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Showing posts from June, 2014

How I Almost Broke My Marriage

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Hi, it’s Shannon again. Cap’s wife. Last time I wrote a guest article for Cap, the main thing on my mind was speaking to young wives about discontentment. Many ladies wrote or spoke to me after that post and shared that they’d had the same struggle. So now that Cap’s asked me to write another post, I thought I’d share just how I came to be so passionate about battling discontentment—or in other words, how I almost single-handedly tore apart my marriage, and how God saved my marriage from me. In August 2010 I discovered that, by misusing the Excel template of a friend who was much smarter than I, I had inadvertently been budgeting over $250 more than we could afford to spend monthly. (Math is not my strongest asset.) What’s more, we could not cut enough spending to stay within our affordable range. We had gotten married during the recession, so Cap’s company had a freeze on raises, and my grad school (in English Literature, not budgeting, obviously) hadn’t paid too well. We c

Three Lessons I’ve Learned in Five Years of Marriage

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When you take your wife out to dinner to celebrate your wedding anniversary, you don’t necessarily plan on misspelling her name on her to-go box, taking a leisurely drive through a local cemetery, or filling up your tank at a seedy gas station. All those things did recently happen, and yet Shannon and I still enjoyed the evening. (She also forgave me for the spelling mistake—which is a big deal, coming from an English major.) Yes, this past weekend Shannon and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. The time has both taken forever and flown by. (Not quite sure how that happens.) In this short period, a lot has transpired. I won’t bore you with the details, but I did want to share three things I have learned—or, rather, am still learning—at the outset of this lovely journey called marriage. 1. You can’t rightly love if you can’t rightly see love The more I grow in the Christian faith, the more I see how much of a difference there is between knowing something and belie

It Doesn’t Matter If Actors Willingly Undress for the Camera

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It’s true that some actors perform nude and/or sex scenes without any form of coercion. Indeed, there are those who almost seem to relish the opportunity to undress for the camera. As Christian patrons, that shouldn’t provide us with any comfort. When we financially support films with degrading sex and nudity, we support a subculture that abuses those actors who do have a problem with publicly disrobing and sexually acting out. Maybe it would help to look at it in this way. Consider, if you will, two pertinent groups in this discussion. In the first group are plenty of actors—many of whom are not professing Christians—who experience serious reservations about exposing themselves to the public at large. It’s not because they are trying to glorify God with their bodies, their words, or their actions. It’s not necessarily because they subscribe to a Christian sexual ethic. Still, their consciences bother them when it comes to nudity and sex scenes. That’s the first group of p