{Week 10 Core Need is the need for purpose: filled with a sense of profoundly mattering.}

Unless we are feeling severely depressed, every human intrinsically feels this need to matter, to have purpose, and to make a mark on the world. Sometimes, this purpose-need gets redirected from receiving our marching orders from Jesus to staring at marriage: It will complete me.

Let’s bust that whole thing apart with Breaking the Marriage Idol author, ​Kutter Callaway.

We also explore your responses to what you grew up with as a paradigm for marriage (was singleness an option?), dig into the need to intentionally place women in positions of influence, and try to affirm our working theory that we are attracted to spouses and friends who are opposite to us when it comes to loving or loathing jigsaw puzzles.

You’re welcome.

Highlights:

“Let’s get rid of … romance altogether.  What are we left with? We are left with these amazing things that we should all be committed to: The welfare of widows and orphans, [and a commitment] to the welfare beyond simply the spouse that I am marrying . . . This is the family that God has called us into: A radically extended and open-armed family–not this sort of closed dyad we get if we start with that myth of romantic love.”–Kutter Callaway

“I don’t think anyone is walking around with a generic, abstract ‘call’ to marriage or singleness … To walk into [life with a] Bachelor or Bachelorette vision where, ‘I am just going to be with someone at the end of this. It doesn’t really matter who the 25 people are–it’s just survival of the fittest. You are the winner for my marriage calling!” That is the idol.” –Kutter Callaway

Do the Next Thing:
Read the book we explore today called Breaking the Marriage Idol ​by Kutter Callaway
Those new books released this week? Find Deep Focus (Engaging Culture) here, and The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture here.
Follow Kutter on Twitter
[Our outtakes with the high-pitch voiceover of Jesus comes from these ancient videos. They are worth a watch.]

Question of the Week for Next Week:
Are you a jigsaw puzzler or not? Is your spouse and/or your closest friends? Help us out in our theory development. 😉