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Kevin Harvey is an editor and author who also really enjoys pop culture. His latest book, All You Want To Know About the Bible in Pop Culture, points people to the sometimes surprising gospel elements in today's movies and comics.

1) Have you always been a fan and/or consumer of pop culture? What motivated you to write this book?

Absolutely. Though my dad was a deacon and Sunday school teacher, and my mom was a preacher’s daughter who always sang in the church choir, our family did not shy away from enjoying great family moments and memories at the movie theater or in front of the television. I have vivid memories of my dad rushing my brother and me to the theater after church one Sunday to see the latest Star Trek movie and my mom cringing at the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when the man’s heart is pulled out. Pop culture in my family growing up was part of enjoying life together. At some point in my adulthood, I began noticing more and more ways in which Hollywood was using biblical themes, perhaps without even knowing it, to write their stories. So my motivation for this book became twofold:

One, that the churched audience would recognize that a great deal of pop culture today is not near the Sodom and Gomorrah environment many accuse it as being, and in fact much of it is either intentionally gospel-inspired or unintentionally able to be redeemed for the gospel. We just need to be able to put on our “God goggles” and be willing to enter a mission field that hundreds of millions of people immerse themselves in daily. The new Avengers movie made $180 million dollars in its opening weekend, which is a gigantic audience of fans who would probably be more open to discussing comparisons between The Vision and Jesus than they would most any other topic Christians tend to use to try and break the ice with in order to share the gospel.

And two, for the unchurched audience, I hope that this book and others like it will find a mass appeal to the mission field itself. This is probably my biggest hope for the book—that a comic book fan who has never opened the Bible would suddenly find themselves curious to read more about Jesus, after seeing all the similarities to him in the recent Superman movies.

2) Christians have a complicated relationship with pop culture, swinging wildly from withdrawal and separation to total immersion. What is your view?

No doubt, I wish that Christians would view the 15 million people who watched The Walking Dead finale or the millions of people who loved Breaking Bad as a mission field. The fan bases are basically the population of a small country. Just as a missionary going to Africa would first learn the native language in order to best form relationships and share the gospel, so must we “learn the language” so to speak of pop culture and be able to engage in watercooler conversations at work and online about the previous night’s Blacklist episode or the latest movie to make a billion dollars at the box office. Certainly there are lines to draw and temptations to stay away from. I would never call for an all-out pop culture party for all Christians. But I believe there is much more than people realize that can be not only enjoyed as entertainment but used to introduce others to the gospel.

I wish that Christians would view the 15 million people who watched The Walking Dead finale as a mission field.

3) Christian themes or content can be found in some surprising places. What surprised you most in your research?

Probably what surprised me the most would be the unintentional (at least what I believed to be unintentional) biblical parallels that can be found in many popular reality television shows. For example, Undercover Boss is an awesome metaphor of how Jesus came down to earth to serve among the people. Home-renovation shows do a good job of exemplifying 2 Corinthians 5:17, taking out the old and replacing with the new. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a beautiful picture of the early church in Acts and what I believe we are still called to be like as a church.

4) Sometimes Christian themes are overt, sometimes they are subtle. What motivates otherwise secular artists, filmakers, and songwriters to include Christian themes?

Just like the psalmists in the Bible were simply communicating to God, sharing their hearts through their art, today’s writers are doing the same thing. If you want to know what is on someone’s mind, look at their art. Look for what they’re writing, not just saying. But beyond what they are intentionally communicating, a secular artist, whether he believes it or not, has been created by God, made in his image, and has a hole in his heart that can only be filled by a relationship with his creator. I believe that perhaps without being able to connect all the dots, a writer recognizes the need for redemption, grace, and forgiveness in each of our lives. He realizes that we cannot save ourselves and that some things in life can only be explained through supernatural means. Themes such as sacrificial love and forgiving the unforgivable hit home with everyone, because we were created with a need for them in our lives.

A secular artist, whether he believes it or not, has been created by God, made in his image, and has a hole in his heart that can only be filled by a relationship with his creator.

5) If you could give pastors and church leaders one piece of advice on applying pop culture in their sermons, what would that be?

Don’t run away from pop culture. Don’t consider cable TV and Top 40 radio beacons of the devil to stay away from. In fact, they are beacons of the world, broadcasting to us, the church, what they are relating to and how we can make connections with them. Maybe those sitting in your Sunday congregation who have been in church their whole lives can make connections to Chris Tomlin, Duck Dynasty, and Left Behind. But the mission field we have been sent to share Christ with, those outside the doors of your church or who perhaps have crossed that threshold for the first time ever, are listening to Katy Perry and watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and are planning on standing in line to see the next Star Wars movie. If you can connect with them there, you will definitely get their attention.

Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.

Last week, Bible teacher, conference speaker, and the leader of Revive Our Hearts ministry, Nancy Leigh DeMoss announced that she will marry Robert Wolgemuth this coming fall. Given both DeMoss and Wolgemuth’s very public personae—he is a former president of Thomas Nelson, once chairman of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, and owner of the literary agency Wolgemuth and Associates—their ensuing marriage is the closest thing evangelicalism has to a royal wedding.

Naturally, there is a lot of supposition about how marriage will change them, but both DeMoss and Wolgemuth have been clear about one crucial principle: their call to marry does not negate or replace their individual calls to ministry.

The call to marriage

DeMoss and Wolgemuth’s belief, articulated in the announcement, that God will make them “even more spiritually fruitful together than [they] could be apart” is not unusual in evangelical circles. One of the distinctives of the Protestant Reformation is, after all, the conviction that those called to ministry can (and often are) also called to marriage.

Still, the relationship between marriage and ministry continues to be a sticky one, especially for women.As if anticipating the question, DeMoss quickly assured her audience that she has no intention of stepping away from ministry:

I love this man dearly and look forward to becoming Mrs. Robert Wolgemuth. But my life mission has not changed. It will now be our life mission to magnify the Lord together … We envision a continued robust Revive Our Hearts ministry. Our longing is for even more women (and men) around the world to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

Given her vocal embrace of singleness in the past, it’s natural for DeMoss to feel the need to reaffirm her call to ministry. If singleness was a gift that enabled her to fully commit herself to the work of Revive Our Hearts, then any change in her marital status will require some explanation.At the same time, DeMoss’ commitment to public ministry may surprise some because she has also been an outspoken advocate for women to embrace a unique call to home and family. An unabashed critic of feminism, DeMoss warns women against attempting to “do it all.” While she stops short of criticizing women who work outside the home, she does encourage married women to prioritize their husbands and children as a primary means of ministry.

The call to home and ministry

Some of this disconnect is explained by our cultural assumptions about who bears responsibility for the work of the home and who bears responsibility for the work of the church. Since the Industrial Revolution, the marketplace and home have become distinct realms of existence with women traditionally finding their place in the home while men venture into the marketplace to “bring home the bacon.” With this divide in place, church ministry increasingly assumed a quasi-marketplace identity; today, ministry is often understood as a profession with its own set of educational requirements and financial rewards.Because of this, many understand the call to ministry and the call to home as competing calls. If a woman’s place is “in the home,” then how could it also be in the church?Thankfully, in the digital age, the divide between the home and marketplace is shrinking and with it the unnatural divide between public gifting and family. If it’s true that we have unhelpfully associated ministry with the marketplace, perhaps a more holistic engagement between the home and marketplace will lead to a more holistic engagement between home and the call to formal ministry. Perhaps we will begin to see both home and ministry as part of a larger call entirely: to extend the glory of God throughout the whole earth.

Partners in the gospel

In Scripture, both men and women carrying out leadership and service in the local church can be disqualified on the basis of their ministry at home. In other words, the Bible does not support a separation between the call to minister to family and the call to minister publicly. If any of us fail to love and serve our closest neighbors—those within our four walls—we cannot be trusted to love and serve those outside them, either.

Still, the apostle Paul is clear that marriage can present a distraction, or a limitation, to our participation in more formal ministry. Women like DeMoss who believe they are called to both marriage and ministry should expect to experience very real constraints on their time and emotion. Yet these calls do not negate each other. As 19th-century pastor, theologian, and statesman, Abraham Kuyper notes in his biographical sketch of Priscilla, who aided Paul in his ministry:

A woman such as Priscilla is a potent influence in any congregation to which she happens to belong … From her position in the Word of God, she affirms that a woman, also a married woman, has another calling besides those of dispatching daily duties and engaging in activities of mercy …

Such a holistic vision of ministry and family may feel unattainable, and in some sense, it is. The tension between our callings is an innate part of human limitation and no number of spreadsheets, calendars, or new models of efficiency can resolve it. But this is also the beauty of multiple callings. The Holy Spirit calls us to attempt the undoable precisely to make us dependent on his power and leading.

Like every newlywed couple, DeMoss and Woglemuth will soon experience the joy and struggle of merging two lives into one. Through God’s grace, they will learn to minister to one another even as they continue to minister to the church at large. But as they do—and as we get to watch from a distance—we may just catch a glimpse of a marriage not unlike that of Priscilla and Aquila. A marriage where two people are bound together by something greater than their own home and family: the glory of the gospel.

Hannah Anderson is a freelance writer, blogger, and author of Made for More: An Invitation to Live God's Image. She lives with her husband and three children in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. You can connect with her at her blog sometimesalight.com, or on Twitter @sometimesalight.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

It is perhaps the most famous sound in all of human history: lubdub, lubdub.

The beating of a heart is the soundtrack of life: lulling every infant and narrating our most glorious and ordinary days alike. It races with our fear, slows in our rest, skips with our joy, and pounds with our passions. While that muted double thump has sustained every human that has ever lived, it is the pause in between—that forgotten, expectant silence between beats—that sustains the heart itself. In this silence, our hearts are renewed; without this silence, they stop.

A single heart will have 2.5 billion beats over a lifetime, each one sending a rush of blood to our brains and bodies and giving us a few more seconds of life. Our dependence upon the function of the heart is much more immediate than on that of any other tissue. If the liver or kidneys fail, we may have days. If the lungs give up, we may have minutes or hours. But the moment the heart stops, we are gone, and only dramatic action can reverse it. So instead of recharging during long, languid periods of sleep like other organs, the heart takes its only break in the quick half second between pulses.

The word diastole comes from the Greek word for separation or expansion. It is the return to baseline—the rest—of the heart in between each contraction (systole). The heart has two pairs of chambers: the smaller atria (lub) that receive blood from the venous system and push it into the larger chambers called the ventricles (dub), the workhorses that pump blood out to the body. With each beat of the heart, the muscular walls of the ventricles squeeze together, forcing blood through the unidirectional valves and into the large-caliber aorta and pulmonary artery, the conduits to the rest of the body.

The walls of the heart themselves are a thick, meaty, muscular tissue composed of some of the most metabolically active cells in the body. Because the walls are too thick to obtain nourishment from the blood flowing through the pumping chambers, the heart has its own circulatory system, the coronary arteries. These vessels branch off the aorta just outside the one-way aortic valve and wrap around the surface of the heart, giving off small capillaries that burrow into the muscle to deliver nourishment and oxygen as needed. The lubdub of the heart infuses the body with life, nourishment, and oxygen, but that energetic squeeze paradoxically wrings the capillaries in the walls of the heart itself. As the muscular walls contract, the crush is so great that the capillaries collapse entirely, and the heart literally drains its own muscle of blood.

And then, for a moment, it is still.

Diastole is the passive stage when the heart rests. The muscular walls that had bunched together with the systolic action now relax and go flaccid, falling limp as the impulse to strain fades. The chambers flop back to their resting shape, and the voids that open as they do suddenly bulge as a surge of blood returns from circulation and flows into this new, negative-pressure space. The low pressure of the venous system—the other end of the circulatory loop and the source of blood for the heart—is enough to drive blood forward into the empty atria and ventricles as they lose the tone of systole. At the same time, the muscular heart wall relaxes, and the crushed coronary capillaries are allowed to expand again. Blood that had been pushed into the aorta backflows against the now closed aortic valve, and with nowhere else to go, it eddies into the open mouths of the coronary arteries. The heart’s own circulation system is flushed with new, oxygen-rich blood, and the muscle is restored.

In that quiet moment of diastole, the heart does very little for itself. It doesn’t pull blood into its chambers; it just waits to be refilled. It doesn’t pump blood through its own circulation system; it just relaxes enough to receive it. Diastole is not an achievement of the heart, yet it is so crucial that if cheated of it, the heart fails.

In sick hearts that cannot relax fully, the chambers themselves are never completely refilled. When the next contraction begins, the heart starts out with an inadequate volume of blood to pump, and the body suffers from poor circulation. Similarly, when the heart beats too fast because of malfunction or stress, the diastolic phase is the one that shortens. Without enough time to rest and expand, the heart cannot fill with blood well enough, and the resulting pumps are smaller and less effective, decreasing blood pressure in the rest of the body. With less time to fill its own capillary system and higher oxygen demand because of the increased work, the heart exceeds its own oxygen supply, and the heart muscle itself begins to break down. If this continues long enough, cardiac cells will begin to die, and these areas of cell death will become arrhythmogenic—meaning that they start contracting out of sync with the surrounding heart tissue. The heart will lose its natural, smooth rhythm and slip into a terminal, disorganized rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. It literally beats itself to death.

While not marked by noise or activity, diastole is as critical to our hearts’ functioning as the activity that precedes and follows it. The heart can do nothing to fill itself, and in its dependence on complete and good rest, we hear echoes of our God’s words to David, who, in the midst of war, is told to “be still, and know that I am God.” Be still and be filled.

Lindsay Stokes is an emergency physician living in Albany, New York.

On April 7, 1990, David Biro broke into the affluent suburban Chicago home of Nancy and Richard Langert armed with a glass cutter and a revolver. When the Langerts returned home that night, Biro, then 16, was waiting. He rejected the couple’s attempts to negotiate, which likely included money; police discovered ­$500 in cash abandoned at the scene. Biro shot Richard in the head and Nancy, who was pregnant, three times. He left her bleeding in the couple’s basem*nt.

“It was Palm Sunday,” remembers Jeanne Bishop, Nancy’s sister. Bishop was at choir rehearsal at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. “The secretary came and said, ‘You have a phone call.’

“I said, ‘Can you take a message?’

“She said, ‘No, you need to come with me.’ ”

Bishop immediately thought of her elderly father. But it was his voice she heard over the phone: “Nancy and Richard have been killed.”

An image of a truck crushing the couple’s compact car on the expressway flashed through Bishop’s mind.

“What do you mean, killed?” she said.

“Somebody killed them.”

A week later, Bishop learned the details of her younger sister’s last moments. Nancy had remained alive for roughly 10 minutes after Biro shot her in the elbow, back, and abdomen. Before she died, she crawled over to her husband’s body and used her own blood to draw a heart and the letter U.

No Division

Six months after the murders, the police arrested Biro. An honors student at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, Biro had once been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for trying to poison his family. He had bragged to his friends about the Langert murders.

In 1991, shortly after Biro was sentenced to life in prison without parole, Bishop had already decided that she needed to forgive him.

“If you look at the Gospels, you see Jesus over and over again saying, ‘You have to forgive because you have been forgiven,’ ” said Bishop, a lifelong Christian, citing the parable of the unforgiving debtor (Matt. 18:21–35).

But because Biro was permanently behind bars, Bishop thought she could move on without ever informing him that she had forgiven him in her heart. She thought she would never have to say his name aloud.

“I had built this wall that was convenient for me,” Bishop told CT. “I thought, ‘Because you haven’t apologized to me, that absolves me of the responsibility of reaching out to you.’ ”

Then, in 2012, Bishop read Forgiveness: Christian Reflection. It contained an essay by J. Randall O’Brien, the president of Carson-Newman University, a Baptist school in Tennessee. “No Christian is ever in the position of privilege, wronged one or wrongdoer, where he or she is excused from the responsibility of working for reconciliation,” he wrote.

Bishop disagreed—so much so that she arranged a meeting with O’Brien to challenge him. O’Brien reminded her that Jesus prayed for his own murderers from the cross.

“I felt my heart, hard and rigid, cracking open,” said Bishop. “I had always made a divide between Nancy’s killer and me. Him: bad murderer. Me: innocent victims’ family member. The truth was, there was no division between us before God—we were both flawed and fallen.”

“Wouldn’t it be amazing,” O’Brien told her, “if God used you to bring this man into relationship, if he joined you in heaven one day?”

After their meeting, Bishop began to pray for Biro, saying his name aloud for the first time. In January 2013, she made contact with Biro through a letter, asking if she could visit him.

One week later, Biro—who had never admitted to the murders, far less shown remorse—wrote back. In the course of 15 pages, he confessed to the crime for the first time and accepted her offer to meet.

Pardoned

The day before Bishop first made the 100-mile drive to Pontiac Correctional Center, she had coffee with an 83-year-old man who had been making the same journey every other week since 1991. Nicholas Biro, David’s father, gave her handwritten directions to the prison, including a tip for a nearby McDonald’s if she wanted a beverage before entering the jail. He also gave her two quarters, explaining that she’d need them for the locker at prison to hold her car keys.

When Bishop first sat across from David Biro in prison, Bishop did not find the person she’d expected. “I’d turned him into a monster. I’d mythologized him as a thing called a murderer. He’s a 40-year-old man.”

In their first meeting, Biro didn’t explain how someone raised in a loving, well-to-do home could take “a magnum revolver and put it to the back of a grown man’s head. But he did admit to the crimes.” He recounted the details of April 7, 1990, as Bishop asked questions.

Since then, Bishop has returned to meet with Biro 15 times. Before each visit, she prays on the drive that she will be able to communicate that “he’s loved and valuable and that God has a purpose for him.”

“The more I get to know you, the worse I feel about what I did,” Biro told her recently.

“What I wanted for him before was to rot in prison and suffer, and that would make him sorry,” said Bishop. “But what made him sorry is to experience the unconditional love of God and the forgiveness of his victims’ family member.”

Bishop believes that all who are sentenced as teenagers should have a chance at some point while in prison for a comprehensive review. But it’s likely that Biro will spend his life in prison. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that juvenile mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole were unconstitutional, the judge at Biro’s trial gave him a discretionary life sentence, which remains constitutional. A governor could pardon him, but that’s unlikely given the severity of the crime.

“To say to a person who commits this crime at age 16 or 17, ‘We know that you need to be locked up forever for us to be safe,’ is contrary to what we read when we open up the Bible,” said Bishop. There, “we see stories of people who killed and were restored, starting with Moses and David and later Saul, who became the apostle Paul.”

Bishop doesn’t sugarcoat Biro’s murder of her sister, brother-in-law, and their unborn child. She calls it “horrific, heinous, and merciless.” In a new book, Change of Heart (Westminster John Knox Press), she goes into detail about what happened. “I want people to understand that I’m not forgiving him because it wasn’t so bad.”

Facing the gravity of the situation, in fact, is what allows Bishop to keep making the treks to Pontiac.

“It’s not okay what you did, but I am not going to hate you. I am not going to wish evil on you,” said Bishop. “I am going to wish the opposite. I am going to wish that you will be redeemed.”

Morgan Lee is CT’s editorial resident and lives in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @Mepaynl.

Nancy Langert’s murder spurred Jeanne Bishop to grapple not only with Christian forgiveness but also with her vocation. In 1990, the then-29-year-old was a corporate attorney in Chicago.

“I was doing the job out of fear and pride, really—fear of not having enough money, pride in working for the big fancy law firm,” Bishop told CT. “I realized that God gave me this gift of life, and I was squandering it.

“I needed to do the things God gave me this life for: to serve others and not myself.”

Within a year of her sister’s death, Bishop quit her job to become a Cook County public defender. Today, the Yale Law School graduate advocates for Chicagoans who can’t afford a trial lawyer, representing thousands accused of everything from petty theft to murder.

Before Bishop and her clients meet—typically in the lockup of a courthouse—the defendants have been handcuffed, arrested, and put in a cell. They will “be wearing a uniform they did not choose, shoes that may not fit,” said Bishop. They have a number written in marker on their arms, so “they’re not called out by name. They’re called out, ‘Number 24!’”

The majority of Bishop’s clients opt for a plea deal instead of a trial. But before Bishop offers counsel, she asks them for the truth.

“I want to be the smartest person in the room when I stand in front of the judge,” she said. “If I don’t know what really happened, then I’m not the smartest person in the room. I want to know everything so I can investigate every possible avenue of defense.”

Bishop also uses all the details of the crime to teach her clients. One previous client stole the bike of a delivery man who was on the ground, already the victim of having his wallet and cell phone filched.

Bishop asked her client why he failed to call 911 and help the man.

“Oh, I didn’t know him,” he said.

“That’s not okay to do to a stranger,” Bishop told him. “That’s what got you in trouble.”

Another defendant wore a ski mask into a convenience store, pistol-whipping the owner before ransacking the shop. Bishop warned him that going to trial would not only result in a guilty verdict but likely invoke the ire of the judge for traumatizing the shop owner again.

“[The victim] wasn’t that terrified. The gun doesn’t even work,” he said.

“He didn’t know that,” said Bishop. “It’s likely that with the gun in his face, all the owner is thinking is, I have two daughters whom I might never see again. I’ll never get to see their graduation from high school or walk down the aisle for their wedding.”

In talking in depth with clients, she helps to humanize not only victims but also the clients themselves. Several years ago, Bishop interviewed a man accused of breaking into the apartment of an immigrant mother and her daughter. They had watched, helpless, as he stole their belongings. The client grew up in Cabrini-Green, formerly one of Chicago’s roughest housing projects.

“I was eaten by rats when I was a baby,’” he told her. Then he pulled up his shirt to show her the crevice in his stomach. There were chunks of flesh missing from his forearm.

“If you’re an infant in your crib and you’re eaten by rats, one of two things has happened,” she told CT. “You’re screaming and there’s nobody there to hear you. You were left alone. Or, they’re there, but they don’t even care enough to notice that you’re being eaten by rats.

“I have been able to learn about why people commit crimes—what it’s like to be a prisoner, how prisoners often think of their own crimes, and how their narratives of themselves and what happened shifts over time.

“My job is to be as good a lawyer as I can possibly be, because it isn’t about whether I like them or they like me. It’s about this ethical duty I have to be their advocate, no matter what they’ve done.”

This year, Pentecost Sunday, which is this weekend, falls a couple weeks after Mother’s Day.But several years ago the two celebrations fell on the same day, and I thought that timing was perfect—Pentecost celebrates a birth and a mother­, the birth of the church and the church as our mother.

Since then, I’ve thought of Pentecost as our truer, ancient Mother’s Day.St. Cyprian, a third-century bishop, famously said, “No one can have God as Father who does not have the church as Mother.” The symbolism of the “church as mother” is used throughout early church writings, continues into the medieval period, and, though it may surprise some, was embraced by the reformers. John Calvin quotes Cyprian and refers to the motherhood of the church throughout his Institutes.

The historic symbol of the church as mother is replete (dare I say pregnant) with meaning: we receive the gospel through the church just as we receive life through our mother; in many traditions, word and sacrament are said to nourish and feed us just as mothers nourish infants through their very bodies; and, extending the Pauline metaphor, the church is historically addressed as the “bride-mother,” through which the Spirit bears life to all the world. A French hymn proclaims, “Now Christ, the Model of what all may be, has taken Church, our mother, for his bride…His love is she.”This maternal symbolism affirms the significance of motherhood and the vital role of moms. Throughout church history, when thinkers, teachers, and saints looked around for a symbol of the church—something that told us of that which was essential, life-giving, glorious, nourishing, vital, and indispensible—they looked to moms and motherhood.

Additionally and importantly, this maternal imagery affirms the vital role of the church. Last year, Donald Miller stirred up the Internet with a blog post saying that he doesn’t go to church and neither do most Christian leaders whom he knows. He is not alone in his uncertainty about the role of the church in the Christian life. Due to our history of anti-institutionalism and individualism, some evangelicals view church attendance as merely an add-on to the Christian life, one of many elective ways to grow in a “personal relationship” with God. We can overlook the celebration of Pentecost because we overlook the central role of the church in the gospel story.

But for most of Christian history, a relationship with God was inseparable from a relationship with the church. Most believers over the last two millennia—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox alike—would deem spiritual life without the church as incomprehensible and impossible as biological life without a mother.

During Pentecost, we recall that, mysteriously, the church is a God-invented institution, built by Christ himself through the Holy Spirit. In Pentecost, we celebrate God’s act of creating the church, forming a people who, under the leadership of the apostles, are filled with the Holy Spirit and bring the message of redemption to the ends of the earth, carrying the “deposit of faith” in every age and place, birthing generation after generation of those baptized and called Christ’s own.

Yet, hurt and wounds some have experienced from our mothers or from the church can make Cyprian’s call to embrace the “church as mother” sting.

Stanley Hauerwas reminds us that when we speak of God as father, “fatherhood is a grammar controlled by Christological conviction”—in other words, fatherhood is defined by Christ, not our dads—and, therefore, that “those who have a troubled relation with their biological father are perhaps in the best condition to worship Trinity.” In the same way, the motherhood of the church must be defined by what Jesus taught and who he was.

Christians live within the paradox of the church as a divine organism, a perfect mother, and the church as a human institution, one that is broken and fallible. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon, Screwtape, distinguishes between the church as a glorious bride (“the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners”) and the church as a broken institution (“the half-finished sham-Gothic erection” where a worshipper “sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad…[and] just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided”).

I love the church and have been loved well by her. Yet, like many Christians, I have been hurt by her as well. During one dark period, I wanted to quit church all together. Sunday mornings brought sadness, anger, and condemnation. During that time, a friend invited my family to worship with his congregation as a way station, a place to heal, so we went. When I took the Eucharist each week, I’d cry; I was being fed by a mother who I wasn’t sure I trusted and whom I needed to forgive. Week by week, I kept returning to our way station church because, in it, I heard the Scripture and participated in the sacraments with others in this broken family. In it, I found that kindness and truthfulness remain alive in Christian community, and, in it, I remembered that the bridegroom is faithful. He will not leave his church to our own devices.

Even in broken relationships in our families, we nevertheless see fragments of the divine. Through the goodness in motherhood, we glimpse what the church will one day be, glorious and whole. This Pentecost, we celebrate the beginning of that great work of sanctification, the birth of our mother, Christ’s bride. And we celebrate that he who began that work will be faithful, often in spite of us, to complete what he began.

Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She and her husband work with InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries at The University of Texas at Austin and have two young daughters. She writes regularly for The Well, InterVarsity's online magazine for women. For more, see tishharrisonwarren.com or follow her on Twitter at @Tish_H_Warren.

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A productive ethic guides the novelist Shannon Burke: Know the subject intimately, then write: "Fiction is about making the reader feel a time and a place and it's really hard to do this if the place isn't rooted inside you." His first two novels, Safelight and Black Flies, are set in North Manhattan, where Burke worked for five years as a paramedic in the 1990s. His third novel, Into the Savage Country, rebounds from now to then in a historical adventure featuring 1820s American trappers in Indian Country.

How to mediate that gone world? Burke read everything available: "The sources that were read for this book, if listed, would stretch for several pages." And he camped! "I've spent at least two years of my life in a tent, so I'm familiar with the feeling of being out in mountains."

Fully informed and infused, Burke put his excellent skills as a novelist to work, becoming the fictional trapper William Wyeth. The result is tale ringing with the narrative tone, conversational idiom, and striking vistas of the Northern Rockies and primitive settlements where the trappers worked and slept. William the novice leaves St. Louis and drags a boat upriver with a brigade of veteran trappers: "I was twenty-two years old and feverish with the exploits of Smith and Ashley." The literate Wyeth ("feverish with the exploits") seeks experience as much as fortune. His companions include the aforementioned Jedediah Smith and a rich assortment from Burke's memoir-fed imagination. They include a mad, courageous dandy, Henry Layton; the expert tanner Alene, who uses buffalo brains to process pelts; Ferris, the crack shot who splits arrows with a long rifle from 500 yards; and the pernicious Grignon, bent on mayhem.

One great pleasure the book offers is the formal, declarative speech of another time, long past. Oratory underlies conversation, and complaint is anathema in this stoic era. William and Alene speak of her circ*mstances after her husband's passing:

"I have no means of leaving," she said evenly. "He had only debts. The doctor has offered me an occupation. And the children need me."

"His family was wealthy."

"His family had cut their ties with us before he died."

"Because of his debts?"

"Because of me," she said matter-of-factly. She had a quarter native blood.

"I knew his father slightly," I said. "My initial impression was of an arrogant, heartless man. Now I have another reason to dislike him. I 'm sorry to hear of all this. I offer what assistance I can."

"I ask for no assistance. I will be glad for your friendship."

Like the dialogue, Alene and William's deliberate courting procedure is another rich archaism the book offers our frenetic, texting psyches. Yet another is feeling the ever-present physical jeopardy of the time before health insurance. Insults lead to duels. Riding a horse killed Alene's husband Bailey. You can still make your fortune, but you'll have to square off with British trappers who'd like your scalp along with your beaver skins. Food is meat, and there are no refrigerators. Layton has a new-fangled gun, a Collier, still a flintlock but self-priming, and shoots the balls one after another. (You better shoot straight, or you'll get shot.) When you have cactus spines infecting your feet, the best doc to have is the prototypical survivalist Pegleg: "I ain't set to do anything 'cept to see how the doc's maimed him," Pegleg said. "Shame old Peggy wasn't here to help you out."

Shannon Burke's novel puts us in "the savage country" with savages as much white as native, and with "savage" implying a world of experience we sadly lack today. You're sorry when the story ends—the characters are that good, and the novel's that well made. And you'll be right to place it on a shelf next to Charles Portis' True Grit, that other brilliant conjuring of American voices and characters in Indian Territory before the western states got their names.

Bruce Wiebe is a retired high school English teacher, woodworker, and Kindle reader in Lakeville, Minnesota.

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I became a Christian in 1975 after debating some Baptist street evangelists. I wasn’t raised in church and had become an ardent atheist, but I knew some things about Christianity. I knew that Christians believed in the Trinity and gargoyles, and that they were against science. At least I was right about the Trinity.

After coming to Christ, in order to catch up with the kids in Sunday school, I read the Bible a lot. I learned that if you read 40 chapters per day, you could read through the entire Bible every month—or, what I did more often, through the New Testament every week. Consumed, I began seeing not just how each book of the Bible is distinctive, but also how each passage reinforces the major themes of the book in which it appears.

One New Testament theme that resonated with me early on was self-sacrifice. I saw this theme most clearly in the Gospel of Luke. As I grew familiar with the book, the meaning of Jesus’ words in chapter 12 became obvious to me. When Jesus called people to follow him, he demanded that they forsake everything, instructing his disciples to sell what they had and give the proceeds to those who need it more. By so doing, he said, they would provide themselves wallets that don’t get old, an unfailing “treasure in heaven” (v. 33).

As a new convert, I didn’t think giving up my possessions for Jesus seemed difficult—especially as I realized that the eternal reward far outweighed any present sacrifice. Or perhaps it seemed easy because I was young, idealistic, and didn’t own much. But I hadn’t been taught differently. While lacking a church background may have led me to take this passage more literally than Jesus intended, it helped me to see that living forever with God easily trumps everything else.

Abandoning Everything

In Jesus’ day, most people owned few possessions. In rural areas, many people worked and lived as serfs on the land of the wealthy. In urban areas, many of them lived in rickety tenements located downwind from sewers. Only a small proportion of people were wealthy, and their property was serviced by slaves and paid workers. Estimates suggest that at any given time, more than half the Roman Empire was at risk of starvation. Luke’s world was not too much different from ours: Today half the global population lives on less than $2.50 a day and 400 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

While giving up possessions was not a foreign practice in Luke’s day, it certainly wasn’t the norm. Only some marginal philosophic sects and Jewish monks who lived in the wilderness near the Dead Sea actually demanded the sacrifice of possessions. Most people, like most people today, would have found Jesus’ words frighteningly difficult. They had either too much—or too little—to give away.

Yet Luke stresses that financial sacrifice is fundamental to Christian discipleship. Jesus urges not just the rich ruler but all of his disciples to sell their possessions and care for the poor—in return for treasure in heaven. Many of us today wonder whether Jesus’ words apply to all Christians or only to the disciples, those leaders of the early church. Peter wondered the same (v. 41). While Jesus may have meant it especially for leaders, the principle applies to any of us entrusted with resources that we can use to care for others (vv. 42–48).

A key reason Jesus calls us to care for those in need is that God does (1:53; 4:18; 6:20; 7:22; 14:13, 21; 16:22; 19:8; 21:3). Luke shows that God’s concern for the destitute carries profound implications for those who aren’t destitute. For instance, when people asked John the Baptist how they should repent, he invited anyone with two garments to give one to someone who had none (3:11). When an official asked Jesus how he could inherit eternal life, Jesus invited him to sell everything, give the money to the poor, and follow him (18:18–22). And in Luke’s second volume, the Book of Acts, after people ask how to be saved, we are told that an integral part of their life together, subsequent to conversion, was sharing resources (2:44–45).

All of this struck a chord in my newly believing heart. Early on as a Christian, I decided not to accumulate many possessions so that I could care for others. Living simply seemed to come naturally to me.

Another aspect of Christ’s call, however, proved to be difficult.

Jesus not only summons his disciples to surrender their possessions, he also invites them to trust in his provision. He even tells us not to worry about basic needs such as food and clothing (Luke 12:22–29). It’s not that we stop needing such basic things. It’s that we shouldn’t worry about them. As a recent convert from atheism, I felt more prepared to give up my possessions than my self-dependence. I accepted the truth that God worked in spiritual ways, but I struggled to trust that he would act in my physical world.

Luke emphasizes that we can trust our powerful and caring Father to provide for us, especially when we aim to do his work. When Jesus sent out his disciples, he told them not to take any provisions with them and to instead depend on God through local hospitality (9:3–4; 10:4–8). I understood intellectually that God’s promise of provision is related to the mission on which he sends us. But learning to trust him in this area has been slow going for me.

For example, soon after I committed to support a child in India for $15 a month, circ*mstances changed and I had no income. I prayed that God would supply the money since the child was dependent on me. When I was literally down to my last dollar, God provided the money I needed—and the money the child needed—even though my faith was weak.

And when I was accepted into a PhD program, I didn’t have the resources to pay tuition. I figured I wouldn’t be able to enter the program, so I planned to decline enrolling. The day before I would have done so, however, God unexpectedly provided the money I needed—through someone I didn’t know even had that much. Time and again, I’ve experienced God’s provision for my calling. He’s been faithful to provide, even when I feared he wouldn’t.

God cares about us more than he cares about birds and flowers, yet he provides for them, Jesus says. How much more, then, will he provide for us (12:24–31). “Don’t focus your attention on, or worry about, what to eat or drink,” he notes. “No, these are the things that all the pagans are focusing on, but your Father already understands that you need them! Instead, focus on the matters of your Father’s kingdom, and he’ll provide you with these things you need.”

At minimum, this includes our basic needs such as food and clothing. And someday our Father will share with us everything—the fullness of his kingdom (v. 32). Meanwhile, Jesus wants us not simply to give up possessions but also to give up our dependence on them.

We cannot be his disciples if we do not give up everything. He is an all-or-nothing Lord.

The self-sacrifice that Jesus calls us to, therefore, involves far more than money. Following Jesus and participating in his mission takes priority over everything else in our lives, including residential security and social and family obligations (9:57–62).

A few chapters later, Jesus warns those who want to follow him that they must “hate” their family, “even their own life” (14:26). Many of us trip up on the word hate. Like other ancient Jewish teachers, Jesus often used hyperbole, a rhetorical overstatement meant to drive home a point. Such statements were not intended to be taken literally, as if we could, for example, actually relocate mountains or squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle (Matt. 17:20; Luke 18:25). Rather, Jesus wants to grip our attention to force us to reconsider our priorities and actions.

Matthew’s version puts Jesus’ statement in more literal terms: “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (10:37). The point is that Jesus doesn’t want anything to get in the way of our following him—not even family or survival. He says we cannot be his disciples if we do not give up everything (Luke 14:33). He is an all-or-nothing Lord.

This doesn’t mean that everyone must give up all possessions; it does mean everyone needs right priorities. When Charles Finney preached on Luke 14:33 in a wealthy New England church, he emphasized Jesus’ call to surrender possessions. The pastor thought he needed to correct Finney’s interpretation. So he assured his congregants that Jesus merely wanted them to be willing to give up their possessions. Finney countered that while we don’t lose all our possessions when we come to Christ, we do lose our ownership of them. If Jesus is truly Lord of our lives, then everything we have and everything we are belongs to him.

Prioritizing People

I sometimes carried the principle of forsaking everything further than Jesus intended. Shortly after my conversion, I was supposed to be translating Caesar for my second-year Latin class. I wanted to read Scripture rather than do my homework, so I opened my Bible and put my finger down on the page, expecting it to fall on another “forsake all” passage. But not all passages, even in Luke, address this theme. Instead my finger landed on Luke 20:25: “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” I now know as a Bible scholar that that’s normally not a smart way to apply Scripture to life. But the finger trick did get me to do my homework.

When people turned to Jesus, they learned to value people more than possessions. Rather than immediately selling everything and becoming monks—like Saint Anthony—the earliest Christians sold what they had to help those in need, as their needs arose (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35).

That sort of sacrificial love inspired me profoundly. I learned that everything I had was a gift from God, and I tried to use my resources for God’s purposes. After learning that in some countries 20 cents could provide a day’s worth of food for a child, and that a Bible commentary could cost a pastor a month’s salary, I used my money as carefully as possible. I found ways to live simply so I could contribute to people’s desperate needs.

Having a family obviously changed my practices. I want to provide for my family’s needs and bless them as much as possible. At the same time, my wife and I try to help our children understand why they don’t need everything valued by their peers. William and Catherine Booth, the founders of the Salvation Army, similarly had to explain their sacrifices to their children, who grew up understanding why their parents lived the way they did. I pray that mine do too.

So what does it mean today to value people more than possessions? We’re not like the rich man who let Lazarus starve at his doorstep (Luke 16:19–31). Our society is too sophisticated to let anyone that hungry near our doorstep. Yet we know that thousands of people die every day from starvation, malnutrition, and inexpensively preventable diseases. It seems backward, therefore, to acquire what we don’t need when we could help others meet genuine needs. There is inexplicable joy in living wholly for Jesus. Why settle for temporary pleasures when we can do what counts for eternity?

I’m still discovering areas of my heart that can be more devoted to Jesus. Nevertheless, I’ve experienced firsthand the joy of sacrificing for others, not to mention God’s never-ending faithfulness through it all. That is worth infinitely more than anything I could give up.

Craig Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and author of The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (InterVarsity Press).

In all the battles waged by men, one of the most effective ways to destroy the enemy is to destroy its women. Rape and sexual abuse are wartime “strategies” as old as war itself.

Yesterday The New York Times ran a devastating report that hundreds of girls as young as 11 have been raped and impregnated by members of Boko Haram. Based in Nigeria, the radical Islamist sect has long proven its cowardice by targeting girls, including the 300 mostly Christian schoolgirls they kidnapped last year, inciting the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. For the young victims now carrying their abusers’ unborn children, returning to anything like normal life is impossible to imagine.

The same goes for those targeted by another radical Islamic group, this one spreading terror throughout the Middle East. Popular Christian writer Ann Voskamp recently visited refugees in Northern Iraq who had fled ISIS, the self-declared Islamic State. Voskamp noticed 5- and 7-year old girls among the families, but no 9-year-olds. The reason, writes Voskamp: “ISIS sells 9-year-old girls in slave bazaars… They are categorized. Stripped. And shipped naked. Examined and distributed. Sold and passed around like meat. Livestock.”

ISIS “has institutionalized sexual violence and the brutalization of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations,” a UN representative confirmed last week. On the ground, females are sold as sexual slaves for $43—with the price going up to $172 for the youngest (ages 1–9). The UN reports that one girl was “married” more than 20 times, each time forced to undergo surgery to “restore” her virginity.

Why does war and terror target women in particular? The reasons are as numerous as they are horrid. Sometimes a group intends to infect the enemy’s women with disease in order to destabilize a community. One of the countless women raped during the Rwandan genocide recounts her abusers, Hutu men with HIV/AIDS, saying, “We are not killing you. We are giving you something worse. You will die a slow death.” Some women get sold as brides by their families to placate an insurgent group; others as sex slaves to fund a group’s own military campaign. And throughout history, systematic rape has been used to wipe out an enemy’s numbers and increase one’s own.

Such is the case with Boko Haram. As one Nigerian governor told The New York Times,

The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women. Some of them, I was told, even pray before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they are doing become children that will inherit their ideology.

“The products of what they are doing” include for many victims infection, dangerous childbirth, trauma, and stigma. Many of the women express deep shame upon returning to their communities, where they are derided as “Boko Haram wives.” Often the mothers have trouble showing love to their children after giving birth; this makes it more likely for them to turn to their fathers’ ideology. According to the Nigerian governor, Boko Haram believes their offspring will carry on the faith. Apparently when your God demands that infidels be wiped from the earth, sexual violation becomes a justifiable, even righteous method to secure true religion. After all, the oldest way to spread a religion is not to evangelize people; it’s to create new ones.

After the Fall

This might have been the motive for the Israelites to take “every girl who has never slept with a man” after their war against the Midianites. In disturbingly neutral terms, Numbers 31 describes Moses telling 12,000 Israelite men to kill every male and every female “who has slept with a man” (v. 18). Then, he instructs the men to take the female virgins as captives.

The text doesn’t say that the Israelites raped the women; according to Deuteronomy 20–21, they would have made the captives their wives. Still, Numbers 31, Judges 21, Zechariah 14, and other Old Testament passages describe God’s people disobeying God's good design for sex and family, treating women as property, and forcing them into sexual arrangements to add to the Israelite family.

The wartime atrocities recounted in the Old Testament resemble many we read about today. The Old Testament is an account of God's saving acts toward his people, but it is also an account of sinful human proclivity for depravity and domination. “The foundational premise of the Bible after Genesis 3… is that this fallen world, particularly fallen humanity, is violent,” notes Reformed theologian Justin Holcomb. In light of the Fall, sex and childbirth—acts intended to create and sustain life and love—are put to violent ends. And the “ruling with” relationship between men and women described in Genesis 1–2 is warped into “ruling over.” Boko Haram and ISIS are particularly pernicious expressions of the violence we are all capable of.

Thankfully, the Old Testament is only half the story. When Christ came to “put the world to rights,” in the words of N. T. Wright, he does so by establishing a new family based in repentance and belief, not genealogical bloodlines or conquered people groups. As such, Christianity introduces an entirely new strategy for spreading a religion. As New York pastor Tim Keller notes,

Nearly all religions and cultures made an absolute value of the family and of the bearing of children. There was no honor without family honor, and there was no real lasting significance or “legacy” without leaving heirs.

In this way, groups like Boko Haram and ISIS are repeating an age-old pattern, trying to secure their future by producing offspring using whatever means necessary. The growth of Christianity, like all religions, is often due to families passing on the faith to their children. But by contrast, Christianity is the first major religious tradition also to emphasize growth through verbal proclamation and acts of mercy and healing. That’s why evangelism is a distinctly Christian word—and will likely be the growth edge of Christianity in the next 35 years.

That Boko Haram has to kidnap and rape little girls to gain members suggests the group knows its days are numbered. We can pray that that is the case. We can also pray that women now facing trauma or pregnancy are given support and healing. In the meantime, we long for the day when the arrogance of men will be brought low, when spears will become plowshares, and women and men together will walk in the light of the Lord (Isaiah 2).

A decade ago, if you broke up with a guy, or needed to avoid him, it would probably be a matter of chance as to whether or not you’d bump into him somewhere. Maybe you’d say an awkward hello and walk the other way. All in all, it was pretty straightforward. Go where he doesn’t. Live your life. The end.

Now, it’s not about chance. It’s about choices. Tons and tons of choices.

The social media fiasco of “should we stay friends with our exes or not” is complicated. I spent years feeling unsure of what I should do. When you’re a caring, Christ-following woman and you’re dealing with relationships that were once so close and important, it’s hard to think of any other option than staying friends. It’s hard to be a nice girl and still have firm boundaries. Married or single, it just is.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat—there are plenty of ways to connect with (or simply observe) an ex in trivial ways. And as harmless as it may seem, it may actually be doing you a world of hurt to stay in contact with that boy you crushed on all through college. As a matter of fact, in 2011, lawyers polled said Facebook was the third leading cause of divorce in the cases they worked on. People connecting with their old flames or meeting someone new on Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild was the third leading cause of divorce.

Nice Girls

A few years ago I encountered a man (at a 20somethings ministry at my church, of all places) who didn’t have good boundaries. I was seeing someone else at the time, but this guy would still make borderline inappropriate comments to me, ask if he could see me in private, and message me on Facebook. I distinctly remember a weekend trip to Minnesota when I told my friend Sarah about him, torn up and wondering how on earth I was going to deal with this in a good “Christian” way. She took my computer out of my lap, clicked a few buttons, and handed it back to me.

“There,” she said.

“What? What did you do? Did you tell him to stop? Were you nice?”

“Nope. I blocked him. Ashley, you don’t have to be nice all the time. You don’t have time for that. Once he realizes you’ve blocked him, he’ll get the picture at church.”

By helping me rip off that Band-Aid, Sarah had introduced me to the beauty of blocking.

The Beauty of Blocking

If you are married, if you’re committed to someone, if you know that ex-boyfriend was unhealthy, if it wasn’t a God-honoring relationship, if you ever felt unsafe or abused, if you can’t get over someone and you don’t know why, it might just be time to rip off that Band-Aid and take away the temptation of contact. It’s time to stop looking at his profile, reading his tweets, or following his Instagram. Heck, it might be time to block him from your phone. Actually, it might be best to block him altogether—that’s what I call removing yourself from temptation.

Worried that it’s going to make you seem mean and heartless?

It might. But that’s a small price to pay to protect your ability to move forward in a healthy way. God is calling you forward, not backward.

I’m being harsh, I know. But I know sometimes it takes a helpful nudge to move forward, and this concept has set me free—and it’s kept me more emotionally and spiritually safe. Often we can’t control when temptation enters into our lives. But this we can control. Cutting ties is about protecting ourselves from the temptations we can control. It’s a way of respecting yourself and respecting your future.

If you’re single and you’re reading this, you might think I’m crazy. You might think it’s good to stay friends with exes on Facebook after you’ve broken up or moved on. You may even see it as somewhat of a safety net, just in case, down the line, you’re single, and he’s single . . . you know the drill.

But if you can’t remove that person from your life after you’ve broken up for good, there will be no room for someone new. And doing that unfriending or blocking once you’re in the new relationship? Well, I’ve been there, and it made me wonder if I was doing it for me or for my new boyfriend. It made me bitter.

See Joseph Run

In Genesis 39, Potiphar’s wife is trying to get Joseph to sleep with her, because apparently he was the McDreamy of the Old Testament and all the girls thought he was hot stuff. What I love about this passage is that in the face of her advances, Joseph doesn’t give a second thought to being nice. Instead, he doesn’t even try to save his cloak (he’s constantly put in situations where he’s losing his coats, poor guy) and runs away from her as quickly as possible, knowing he’d make her sad, mad, or both.

Joseph wasn’t an idiot—he knew this woman had the power to affect his professional life as well as his personal one. She was his boss’s wife, after all. But what I admire so deeply about Joseph is that regardless of any feelings, professional or private, he had, he put his purity, his integrity, and his obedience to God ahead of all else. He ran out of her bedroom in his Skivvies, only to be falsely accused of attempted rape. He was fired. He went to prison. He lost everything, once again. But he was obedient, and he protected himself from a woman who was not his to have.

Protecting the Marriage You Want

It’s easy to compare your husband at his worst (when he smells bad and he’s crabby and he forgot to buy that thing at the store that you needed) with that sweet ex-boyfriend whose Facebook is telling you he just moved to India to work with orphaned children. Or whose Twitter account is reminding you of how very hilarious and godly he is. Social media is the easiest way to present people with the best versions of themselves, and whether or not you know it, that comparison can seep into your marriage and suck out your joy. It’s poison.

I recently got married, and as I’ve grown in this relationship and its responsibility, I’ve had to really reassess my social network activity. For a while, there were a few exes I still needed to completely cut out from my media world. I hadn’t done so yet because I always thought staying social media pals with them was a neutral decision. They weren’t a threat to me at that moment, so I assumed they never would be. But I’ve had to ask myself: Are these friendships benefitting my marriage? Are they healthy in the long run?

The answers, for me, were no. And even though they may never have come back to haunt me, I didn’t want to take that chance. Sometimes making these tough choices is the best way we can help ourselves.

While not all Facebook friendships with old flames lead to affairs, the concept of running away from temptation instead of allowing it to remain at your fingertips is a good one. It’s a biblical one, even. If you’re married, protect the marriage you’re in. If you’re single, it’s about protecting the marriage you want. Not interested in getting married? Well then give yourself permission to live the single life with a little less baggage.

It’s time.