For example, I have not been thrilled with many of the housing developments going up in our county. While we need more housing, the cost-to-quality ratio doesn’t appear to be there, to my very untrained eyes. These homes all look the same, are on small lots, and resemble the poorly built homes I’ve been reading about. The claim is that many new builds are being completed too quickly, using cheap materials and low-skill craftsmen. And yet the prices remain very high, even higher than those of the older but higher-quality existing homes. Buying a house at top prices on a 30-year mortgage, only for it to start falling apart just a few years in? That’s not the future I want for my community.

For many people I know, even if they earn enough and have saved enough to buy a house, they have decided to delay until they can find something of higher quality. So they remain renters or, in many cases, pay high prices for a crappy house or settle for what is essentially a “tiny house.” This isn’t just a housing problem. In many areas, we are coerced into being perpetual renters, paying more for less, and often getting both.

This all does feel designed, or maybe more like the organic and necessary end of a certain way of thinking. After all, many of you are familiar with the World Economic Forum’s 2016 line, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” Regardless of how orchestrated it all is, I think it is essential for Christians to revolt against it.

A life organized around access rather than ownership does not just leave you financially exposed. It slowly trains you toward non-attachment, toward the assumption that everything is temporary, nothing is worth maintaining, and belonging somewhere is optional. That is precisely the kind of person who cannot build a household, cannot commit to a church, and cannot plant himself in a county and mean it.

Renting Everything

The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum. And what they teach runs counter to everything required to build a lasting community that values the good, true, and beautiful. We must return to the school of ownership, and it doesn’t have to start with buying a house. The beginning can be much smaller and yet still formative. First, though, consider how far this has gone.

Legal ownership is only part of what’s been taken. The subtler loss is cultural. Renn was talking about churches and neighborhoods, but the same dynamic has colonized the most ordinary parts of daily life. Many of the things that we once owned have been replaced by digital subscriptions. We get our music through Spotify, our movies through Netflix or Prime, and even our video games through Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation. In most of these cases, we essentially are paying for access to a library of content. It’s not stored locally. It’s not just entertainment. It’s software like Adobe, Microsoft Office, and, to a degree, QuickBooks. You no longer own a copy but rent access to the program in the cloud. But what once was limited to TV and computers has spread to just about any internet-connected device.

The BMW 3 Series required a subscription for heated seats. Mercedes-Benz has offered an “Acceleration Increase” subscription that uses software to unlock more of the engine’s existing potential. Mazda’s remote start was locked behind a subscription service. Toyota did the same thing, but it was part of a free trial that ran out, and one day it just stopped working. There are similar examples with printers, smart alarm clocks, and washing machines. But my favorite example is Samsung’s Family Hub smart refrigerators. It rolled out a software update on the fridges that added promotions and advertisements to the refrigerator’s display when it is idle. Keep in mind, these fridges cost from $1,899 to $3,499. Imagine paying that much only to walk into a darkened kitchen for a glass of milk and find a Moana 2 ad on your fridge.

We don’t own our media, full access to our vehicles, or even the surface area of our appliances. Worse yet, we buy things that initially include features that are removed unless we pay a monthly or annual fee. This “worsening” has a crass name made popular by Cory Doctorow: enshittification.

The Deal has Been Altered

Doctorow uses the term to describe what happens when a platform, product, or service begins by treating users well, offering real value at low cost or low friction. Once people are locked in, it starts shifting value away from users and toward advertisers, business customers, or other partners. Then, once all sides are dependent, it begins squeezing everyone in order to extract as much value for itself as possible. What began as useful becomes bloated, manipulative, and worse. You pay more, get less, and find that leaving is harder than it should be.

Google Search in the early 2000s was a clean, useful tool. Today the first page is frequently a wall of advertisements, AI summaries of uncertain accuracy, and SEO-optimized content designed to rank rather than inform. Facebook built itself on genuine social connections: lost friends found, family kept in contact across distance. Then came the algorithmic feed, targeted advertising, and the deliberate engineering of outrage, because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives revenue. The pattern is the same in both cases. The product got worse on purpose, and leaving costs more than most people are willing to pay.

This is what it looks like to live in space owned by others. You moved in when the terms were good. Now the terms have changed, and leaving costs more than staying. You are a tenant who thought he was a resident.

Small Revolts

The other night I stumbled upon a YouTube channel called CheapAudioMan, which recently documented the CD revival in similar terms. CD manufacturers are reporting fifteen percent annual growth. Discogs data shows sales up year over year. A single Taylor Swift album released in 2025 sold two million compact discs in the United States alone. Five of the top ten selling CDs in that same period were K-pop releases, bought largely as collectible objects.

The easy interpretation is ironic nostalgia. For some buyers, it probably is. But I think something deeper is going on. A growing number of people are tired of passive consumption. Streaming made listening effortless, but it also made it weightless. The algorithm chose what you heard. There was no friction, no commitment, and, in the end, nothing to show for it. A CD or record requires a choice. You spend money, bring something home, and put it on a shelf. It becomes part of your life in a visible way. CheapAudioMan makes this point directly: Gen Z buyers are not mainly purchasing CDs as nostalgia. They are purchasing them as identity. What is on their shelf says something about who they are.

And it is not just CDs. Retro video games, consoles, and cartridges from the nineties and early 2000s have become mainstream, expensive, and more popular than ever, despite modern games being technically superior by almost every measure.

Gaming has been one of the most aggressive adopters of the subscription and live-service model. Battle passes, daily challenges, early access tiers, and games that launch broken and patch themselves into adequacy over the course of months. The implicit contract is that you never finish, never own, and never stop paying. Retro games violate every part of that arrangement. They start instantly, and they end. They have clear goals and no ongoing obligation. You own the cartridge. Nobody can patch out the experience you remember or add a storefront to it.

And many of the people going back to older hardware never even played these games as children. They are choosing them because the current alternative feels extractive. They are choosing ownership over access. They are choosing something fixed over something endlessly updated, monetized, and controlled from far away. In their own way, they are pushing back against the rented life.

Own Things Worth Owning

That instinct should make sense to Christians. We should want to own things that can be handed down, maintained, and defended. We should want our children to value what is durable, tangible, and good. Property matters. Homes matter. Land matters. But so do books, music, stories, and even games. They help train people in the habits of stewardship and care. They teach that some things are worth keeping, not just consuming. And in an age that wants to turn everyone into a perpetual renter, even small acts of ownership can become a kind of revolt.

The lesson I am trying to teach my children, and relearn myself, is simple: when you own something worth owning, you become invested in it. You maintain it. You protect it. You notice when something is wrong, and you do something about it. That is not just how you care for objects. It is how you learn to care for a household, a church, a neighborhood, and a county. People formed by ownership are not easily pacified by endless access to things that are not theirs. They know the difference because they have felt it. They are harder to extract from, harder to uproot, and harder to turn into perpetual tenants of someone else’s vision for their life.

Renn was right. The space you own is the space you can defend, shape, and pass on. That is true of a building on Main Street in Batavia. It is true of a house with a yard. It is also true of a shelf of books your children have actually read, a record they saved up to buy, or a game with a beginning and an end that belongs to them and stays what it was. Start there, if you have to. Start small, but start. The rented life is not neutral. It is shaping you, whether you consent to it or not. The question is whether you will let your children be formed by it, or whether you will form them to resist it.

If we’re going to be an intergenerational church, we also need a real pipeline for training pastors. That’s where energy should go.

Toward that end, my wife and I have started a small press to publish the work we’re doing. I’ve partnered with Grimké to help with their church planting concentration. We’ll still do a few conferences here and there. But that’s it. Nothing new for a while.

What about making the internet more enjoyable?

A big part of this, for me, is just disavowing the outrage machine on both sides. I don’t want to be part of it anymore.

So I’ve started making some small, deliberate changes. I’ve been unfollowing people on Twitter who don’t have anything constructive or positive to say. Many have been muted for a long, long. In their place, I’ve been following comic book creators, boxing commentators, and writers I actually enjoy. Same thing on YouTube, which I probably use the most. I’ve been gravitating toward art history, writing strategy, story structure… that kind of thing. Some of it is entertainment, but most of it is helping me get projects done. So, it’s more productive content.

It’s been a noticeable shift. I’m less pulled into the constant churn of the news cycle, less tempted to get worked up about whatever the latest thing is supposed to be. The internet actually becomes enjoyable again when you stop feeding on outrage all day.

By then, Great-Grandma Patrick had some dementia. She got people mixed up. But she could still tell a story. I remember one in particular. She told me about walking to buy cookies as a little girl, paying just a penny. The idea of a single coin buying that many cookies stuck with me. I’ve told that same story to several of my own kids when they were young. Who doesn’t like cheap cookies?

Life is shaped by stories. They form little lives into the people they become. If we want our children to grow into what God intends, we have to tell them stories, good ones, true ones. And “true” means both what really happened and what faithfully reflects enduring truth, even if it didn’t. Part of godly parenting is learning to be a storyteller.

Of course, they must be told the greatest story ever told, the storyline of all Scripture.

They need to know that the world was made perfect by a good and generous Creator, one with whom we had real fellowship. Then, through our own self-centered and unjustified rebellion, we fell, and we dragged the whole creation down with us into misery and death. But God, being merciful and full of grace, came in the flesh. He died in our place, satisfying the wrath of God, rose again, and triumphed over evil. Now He is seated at the right hand of the Father. We are waiting for His return, when He will set all things right.

That story, creation, fall, redemption, consummation, is told through a thousand smaller stories across the Bible. Your kids need to know the whole thing and the parts that make it up. That means teaching them Adam and Abraham, Samuel and Malachi, Paul and the rest. Sometimes you tell a single story and let them see a piece of the whole. Other times, you pull the threads together so they can see the tapestry.

Children’s Bibles can help. We used The Big Picture Bible for a time, though we eventually set it aside over concerns about images of Christ. Still, the basic idea is right: give them simple, faithful retellings that help them grasp the shape of the story.

Don’t underestimate what grabs them. Kids love the epic parts, Exodus, the judges, the kings, the battles. Use it. Let those stories hook their attention. Just make sure they don’t stay isolated. Show them how they fit.

Teach the Bible. Get these stories into them. If you do, they’ll start to interpret the world through them. They’ll compare people they know to people they’ve met in Scripture. That’s exactly what you want.

You also have to tell them stories from your own life, and the ones handed down to you by your parents and grandparents. Family stories matter. They function like a kind of family Genesis.

The word Genesis means origin, source, beginning. It’s the story of where everything came from, how the world began, how man fell, how the people of God took shape. It’s not just history; it’s identity. It explains who we are and why things are the way they are.

Your family stories do the same thing on a smaller scale.

They tell your kids where they came from. Why you grew up the way you did. Why your family lived where it lived. Why certain traditions stuck. Why some relationships are strained and others are close. They explain why Grandpa drank too much, why an uncle disappeared, why your parents fell in love, why there’s a silence around certain names. They display the reality of sin, consequence, mercy, and providence.

They also carry the small, human details that stick, like the time your great-grandmother could buy a pile of cookies for a penny.

These stories help your kids make sense of their world.

And they want to hear them, especially when they’re young. Later on, they may act like they’ve heard them all before. But when they have kids of their own, those same stories come back. They start telling them again.

If you don’t tell your stories, you cut them off from something real. They lose access to lived examples of sin and its cost, of God’s mercy showing up in ordinary life, of decisions that shaped the family they now belong to.

Don’t underestimate the scale of it. What feels small to you feels big to them. Those little stories open up a whole world.

And of course, you should read to them.

You start simple, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, just to build the habit and the love of it. There’s nothing better than when one of your little kids brings you a book, climbs into your lap, and settles in.

It usually starts with silly, light stories. Then you move into things like Little Bear and Frog and Toad, which I’ve always loved. They’re mostly about friendship. They don’t hammer you over the head with a lesson. Overly moralized stories can backfire. Better to tell stories that quietly normalize what’s good, right behavior, right affections, just by showing it.

As they get older, you can widen things out. I read mine The Wizard of Oz series, The Chronicles of Narnia, and My Side of the Mountain, a story I loved as a kid. We also read missionary biographies, especially Hudson Taylor, whom I named my firstborn after.

At this point, my older kids are all readers, or at least listeners. A lot of that comes through audiobooks now. And while there’s something unique about holding a physical book, turning the pages, and sitting still with it, the main thing is getting good stories into them. However it happens, I suppose.

A good story tells the truth, one way or another. Sometimes fiction does that best. It gets inside the human heart, its motives, fears, longings, in a way that sticks. In that sense, some of the truest stories ever told are the ones that never happened.

Here’s a challenge I used to run with my three oldest when they were younger.

I’d give them a setting to choose from: mountains, ocean, or a run-down futuristic city. Then a character type: robots, pirates, or aliens. Then a plot: searching for an escaped prisoner, fighting in a civil war, or traveling with a carnival. Sometimes I’d throw in a villain, an evil alien overlord, a treasure-hungry dragon, or a super-genius gorilla.

Then I had to tell a story that held all of it together.

Sometimes the stories were surprisingly good. Most of the time, they were ridiculous. I’d stumble through them, make it up as I went, and the kids loved it all the more for that. The robotic bearded lady would look off across the deck and spot Manila, the vanilla gorilla, trying to recapture the carnival workers he’d enslaved to feed his endless appetite for bananas. It was nonsense, but they still bring this up every once in a while.

Story time should be both planned and unplanned.

It happens around the dinner table when you read Scripture during family devotions. It happens around campfires and at the edge of bedtime. It shows up at funeral meals, when stories start flowing about the ones we’ve lost, the good, the strange, the funny, the hard.

Tell your kids stories.

God uses them. He uses them to shape boys into men and girls into women, to give them a sense of the world, their place in it, and the kind of people they’re meant to become.

Big Idea

Mature masculinity is not swagger, charisma, or raw force. It is self-rule under the rule of Christ. A mature man governs his appetites, emotions, words, and priorities, and from that inner order he becomes capable of caring for others.

Definition of Mature Masculinity

A spiritually mature man is one who, because he is under the lordship of Jesus, rules himself well in body and soul and therefore can faithfully steward what God has given him, beginning with his household.

Preliminary Principles of Mature Manhood

• Self-rule comes first. A man who cannot govern himself cannot be trusted to govern anything else. Leadership starts in the inner life before it appears in public.

• Maturity is character, not technique. Gifts and competence matter, but they collapse under pressure when character is weak.

• Bad authority is the enemy, not authority itself. Godly authority protects, orders, corrects, and cares.

• The more common masculine failure is abdication. Some men are tyrants; more fail through laziness, passivity, and people-pleasing.

• Nice is not the same as good. Biblical masculinity includes kindness and gentleness, but not spineless agreeableness.

• Responsibility, authority, and ability belong together. A man should not seek authority without the character to bear it.

• The household is the proving ground. Before a man talks about influence, he should examine what order, peace, and faithfulness exist at home.

• Maturity is visible: in sobriety, self-control, sexual fidelity, hospitality, patience, and a credible reputation with outsiders.

Marks of a Mature Man

• One-woman man: his desires are disciplined; loyal, not wandering.

• Temperate: emotionally steady; serious when seriousness is needed, light when lightness fits.

• Prudent: sensible, ordered, not ruled by impulse.

• Respectable: outward life reflects inward self-control.

• Hospitable: loves people, not just ideas; opens his life, not merely his mouth.

• Able to teach: communicates truth in a way that helps people.

• Not ruled by substances: alcohol, screens, lust, status, and money have no throne.

• Gentle, not quarrelsome: strength under control, not harshness dressed as conviction.

• Not a lover of money: comfort, platform, and profit cannot buy him.

Proverbs of Mature Masculinity

• The first battlefield of masculinity is the man himself.

• A man who cannot say no to himself will eventually fail everyone depending on him.

• Mature men are not driven by mood, fear, appetite, or public opinion.

• When pressure rises, technique burns off. Character is what remains.

• A man does not prove maturity by demanding authority but by carrying responsibility faithfully.

• Before a man asks whether he should lead, he should ask whether he is leadable by Christ.

• Public leadership without private order is fraud, eventually exposed.

• The home is where masculine maturity becomes concrete.

Tensions in Mature Masculinity

• Tender but not soft. Gentleness is restrained strength, not its absence.

• Serious but not sour. Sobriety is not joylessness.

• Firm but not domineering. Rule must be just, bounded, and sacrificial.

• Convictional but not combative. A man can confront error without becoming a bully.

• Ambitious but not self-seeking. Wanting to build and protect is good; craving status is not.

Strategies for Masculine Maturation

• Take inventory of what rules you: anger, comfort, lust, screens, food, alcohol, approval, money, fear.

• Build ordinary disciplines: prayer, Scripture, work, sleep, exercise, financial restraint, ordered speech.

• Practice leadership at home through consistency, not speeches.

• Earn trust in small things before reaching for larger influence.

• Cultivate hospitality. Mature men make room for others.

• Choose steadiness over image. The goal is not to look strong but to become strong.

Bottom Line

Mature masculinity is disciplined, stable, loyal, hospitable, courageous, and governable under God.

Stage 1 is magnification. This is something like a honeymoon stage. The pastor appears to be the sort of leader they have been longing for, and they magnify his virtues, which leads them to overlook, or at least minimize, his shortcomings. I have seen it said that this stage lasts four years. I have no clue how you could prove that. I will say that, in my experience, it is usually much shorter, more like 2–3 years. I think the more mature the Christian congregant and the pastor, the shorter the duration. That is why I say this is a common pattern, not one that must be fully played out in every single congregant-pastor relationship.

Stage 2 is disillusionment. This stage grows over time. Essentially, the congregant gains enough access to the pastor that he begins to let them down. That letdown may involve expectations the pastor created himself. But it can also come from idealistic expectations projected onto the pastor. Usually, it is some mixture of the two. A lot of this depends on the maturity and stability of the people involved. A less spiritually mature congregant will tend toward more idealistic projections. A less spiritually mature pastor will allow or create unrealistic expectations. The intensity of the disillusionment will roughly track with spiritual maturity. The more they idealize you, or the more you allow them to idealize you, the more disillusioned they will become. Fanboys often become haters. Mature people tend to have more reasonable expectations, and they gain that sort of wisdom either by going through letdowns themselves or by being the one who lets someone else down. I have no clue how long this stage lasts. I will say that by the time the pastor figures out it has been going on, it has usually been going on for a long time.

Stage 3 is the fork in the road: reverence or rejection. The disillusionment stage can only last so long. Its conclusion will hopefully end in what we might call reverence. This is where the congregant comes to see the pastor as a normal but mature believer laboring hard under the weighty office of a pastor. Because he reveres God, he reveres the office. Because he reveres the office, he understands its high calling. And because he recognizes the difficulty of such a high calling, he reveres the man who takes that calling seriously and labors to be an example of mature Christianity. This demystification of the man allows the congregant to actually love and respect him. Something similar has to happen between a child and a parent as they age into near-peers.

The other outcome is rejection. The congregant is so let down and disillusioned that they leave the church because you failed them. If you made yourself appear to be something you are not, then you did fail them. But, as is often the case, if they projected onto you something you never claimed to be, then this is really them failing themselves. They leave and start the process over with some other pastor, and the whole thing begins again.

This cycle will be a constant in the life of a pastor as people come, go, and some stay.

I am wired to be a demystifier in all of life. I want people to see the truth of things. I want them to see the reality of Oz the Great. So I have worked hard to demystify the pastorate. By demystifying, I mean the deliberate showing that while pastors should be mature, godly men suited for their calling, they are not super-Christians or heroes in the old Greek sense of the word. That has not always been the right move.

The truth is, I think some of this was motivated by a desire to speed up the three-stage cycle and avoid being rejected once again as a failed hero. Some pastors, especially those driven into ministry by a desire to be celebrated, eat this up. They lean into the mystification of the pastorate. By mystifying, I mean the deliberate cultivation of a pastoral mystique that shrouds a man’s humanity and magnifies him as a hero, again in the Greek sense. They will eventually pay for this.

There are others, though, and this is more my camp, who have the opposite tendency. We trend toward a kind of radical transparency, trying in good faith to collapse the pedestal, but the result can be just as destabilizing. Forcing disillusionment because of impatience or self-protection is not good. You have to let this process play out.

I think the pastor must be wise about who he allows access to his personal life. This is not a matter of full access or zero access. It is a matter of degrees. Beware of giving fanboys too much access, because they rarely make it through the disillusionment phase without eventually coming to hate you and using whatever they have to prove that you failed them. Your and your family’s little failings will not be overlooked for long. In time, disillusionment will exaggerate them into something disqualifying in the mind of the fanboy turned hater.

The women who appear to want to be your wife’s friend may turn on her once your non-heroicness is discovered. They will weaponize what they have learned. The same thing can happen with your kids. This is part of what makes ministry families want to live in a fortress. I get it. But you cannot do that.

Erecting fortress walls will ironically lead to even more mystification, and your family needs friends. The answer is to have degrees of relationship and degrees of openness. You must be known, and you must know others. But you cannot allow unstable people to define the shape of your whole life. You can build these relationships in your church with members of your congregation. Part of demystifying is being a good example of what a mature household looks like: a household with boundaries, where trust is established over time. I’m stewing on this aspect and will expand on it later.

Note: Some of these thoughts come from an article I read by an Episcopal priest named Warner White. He went deeper into the Freudian stuff that I didn’t care for, but it’s still worth tracking down. I don’t know its title.

Brian’s Bullshit-Free Zone

All the details in one place: New doc shows the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film was hoaxed.

By now you’ve probably heard that the new documentary Capturing Bigfoot which premiered last week at SXSW has revealed that the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film of 1967 was hoaxed. “Revealed” is perhaps too strong a word; it’s been known beyond any reasonable doubt basically since the very beginnin…

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a month ago · 11 likes · 6 comments · Brian Dunning

Here is the YouTube video from the streamer I mentioned:

What interests me about all this is not just whether the footage was fake. It is how people process evidence once they have decided they want something to be true. I can almost guarantee that some believers will take this debunking as confirmation that the original footage is genuine. In their minds, this is exactly what a cover-up would look like. They will say it proves there is a coordinated effort to discredit compelling evidence of something modern Westerners cannot bring themselves to accept as real.

That is how a lot of people think now. They decide what they want to believe first, and then go looking for material to justify it. You can see this dynamic all over the place, especially with conspiracy theories. Even saying that will discredit me with some people. They will respond, “All the conspiracy theories turned out to be true,” which is nonsense. A few did. Most did not.

But the broader mood really has changed. It used to be that if you thought a conspiracy might be true, people treated you like a crank. Now, in many circles, questioning a conspiracy is taken as proof that you are just a normie with your head in the sand. It is a strange times.

It's okay to question all this weird stuff right now. Keep your head.

That trend reflects something larger than Reddit. It reveals a cultural instinct that treats hardship in relationships as proof that the relationship itself is the problem. Difficulty gets interpreted as incompatibility rather than as something that might actually grow a couple up. Marriages have dry and difficult seasons. Anyone married long enough knows that. Couples who stay the course through those seasons often come out the other side with something deeper and more durable than what they started with.

Part of the problem is the expectations people bring into marriage. Many walk in assuming their spouse will meet nearly every emotional need and supply the sense of fulfillment they’ve been looking for. When real life fails to deliver, disappointment sets in fast. Then the internet steps in and names the obvious solution: walk away. A wiser framework says the opposite. Lower your expectations of the relationship and raise your commitment to the person.

There is another problem underneath all this. People are seeking counsel from anonymous strangers online. Communities like r/relationship_advice are full of people whose lives you know nothing about. You have no idea whether the person advising you has ever sustained a healthy relationship. You cannot ask if they are still married, whether they have raised children, or whether they have actually walked through difficulty and built something lasting. All you get is a verdict from the crowd. And the crowd is increasingly inclined to give the same verdict every time.

Proverbs says there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. But it assumes those counselors are real people with wisdom worth weighing. The people best suited to speak into your marriage are the ones who know you, love you, and have some skin in the game. A pastor. A mentor. A couple in your church who have been married thirty or forty years and have weathered storms of their own. Those voices are worth listening to.

The internet often is not.

I will say this means the church has to step up. There is only so much we can do, and there are always people who would have us try to do everything. But the health of your marriages should be near the top of our priorities. Just consider how much attention the epistles give to marriage and the household.

I’m working through what the best approach is for us at East River. There are a lot of ways to go about it, but all of them involve getting married couples together. Especially younger couples spending time with older ones. That kind of proximity and example does a great deal of quiet work over time.