A question for pastors and other church leaders about singles’ ministry

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I want to ask those of you in the audience who are pastors or who are leaders within your church–because I know there are a number of you–a question about singles’ ministry.
Someone asked me the other day if my church has one. It doesn’t. There are lots of reasons why.

I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of creating a Christian meat market. I know where to find one of those already. If I wanted a date tomorrow, I know what church to go to and at what time, and I could walk out of there with a date without trying all that hard. And if I don’t like what I find, I can always go back next week.

Creating an evening church service for lonely people to go to is slightly more conducive to fostering healthy relationships than the local singles’ bar, but they both have a number of things in common, and one of them is that God isn’t going to be the main focus of the majority of the people at either place. It’s simple human nature.

My church has had Bible studies for singles using the small-group model in the past, but those groups had similar weaknesses. Usually the groups started out really well. But the group would implode over the course of a year or two. After a few weeks, half the people in the room would be trying to impress other people in the room, and the other half would be talking and giggling about how their last date with so-and-so went. And as time went on, you’d have couples there who were clearly more interested in each other than with the Bible study. The couples would eventually drop away, and the frustrated people would drop away, and pretty soon you’ve got no group. And God wasn’t much in focus for more than a few weeks with this model either.

There are approximately 170 single people in my church. Some of them inevitably are perfectly happy being single. Some of them inevitably are miserable. Probably most of them would seek someone out if they knew where to look and what they were supposed to be looking for.

So I’m wondering if it isn’t time for a new approach. There are lots of books that tell you what to look for and how to find it. There are also lots of venues for trying to find Christian singles, so I don’t see much point in trying to compete with them. I’d rather do something supplemental: Create groups where people walk together through the process of learning how to find and develop a healthy relationship.

So here’s the idea. Get a few small groups together. Perhaps go smaller than small groups and use the accountability group model with five or fewer people. Definitely don’t mix genders. Smaller groups and keeping the gender the same encourages people to be open and honest, rather than shy or trying to be impressive. Walk through any number of the available books on singlehood together, doing the exercises and talking about them. It’s one thing to know all this stuff. It’s another to think about it, understand it, and have people walking beside you every step of the way, offering mutual encouragement and accountability.

The encouragement is necessary because the process can be frustrating. The accountability is necessary because some people just aren’t emotionally healthy enough to have a good relationship just yet, and without help it might take years but with the right encouragement and with leaders to point them in the right direction, the time required could be much shorter.

As more people get interested, you form more groups. As groups get smaller due to people getting attached, you merge them or add new people to them.

I think this might be an idea whose time has come, but I’d like to hear some other opinions.

A trick to give your fictional characters some consistency

Dave Farquhar Writing

So I was reading up on character disorders (shaddup Steve) when I stumbled across an incredibly useful site: http://www.writersvillage.com/character/
Let’s say you’re writing a work of fiction. (Contrary to what some people have told me, I do that occasionally, not every day.) And you want your characters to be interesting. Normal is boring. The most interesting people in the world have something wrong with them. (Say yes.) (Steve, don’t say another word.)

Hey, think about it. Think of the greatest novel ever written: The Great Gatsby. I can think of two characters who showed any symptoms of healthiness in the whole book: the narrator, Nick Carraway, and I’m not even positive about him; and Gatsby’s dad, who only shows up in the end. The rest of them are very interesting people. But you’re in deep trouble if you live next door to any of them.

So give the characters in your story a character disorder.

If you’re like me and don’t remember character disorders from college psychology class, there are basically two types of mental illnesses. There are neurosises (I know I spelled that wrong), and character disorders. A neurotic can be pretty messed up, but a neurotic’s problem(s) are generally treatable and a neurotic still has enough grip on reality to be able to take responsibility for his or her own actions.

Character disorders generally aren’t treatable. A person with a character disorder is generally less pleasant and considerably more dangerous. A person with a character disorder generally won’t take responsibility for his or her actions, or a problem he or she caused. I once had a landlord who liked to threaten to shoot people and put a gun in their hand and drugs in their pocket. He probably had a character disorder.

So what’s this have to do with writing fiction? Basically you answer about 300 questions about a character in your story, and it comes back and tells you what character disorder the person might have. Then you can read a profile and a few symptoms, which will give you some insights into how your character will behave in different circumstances and allow you to give the character some consistency.

No fair trying to use it to diagnose your coworkers, OK?

And no fair trying to use it to diagnose me either. I’m a neurotic. (There. That quote will keep me out of public office.)

The Royals came to me this weekend

Dave Farquhar Baseball ,

Once a year, the Royals come to St. Louis. And, inevitably, I’m doing something the weekend they’re here. This year, I wasn’t. So Gatermann and I went Saturday night. He rooted for his team, and I rooted for mine.
The Cards won that one. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Starting pitcher Darrell May is a flyball pitcher, and Busch Stadium isn’t nearly as imposing to power hitters as it was 20 years ago. Now the Cards are loaded up with people like Albert Pujols and Jim Edmonds, and, well, May got rocked. Then the Royals’ weak bullpen got rocked.

The big surprise was the number of Royals fans there–it wasn’t quite like the number of Cubs fans at a Cards-Cubs game, but it was significant–and, well, they were loud. As the first inning started, the Royals fans in the $11 seats above my section started chanting, “Let’s go Roy-als” and clapping and stomping. They had more energy than Royals fans in Kansas City. I thought it was hilarious.

I was wishing I’d worn my Royals shirt. Fans dressed in enemy colors didn’t used to do well at Busch Stadium, but Gatermann told me that’s very different today. Everyone sitting around me was good-natured and polite and had a sense of humor about my allegiance.

As we walked out, one guy complained about being harrassed for being a Royals fan, but I couldn’t tell how serious he was.

And I have to say I was very impressed with the play of Cardinals’ rookie second baseman Bo Hart. He’s already a fan favorite, but when you come up and get multiple hits in your first three games in the big leagues, you’re bound to become a fan favorite. He seems to be a scrappy player with a lot of guts and a lot of heart, along the lines of former St. Louis fan favorite Joe McEwing, or Anaheim’s David Eckhart, or former Met and Royal Keith Miller. I found myself cheering for the guy, even though I was rooting for the other team. You don’t see a lot of players like him.

The encouraging thing to me was that the Royals won the other two games of the series. I know the Cards aren’t having their best season, but they’re a strong team with two superstars who are of at least equal cailber to the Royals’ two superstars, and position by position, they’re the stronger team anywhere but first base.

I still don’t think my Royals will win the World Series. But this is going to be a fun year.

Date or Soul Mate… reviewed.

Dave Farquhar Book reviews

Date or Soul Mate? How to Know if Someone is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less seems like it has as many homework assignments per page as my college algebra textbook did. I’d verify that, but the bookstore was offering $15 for that textbook and I didn’t ever want to touch it again. So I guess selling my college algebra book paid for this one, nine years later.
It was a really good trade, in case you’re wondering.

Even though it’s a lot of work, and if you’re lazy you shouldn’t touch it, the work is extremely worthwhile. Author Neil Clark Warren has been married forty years. That’s good and bad. I want to be married 40 years, or preferably more, and he has some ideas how he stumbled into such a great marriage. So that’s good. The bad side is, well, it took me a lot less than 7 1/2 months to forget what it’s like to be single and unattached, so I can only imagine what he’s forgotten in 40 years.

He does know one thing. He does know the desperation one starts to feel after a while–the desperation to date the first willing and available candidate that passes your way. And then to hold onto it even if there are indications it’s not a very good match because there are no other prospects around, or there’s no easy indication that any of those prospects would be any better, and starting over is a lot of work, so it’s easier to fix the relationship you have. Not to mention there’s the risk that you’ll break it off and then your prospect will say no, leaving you all alone again.

I’m still trying to figure out where that feeling went after I read the first chapter. Somehow the book put my mind at ease, which, if you ask any of my friends, is a big accomplishment.

The first assignment is to answer 20 questions about yourself. They’re probing questions. It took me at least an hour to answer them, even though I’ve answered some of the exact same questions at least a half-dozen times in the past year. A later assignment is to trace your family tree as far back as you can. But you have to write down everything you know or can remember about each relative. Yet another assignment is to write your own autobiography, in 5-year increments.

That’s just in the first 38 pages.

But the book has a major disappointment in it as well. Chapter 9 talks about a test that assesses your qualities. The basic idea is that you need to figure out what you’re worth, assign a numerical score to it, then go find someone whose worth is within 50 points or so of your own. He talks about a couple he counseled. The man scored 650, and his fiancee scored 825. He was thrilled that he was landing someone out of his league. But the downside is insecurity. Eventually she’s going to meet some men who score in the 800s. She’s going to feel some attraction towards them. So then what?

Warren points out that people frequently overvalue some of their qualities and undervalue others. This got me excited, because I’ve probably been guilty of both. I’ve often felt, while engaging in the dating game, like a tourist in a foreign country. I have money and I see the prices, but while I know the value of a dollar, I don’t know much about the value of a euro. And when I have dollars in my wallet but the price is in euros, it’s harder to know a good deal when I see one.

In my last relationship, I know she undervalued herself a good portion of the time. I’m pretty sure she overvalued me, but I have no idea by how much. I know I undervalued myself, largely on the basis that she never has much trouble finding dates and I’ve sometimes gone years between dates. Was I overvaluing her? If she’s a 650 and I’m an 825, then I have a lot to be excited about because I have a great future ahead, because there were a lot of things about her that were, well, great or very close to it. And if she’s a 750 and I’m an 800, then I know we were a good match that just didn’t work because we didn’t have enough in common.

But the test isn’t anywhere in the book. As far as I can tell, it’s in another book by the same author titled Finding the Love of Your Life. That’s frustrating. I understand why–my own book had a chapter in it that was similar to a chapter in another book by the same publisher, and my editor didn’t like it at first. But the context was slightly different, and the book was clearly missing something without it. Why should I make the reader pay $20 for another book to get information I just told him or her was necessary? I stuck to my guns and the chapter went in.

That said, the book had a lot of practical advice. I felt better after reading it because I found I instinctively do an awful lot of the right things, especially as far as the kind of person to be. But one thing I immediately took from it is that I really need to make more of an effort to shave every day and be better about getting my hair cut every six weeks, and to dress a little bit nicer. I’m frequently told that I clean up nice. But when I’m trying to get away with shaving every other day and pushing my haircuts for eight weeks instead of six, I may not draw that second look, so someone could easily overlook the things that matter more.

It says a lot that my outlook on relationships increased dramatically after reading this book. The first few days and weeks after breaking up are a roller coaster anyway, and that probably has something to do with it, but there’s some substance behind this high. The book helped me objectively evaluate where I’ve been. I can see that I’m not coming out of the best relationship that ever existed. I knew for a long time that it had problems. I know now that it would have taken some work to find out if they could be fixed. I can take that knowledge I gleaned from the book, and I can sleep knowing that I wasn’t the one who gave up, that I would have been willing to do the work. I can combine that with something else I learned from the book: There are women who will really value a man who’s willing to work that much, who’s willing to make them that important.

There are no guarantees that the next date will be better than my last, but I would say I like my prospects for my next relationship after reading this.

It also says something that I was able to read the book in just a few hours. I’m a fast reader, but this book is pretty light reading.

There are some books that you pick up looking for empathy. This book isn’t one of them. The author isn’t shy about his PhD and his 35+ years of practice as a psychologist and he works from the assumption that the reader has no particular expertise in the area. And at times he’s blunt. This is a book you pick up looking for solutions. To be blunt, if you’re looking to get happily married and minimize the amount of time and money you waste on dates and dead-end relationships, this is a good book to read. (Note to whoever may be reading this and take offense: I didn’t say my past relationships were dead ends, OK?)

This book isn’t a home run, and it’s absolutely not a timeless classic. What’s frustrating about it is that with the addition of that test mentioned in chapter 9, it might have been. But what I will say in this book’s favor is that there probably isn’t any single relationship book that will answer everybody’s questions. Any given person will probably need to read two or three or four of them, at least. And this book, in spite of its big gaping hole, ought to be one of them.

Why was I cruising Lindbergh on a Friday night?

Dave Farquhar Personal

“Honda!” a teenager yelled out the window as I sat at a stoplight at the intersection of Lindbergh and Lemay Ferry roads. I was in a lineup of tricked-out cars. Mine was the least tricked out.
I was in between Christian bookstores. I’d been out in search of whole-wheat pasta, black pillowcases, and two people I know. I found the whole-wheat pasta. I hoped one of the Christian bookstores would have the last thing on my list. Lemstone had all their books marked down by 20% because they were moving. They had about 12 books left, total, in the store. None of them was what I was looking for. So I braved the cruisers and headed off to One Way.

I was searching for Date…or Soul Mate? How To Know If Someone is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less by Neil Clark Warren. I read another one of his books five or six years ago and it helped me then. He has some good advice.

I have a few motivations for reading this particular book, and regular readers can probably guess most of them. Maybe all of them.

I found it, in the Men’s section, of all places. There were more books on singlehood in the Men’s section than there were books about dealing with being male. Including some written by and for women. I may have to revisit some of the others. I’m thinking I’ll post a review of Date or Soul Mate? when I’ve finished reading it.

First impressions of VMWare

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I’ve been setting up VMWare ESX Server at work, and it’s quirky, but I like it. I shut it down improperly once (logging into the console on its Linux-based host OS and doing a shutdown -h now resulted in a system that wouldn’t boot anymore) so I’m afraid of what may happen. The upside is since every virtual machine is just a collection of files, disaster recovery is dirt simple: Build a VMWare box, restore those files from backup, point the VMs at them, and you’re back in business. No more need to worry about locating identical or close-enough-to-identical hardware. For that reason alone, I’d advocate running all of my Windows servers in production environments on VMWare, since Windows isn’t like a real OS that will allow you use a disk or image on dissimilar hardware with minor adjustments. We get some other benefits too, like allowing us to put all the toy servers in one box with RAID to protect us in a disk crash. We’ve lost far too much to disk failures on desktop PCs recast as someone’s pet-project server.
It also appears to try to only allocate to machines the amount of memory they’re actually using, so theoretically, if you were doing server consolidation and had, say, four servers with 256 MB of RAM, you could potentially get away with putting them on a VMWare host with less than 1 GB of memory.

I also like VMWare for tasks you don’t like to dedicate a single machine to. For instance, DNS on NT is totally brain-dead. It’s slow to propogate. It works about 99.9% of the time, but that .1% of the time that it feeds wrong answers will infuriate somebody, who will holler at you, and the struggle to fix the problem will infuriate you worse.

If you want DNS that works, your best bet is to load Linux or BSD with BIND on something and use it. But if you don’t already have a production Linux server somewhere and you don’t have a machine you trust to give the job, carve out a server on a VMWare box. Allocate 16 megs of RAM and a couple hundred megs of disk space to it, and give it a thin slice of processor time. DNS lookups don’t take a lot of power, so it won’t detract noticeably from the other hosted servers.

It ain’t cheap (the price isn’t listed on the web site for a reason), but software’s cheaper than hardware.

That’s it, I want to be an author again

Dave Farquhar Personal

I want to write a book. A short book. One that won’t mention computers at all, hopefully. I’m thinking 100-120 pages would be a good length. A Christian book. Not terribly deep, but very hands-on and practical, which will say what God has to say about a problem a growing number of people face. (What I have to say alone isn’t especially worthwhile. I’m just a journalist turned systems administrator, which means I studied a lot about nothing in particular in college, and somewhere along the way learned about computers.)
Back to that book. I want it to say to people what my heroes Paul Zindel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Max Lucado said to me the first time I picked up and read a book written by each of them: Hey, I understand what you’re going through right now. Not only that, I understand you, because I’ve been there too. I know your doubts and your fears, because I’m having them right now. I know it doesn’t seem like enough that God says He’ll pull you through it, because I know He will, and yet it doesn’t seem like enough for me either.

Anyone out there have any experience in the Christian publishing biz, by any chance? (You never know.) The subject matter? Well, one might be able to make an educated guess, but I’d really rather not confirm anything just yet.

Do something for copyright freedom

Dave Farquhar Copyright ,

Please go sign the Petition to reclaim the Public Domain if you haven’t done so already. The man behind this is Eric Eldred, the “Eldred” in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
If you’re curious about what the public domain is or why it’s important, here’s an introduction.

Keep in mind that this is coming from a copyright holder. I retain copyright on the content of this website, for example, because parts of it may have commercial value. At times I have reworked entries from this blog and published them elsewhere. Quoting material from this site, linking to it, or even printing copies of it to retain for future reference falls under fair use and I don’t just allow it, I encourage it.

In 14 years, I doubt there’s going to be much use for the information here anymore. A historian may find it interesting. My main reason for protecting the copyright beyond that timeframe would probably be self-protection. Copyright would allow me to keep this content obscure.

Think about how many books, record albums, and movies originally published in 1989 are still in print. Some of them, like the movie Batman and Disintegration by The Cure remain very commercially viable. But the majority of media produced in that year is now out of print and difficult to find. There’s limited interest in it, but that interest may be so limited that even used record stores and used bookstores aren’t all that interested in carrying a lot of it.

That’s not to say it’s useless. It’s still valuable for research. It’s still valuable for other things too. You can make new media by combining old media. A budding artist can combine out-of-copyright audio and video to make new things and legally do things with it. For some examples, look at the World At War collection.

Access to public domain material today is difficult. But disk space is dirt cheap now. Bandwidth is getting cheaper. Access is going to become easier and easier. Admittedly, most of the material created from public domain sources is going to be at least as bad as, if not worse than, the source material. But there will be masterpieces as well. Disney got its start by using the public domain, after all.

Why is there a stigma about meeting people online?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

Steve DeLassus just made a funny observation to me. He said when he talks about me, sometimes people consider meeting and communicating with people online as somehow abnormal. And they tell him via e-mail.
My coworker, Murel, has told me several times that when he was my age, the last place he would want to say he met someone was in a bar. Without making any moral judgments, I would rate the likelihood of me meeting someone in a bar and finding the right stuff for a serious, long-term relationship as very low. There are numerous qualities and values on my must-have list that you’re just not very likely to find in that kind of environment. And most of the things on my can’t-stand list that are very easy to find there.

But what’s the stigma about meeting people online? Steve DeLassus and I met on a bulletin board back in 1989 or 1990. We both had Commodores and modems, and it was summertime and we had time on our hands. The closest thing we had to the Internet in our homes those days was CompuServe. People who didn’t want to pay for CompuServe dialed into BBSs instead. I have one other friend from that timeframe that I talk to at all, and that’s about once a year. But Steve’s been one of my best friends for a very long time.

I met Dan Bowman online. I fired off a rant to Jerry Pournelle about alternative operating systems, and–these were the days when one could post an e-mail address on a Web site without fear of having 250 spam messages in your inbox the next day–Dan replied to me. And we quickly found some common ground. Dan noticed that at the time I was working for a Lutheran organization, and his dad was Lutheran. The result was, once again, a lasting and very valuable friendship.

It’s true that online you can pretend to be othing that you’re not, but it’s hard. Eventually the truth comes out. Some people are fooled for a long time, but every relationship I’ve made online that later fell apart, whether it was of romantic nature or strictly friendship, had one thing in common: My initial impression of the person was slightly wrong.

Funny. When I think of relationships that started in the physical world that fell apart, the same thing is true.

Now, some people are better at talking and listening than they are at reading. As a journalist, I had to be able to look at available information and take educated guesses about what was missing. No, not so I could print those along with the facts, but so I could go and find the rest of the story. As a computer tech, I’m constantly faced with solving problems for which there is little information. I can tell a lot about a person by their writing style and by the questions they ask me. Talking on the phone and later meeting in person tells me some more, but for me, that’s the optimal order.

And it’s easier for me to open up in writing than it is to just talk. It’s easier for me to be real and transparent and honest with someone I barely know when I’m not watching their expression or hearing their voice. Once I’m comfortable with the person, we can talk, but it’s pretty obvious when I get into an uncomfortable situation, and my discomfort can tend to overshadow anything that I might say. Plus, in writing, it matters a lot less how long it takes me to find the right words to say what I’m thinking.

For someone who’s a better listener than reader, the optimal order may be different. That doesn’t make this new way of doing things any less valid.

Nasty weather takes down a site (this one)

Dave Farquhar General

Last night, we got pounded with some severe storms here in St. Louis. My power flickered off a couple of times and actually stayed down twice that I know about. The longest outage was a couple of hours.
There was lots of other goofy stuff going on too–I heard sirens almost nonstop for about half of the long outage. After the rain let up, I went out to my car a couple of times to listen to the radio but I didn’t find out anything useful.

And, of course, any time there’s severe weather, my Internet connection goes goofy. Since my networking equipment and Web server are on UPSs, I think the site actually stayed up a good while after I lost power.

Anyway, there’s another round of storms rolling in tonight, and there’s supposed to be another one tomorrow too. Less severe, or so they say. We’ll see.

If the site is up and down a lot for the next few days, that’s why. Don’t worry. Once summer arrives in St. Louis, we should have some pretty smooth sailing. (I don’t know what to call the season we’re in right now.)

I wish I had something interesting to talk about, but I don’t. I slept through the night last night but I sure didn’t sleep very well. So my idea bank isn’t exactly running over right now. It might be just as well–I don’t know how many people will be able to read whatever I post.