Meat-market Christianity.

"Of course I love you. You're the eight-prettiest, fourth-smartest, sixteenth-most-godly, ninth-funniest girl at the Bible college I was attending when I met you!"

I've noticed that when it comes to relationships, Christians are just as bad as everyone else. We make a mental list of the other singles at our church, or bible college, and try to figure out which one we're supposed to marry. It doesn't get much better as we get older. When I first moved to Tulsa, I got sent to a 30s/40s singles group, and the air fairly reeked of desperation.

And beneath it all, what we're doing is making a list of human attributes, ranking members of the opposite sex by them, and then going down the list.

Which pretty much mandates that you're never going to be with your first choice, and that the one you're with is only "good enough", but not "what you wanted. Imagine if we were honest about that with ourselves and each other?

Broken relationships errywhere. Nobody'd last, because when it comes to honesty, we've just narrowed down a meat-market mentality to a list that only includes Christians. It's not Godly for us to pick the girl with the nicest breasts, so that gets replaced with "most intelligent". Great legs gets replaced with a ranking of how interesting she is. Instead of "prettiest face", we say "most godly."

Meanwhile, they're all still on a numbered list, and the list is still being sorted by "most desirable", and still being progressed down from top to bottom.

Meanwhile, aren't we proud of ourselves for not treating people like meat? After all, we don't judge people based on physical attributes, but by what's beneath the skin, right?

Well, no, not even close.

See, the only difference between us "Christians" and the "shallow" heathens is what we're ranking each other on, not how that ranking is treated.

What if, instead, we tried something completely different?

What if, instead, we could say "Of course I love you! You're the one God kept telling me to love!"

What if, instead, we trusted God to show us which girl we should date instead of trying to date every single girl that ranked anywhere near the top of whatever list we're sorting them by?

Just a thought.