Taboo Topics: Race – Mixed Race Connections – Meet Beth Lee Jooste and Ockerd Ojay Langeveldt [Engaged]

Hi brett. I saw you put up a request for inter- racial relationship stories: here’s a bit of mine:

in 150 days i’m marrying my best friend and the love of my life. He is coloured and i’m white and we are the best for each other.

When I look at him I don’t see my culture or his – I see two people working out life with a different approach and mentality… this goes beyond our cultures and the bounderies it sets us in. We met here at a christian art school and couldn’t be more different in personality. He is waffle and i’m spaghetti… our first year of friendship was filled with misunderstandings, fights and frustrasions which we think back on and laugh at now. I couldn’t understand why he was so rigid and he couldn’t understand why I was so scatterbrained. I look back now and see we couldn’t be more right for each other.

It’s actually quite funny when you go to his house everything is quiet…. when at my house it’s the complete opposite. Many people would have thought it was the other way round. You see, culture has a big part to play in the way you grow up and many times shapes your view on life… but i’ve learned there is ultimately one culture that should shape me and that is kingdom culture where we understand who we are in Christ which supersedes the limitations of this world.

Many people ask me how my mom feels about it, and she couldn’t be more delighted. She loves him as her son and i believe it’s got alot to do with what she imparted to me that I can love beyond borders, colour or culture… I believe from when i was young that I knew in my heart I was born for nations and was going to marry cross culturally. It has not always been easy but like every couple we worked through the same relational stuff. I do believe some people find cultural differences bigger than others, but in my case it wasn’t difficult. With his family i feel so at home and part of his family…

Some funny moments: When I was speaking to an afrikaans girl and replied, “rerig” and before I knew it I said it like a coloured “rerig”. It was so funny, needless to say, I quickly corrected myself but was hosing myself on the inside.

He loves fast cars and hip hop and loves his sound booming from his speakers, he has an impecable taste in fashion , and loves to dance – these are things he grew up with and i would never want to change. We have been best friends for 5 years and now we’re getting married! I feel like the most blessed woman alive.

About 5 years ago he had this gold chain. He used to wear it over his ties. The one day I saw him wearing it and I teased him about it.. . Last year I asked him so what happened to that chain and he told me how this girl went up to him the one day and teased him about it so he stopped wearing it… of course I had forgotten about what happened but as he told me his story I realised that that girl was me…

 i have not noticed any moments of being judged or stared at… when i’m walking with my friends they’ve said that people stare – mostly because it challenges them on their boundaries and they are unfamiliar… but i honestly can say i’m blind to it when it happens…

[To read more stories on the topics of mixed race and culture connections, click here]

Taboo Topics: Race – Mixed Race and Culture Connections

As we have started talking about different aspects of Race on my blog, one area that quickly came to mind was that of mixed race/culture relationships.

Hard to believe that this was illegal when i was growing up. And that it was normal for it to be so.

And even when it wasn’t, it took a bit of a while for it to become more of a regular [less stared at] thing and so i imagine that even now [as the country is still in a place of transition with a long ways to go] for some people who are in relationships with people from different race/culture groups, there are some different stories to be told – with some elements that are fun, some painful and some just confusing or interestingful.

So i took the opportunity to ask some of my friends who are in mixed race or mixed culture relationships to share a little bit of their journey and this is what happened:

Meet Beth Lee Jooste and Ockerd Ojay Langeveldt [engaged]

Meet James T Davis and Sherrell Nesmith [dating] who wrote this one together

Meet Roxanne Rhoda and Gregory Jewell [engaged] who wrote this together

Meet Marcia Wells and Florian Adler – black and white and south african and german

Meet Wendy and Xylon Van Eyck- married 

Marriage Year 10: Meet Lu-Shane and Marco Alexander

When I was young, I always dreamed of being married & having children.

Today I am a proud wife & mother of 2 beautiful boys. Its is only by the grace of God that we are now able to celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary on the 1st May 2014.

As with any marriage, there are many challenges and yes most of them not easy, but even though we were caught up in our problems at those times, GOD was ever present.

We believe that things happen for a reason and so many times we look back and say to each other: “Wow, so that’s why that happened!”

When our beautiful sons were born we thought goodness this is what we always wanted but the scary part is that we thought that we didn’t have to keep learning things and school was over for us, but we were wrong! It only just began…haha. From ABC to projects…how nerve-wrecking, challenging and yet exciting to see the joy on their faces.

A wedding takes time to prepare, cost a pretty penny and only lasts for a day. A marriage however requires patience, love, kindness, forgiveness and best of all lasts a lifetime! And on the plus side it is so much more rewarding to have GOD in the centre of it ALL!

So this is to the partner God has picked out just for me; amazing, kind, loving & the best father our sons could ever ask for! Thank you for travelling this journey with me, I’m having the time of my life on this rollercoaster…yeah!

[For the next post in this series on Marriage through the years with Richard and Wendy Sumner, click here]

[To return to the start of this series and take a look at Marriage through many years, click here]

living with tbV

if you stopped reading after the ‘b’ this becomes a completely different post… so don’t.

the beautiful Val, in case you didn’t know, and yes only i get to call her that and really mean it in the way i do. [you can of course refer to her as ‘tbV’ th0ugh, and i love it when other people do, but it has also been fun to me through the years how so many of you have mistakenly changed it to ‘the lovely Val’ – which is also true]

we are on the way to having being married for 5 years and in that time we have transitioned three times [if you leave out the time Val left family, friends, home, church to some degree to move out to Stellenbosch when we got married – a huge ask!] from Stellenbosch to Philadelphia to Oakland [if you exclude lengthy stays at Che Houston in Kenilworth] which may not seem a lot [especially when you compare it to how many times her parentals moved in their first 20 plus years of marriage] it has been a whole lot for us. ‘

New place to stay, new country, new friends, new church, new food, no mayonnaise [to speak of] and so on.

So it has not all been easy and has definitely put strain on us as a couple of intense, seize-life-by-the-throat-of-its-balls, passionate people. But it has been an adventure and there is much more of that to come. Especially as we know that another transition looms ahead [with Americaland specifically asking us to be out by early August] and are not too sure of the specifics thereof. Or therein. Or therein of? Something.

And there have been so many, and i don’t have pictures of them all [which to some extent i am completely stoked about – some adventures we capture, some we just live] but i just wanted to take a moment to celebrate my beautiful lady. i love being married to you Val and these pictures are just a glimpse of some of the memories we have put together…um together… and looking ahead to many more.

i love and celebrate you, tbV:

 

hold my hand… walk with me…

Awkward ‘Family’ photo wedding pic with adopted son Dreadlocked Kev

Love this lady. tbV

As i have said before and will no doubt say again, being married to the right person is one of the greatest things in the world [and discovering more and more that you become the right people as you continue in your commitment of marriage to each other] and because i have such a heart for those in marriage doing it well, i have created a lot of space on my blog to focus on doing just that and so lots of amazing marriage resources, compiled by a whole big bunch of amazing people, are waiting for you over here.

God called. He’d like His job back.

this has been quite an eventful week.

WORLD VISION AND SAME SEX MARRIAGE

World Vision made a dramatic did-they-really-not-expect-the-reaction-it-got decision involving allowing employees to be in same-sex marriages.

the Evangelical response was strong with notable Christian speakers such as John Piper and Franklin Graham speaking out against the decision and many Christians apparently withdrawing support for World Vision and specifically for the children they support via World Vision.

a day or two later World Vision does a wibbly-wobbly and reverses their decision with president Rich Stearns answering some questions about the matter which included the fact that some of their staff had resigned because of stress:

We had a few in the past few days resigned partially because of stress. You can imagine some of the folks in our call center that our answering our 800 line. They’re receiving an earful of anger. I think we had a few people who couldn’t handle the stress and the anxiety created by the incoming calls.

the decision being reversed also had a dramatic impact on the organisation:

Within an hour of the reversal, the call volume dropped. The angry calls stopped and dropped to a much lower level. Some of the sponsors called back to reinstate their sponsorships.

The Twitterer was on fire with every well-known Christian writer/speaker/blogger having something to say including Rachel Held Evans:

I have never in my life been more angry at the Church or more embarrassed to be a Christian. It feels like a betrayal from every side.

ABORTION

meanwhile, on the other side of town, i posted a story from my friend, Irma, as part of the Taboo Topics section of my blog, on the topic of abortion, where there were special circumstances with both of the babies she lost and where she and her husband had wrestled with the decisions and ultimately she admitted that she still didn’t know if they did the right thing.

i am very much pro life and anti abortion, but when you read a story like Irma’s you realise how not black-and-white those issues can be when there are lives at risk and beyond the issue itself i was very interested to see how people, especially christians, would respond and for the most part there was a lot of love, grace and compassion on offer, but then also responses like this:

I don’t think that there is Any excuse for abortion. We have to suffer for our children and truly lay down our lives for them. those born normal and not. not just abort when the child doesn’t look normal or deformed. thats playing GOD. people died during child birth to give birth to babies that died , were sick and weren’t normal. no amount of justification will remove the fact that you took away a life. I don’t think God favors abortion, under any circumstance. He is a God of forgiveness, yes, but this is coming across as someone who just took things into their own hands and doesn’t have the faith that they speak so much about.

LET’S LET GOD BE GOD [as if we could stop Him!]

A couple of things to take note of:

# In Matthew 22 Jesus is asked what the most important thing is and His response is to love God with everything [heart, soul, strength, mind] and to love our neighbour as ourselves. [Later on He adds enemy to people we need to love and reminds us that His definition of ‘neighbour’ is everyone else in the world and particularly the person in need]

# In John 13 we read: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

# In James 1 we read two important things to take note of here: ²⁶ Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. ²⁷ Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. Tight reign of tongue and look after orphans and widows.

# In Matthew 25’s parable of the sheep and the goats, those who are sent to eternal punishment were not sent away because of their bad theology or because they failed to judge those who had messed up – they did not hit the mark because they ignored the hungry, naked, sick, thirsty, imprisoned etc.

There should be no doubt that our primary focus needs to be love. God is going to be doing the judging and each of us will stand in front of Him one day giving account of our lives and actions and maybe more importantly the times we failed to show love, compassion and grace, mercy and forgiveness.

Jesus has a lot of encounters with terribly sinful people and the ‘Go and sin no more’ of his encounter with the woman caught in sin is a reminder that He never takes their sin lightly or dismisses it. But we don’t see Him making the ‘horrible sinners’ feel bad and in fact He is accused of hanging around with the drunkards and prostitutes which means that they probably enjoyed being around Him and not because He made them feel bad i imagine. In fact the major time we see Jesus making people feel bad, it is the Pharisees and the Sadducees who held so strongly on to ‘the law’ and used it to place heavy burdens on those seeking God.

THE POINT

God is the judge – let Him judge.

We are called to hold people accountable yes, but let the phrase “Speak the Truth in Love” always be our guide and mentor.

And whatever we do, wherever we get it wrong, or are not sure, we HAVE to always get LOVE right. That is the highest call on us and we cannot get that one wrong. Love, compassion, grace, mercy, forgiveness, friendship, community… but always LOVE.

God will be God. [He’s pretty good at it!]

Marriage year 45: Meet Costa and Lorraine Mitchell

Costa & Lorraine Mitchell. Married 3^rd April 1971, both of us 21 years old at the time.

We both think that we have had it very good in marriage. Obviously, this is a gift for which God is to be praised, and parents thanked, and we don’t take it lightly. It helps that God was strong in forming and informing our choices at the time we met. It helps hugely that we both came from parents who loved one another faithfully and long. Of course, hormones helped as well – look at my wife and tell me what’s not to love?

In so many respects it has been genuinely easy for us. We kind of grew into one another, as we finished growing up. We had, like any couple, to make the adjustments necessitated by two quite self-assured, independent people learning to be an indivisible couple, sharing bathrooms, chores and life goals. But what I think we both learned in those first 2 to 5 years was to use the energy of being IN love to “love (live) considerately” with one another – to learn the other person, to look into her/his interests and support them, and to show love in the form of speaking the love language of the other. It was before the books about love languages, but we have spoken for years about the way each of us has drawn the other out into the person each always wanted to be, by showing love in the ways the other really longed for, speaking love in the language the other recognises.

To put it another way, what we have learned is that enjoyable marriage is a competition – a contest to see who can serve the other harder, who can show the other the greater honour, who can live a life of self-forgetfulness in every respect, whether romantically or practically, sexually or spiritually.  Plan every week with the same care as you planned your honeymoon, show as much genuine delight at the company of your spouse in your 40^th year as you did when you saw her walking down the aisle toward you. The result can be, not one long honeymoon, but many, many honeymoons!

[To return to the beginning of this Marriage through the Years series and read a whole lot of stories of different aspects of marriage, click here]

Getting Naked Later – a book review of my friend Kate Hurley’s book

A little eight-year-old girl was asked what she thought love was. She cocked her head and thought for a little bit. Then she replied, “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over to paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis. That’s what love is.” [pg 159, Getting Naked Later]

And with that excerpt, i begin the book review of this most well written and fun book by a friend of mine who i encountered on the internet.

I must have stumbled onto Kate’s blog, the Sexy Celibate, more than a year ago and in fact I might have made the connection through the amazingly worshipful music she writes and sings, but having read something about her being single, I took a chance and asked her if she would perhaps like to write a piece for the Taboo Topics series I was running on Singleness. Taking me totally by surprise she said yes and wrote this very popular piece, some of which may even have made it into her book in some form or another:

Well at times, I feel barren. Not only barren in my childbearing, but barren as a lover as well. I don’t have children or a husband, and so I really have no immediate blood family. Please, please, be sensitive to this barrenness in me. Please don’t tell me that I have done something wrong in not letting go, and the result of that shortcoming is my barrenness.

And we have been friends ever since and so when I heard she had written a book, titled ‘Getting Naked Later: A Guide for the Fully Clothed’ I was super amped to see what she had to share about her journey and also what she might have to say to others about theirs. When she asked for some volunteers to read the book and write some reviews, I charged my way to the front flinging single people left and right and di what had to be done in the hope that she would allow me, a married guy [although married at 35 so I still feel I might ‘get’ it], to read and talk about her book:

She completely fell for it:

THE BOOK REVIEW

To be absolutely honest [although I won’t mention names], I was actually already in the middle of reviewing a book on dating when Kate made the offer. The book was fine and all, but it was not really bringing much new to the topic, and knowing Kate the little bit I do, I expected hers to have a certain life and refreshment to it that would keep me interested.

So ‘Getting Naked Later: A Guide for the Fully Clothed’ jumped to the head of the queue and I devoured it over the next couple of days [which was in the midst of a fairly busy schedule, but there was something very enticing about Kate’s book and I kept wanting to know what was next] and I was not disappointed.

It starts out with this sweet yet heart-breaking story of Kate playing a game of ‘Old Maid’ with her young friend Isabella. When Isabelle wins the game, she looks at Kate and declares her ‘The Old Maid’ and more importantly, the loser.

“Am I the loser?” Kate asked herself and so begins this journey that at times is light and fun and skippy [can a book be skippy? if it can then Kate nails it!], but at other times deals with the raw and the rough, real and honest, angry and confused emotions and experiences of a 30 plus year old who discovered she was single a lot longer than she thought she might be and is trying to make sense of life and love and God and relationships and unrealised dreams.

In her opening chapter she invites the world’s single people into her story: I am writing this book for all of you. I want you to feel validated. I want you to know that you’re not alone. And most of all, I want you to believe that you are deeply valuable. I hope that we can walk down the road toward discovering our value together.

What I love about the start of the book and how Kate follows through with it, is that she begins with a list of ‘I am nots’ with things like ‘going to give you a formula to find the perfect mate’ and ‘tell you that the answer is to be satisfied in God alone’ or ‘promise that God will give us the desires of our heart’ and more, but instead, she writes this:

I want married people and the church at large to have a better understanding of what singles and divorced people go through so that they can better support us. I want to look at the unique challenges Christian singles face and to explore some of the unhealthy perspectives of the Christian culture when it comes to dating.’

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS AND THE PAINT BY NUMBERS

There ARE a lot of books on Singleness and for me what makes Kate’s stand out is the amount of herself she throws into ‘Getting Naked Later’. More than simply writing a ‘How to’ book with theories, formulas and excuses Kate opens the door to her life and invites the reader to join her on part of the journey she has walked and is walking which doesn’t as yet have the Disney happy ending of ‘She found her prince’ if that is the sign of success we are looking for. But along the way she does share lessons she has learned and struggles she has endured as she moves forward on her journey of hope. Possibly the biggest shout out that this book gives goes something along the lines of ‘Hey, you are not alone in this. I get a lot of what you’re going through. Let me share some of mine.’ 

I think there is something in here for everyone but it will particularly stroke a chord with those single people who are a little older and perhaps in some ways feeling like [or being made to feel like by the ‘extremely sensitive’ people around them] they have missed out on something. This piece Kate writes on ‘disenfranchised grief’ for example was a huge eye-opener:

One of the only articles I found that did talk about the difficulty of being single was called “My Secret Grief: Over Thirty-Five, Single and Childless” by Melanie Notkin. In it, the author says, “This type of grief, grief that is not accepted or that is silent, is referred to as disenfranchised grief. It’s the grief you don’t feel allowed to mourn, because your loss isn’t clear or understood. You didn’t lose a sibling or a spouse or a parent. But losses that others don’t recognise can be as powerful as the kind that is socially acceptable.

This sadness, this disenfranchised grief, is what I feel on a semi-regular basis. I have not lost a marriage, but I have never had a lover. I have not lost a baby, but I have never had a child.

Boom! Right between the eyes. And there are a fair number of moments like these.

SOME FINAL MOMENTS OF A VERY INCOMPLETE REVIEW

You can tell how much I enjoy a book I read by the amount of folded over corner tops of pages I want to go back to or paragraphs which really impacted me and ‘Getting Naked Later’ has so many of those I can’t even pretend to HOPE TO cover all of them [that would be a long blog post even by my standards!] here. But I will share a few gems as I sign off [and you really should get hold of a copy and read it for yourself, cos I feel like there is something for everyone to take away:

In a chapter looking at Hollywood movie romances, Kate nails the problem on the head: It would be wise for us to recognise our disease of loneliness and realise that getting married will not cure that disease.

I don’t think Kate is trying to suggest that loneliness is like a sickness, but she is trying to suggest that often, as single people [which I was til age 35!] we tend to get into a head space of thinking that just finding ‘our person’ will solve a whole bunch of issues in our life, when the truth is that we will tend to take those same issues with us into marriage.

Kate shows insight into the married life she has yet to experience, as evidenced in this quote: If I do get married, my husband will love me more than he loves anyone else in the world. He will also probably hurt me more than anyone else in the world will hurt me. I will think there is no one as wonderful as him anywhere. I will also think that there is no one as annoying as him. My job will not be to judge if he is good enough for me. My job will be to love him well.We will build a history together.

Getting Naked Later is also great because it covers such a range of topics – Kate dares to boldly share her take on sex while holding nothing back in her in-depth description of the pity party singles love to throw for themselves [or groups of themselves]

In her chapter titled, ‘The Great Name Changer’ she reminds us of the power labels can play in our lives by saying, ‘I am many things other than a single woman: lover of God, lover of people, traveler of the world, teacher, lover of the poor and downcast, avid reader, overcomer of a chronic disease, ridiculous enjoyer of dark chocolate and good cheese, lover of nature, worshipper, but “single” is often the only label I give myself.

Very importantly this is the story of a woman who is already in a relationship and an important one at that. Kate’s relationship with God is the thread that weaves itself through this book and holds everything together, although not always in a way that feels nicely coloured in within the lines. This singleness thing can get messy and Kate does not hold back from the honesty and sometimes pain that is involved in that aspect of her life. One encounter she has with a mentor of hers who told her:

“Kate, I want you to focus on trusting God for the next few months.”

“I sounded like a recovering Pharisee when I said, “But I do trust God.”

She answered very gently, “No, Kate. No, you don’t.”

I realised almost automatically that she was right. The anxiety that I had just spilled out to her indicated how little I trusted Him. When it comes down to it, I don’t always see Him as good. In my heart, I often don’t believe that God will give me a good life. Sometimes I believe that even if He is good, I will negate His blessings if I don’t make the right choices.” 

And there you have it – you won’t find honesty like that in the ‘Ten tips to finding your perfect Christian man’ book that is front and centre on your local christian bookstore relationship shelf.

But again and again, it is the stark honesty and gentle humour and vulnerability that brings a wave of refreshment with ‘Getting Naked Later’ and that is what will draw you in and keep you invested as you read this part of Kate’s story. This is a worthwhile addition to your bedside table reading material and I encourage you to grab hold of a copy now.

I will leave you with one last quote that sums up a big part of Kate’s attitude as she faces a present that doesn’t look exactly like the future she once imagined and expected, from her chapter on intentional community, but reaching even beyond that:

‘It is good for u to be in a family, even if we have to build our own.’

[To buy your very own copy of ‘Getting Naked Later: A Guide for the Fully Clothed, click here]

[For more information about Kate Hurley and links to everything you need to get hold of, click here]

[To listen to her music and get hold of some copies for yourself and your friends, click here]