Each week I leave a short story or video blog here about where I saw love in action during the previous week. If we are looking for love throughout the week, we will have more faith in the power of the love we share with our spouse.  Leave your story in the comments section about how you saw love in action last week!  Or write about it on your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments section (and be sure to link your readers over here so they can see more stories about love in action!).

Kevin Still

Kevin Still

This week I saw love in big time action going on over on my friend Kevin’s blog.  This post really speaks for itself, so I won’t say much other than this:

I appreciate anyone who is willing to push boundaries and take risks for the purpose of seeking the heart’s of others and pursuing truth.  THAT is love!

Here is Kevin’s essay on being a white male feminist living in the south.  If something here moves you, head over to his little spot in blogland and let him know!

hello.
my name is kevin. my wife and i live in texas. she has a vagina. i have a penis. such anatomical assignments were our destinies, and we’ve learned to make do as boy and girl. (we’ve even learned to have a little fun with it all, too.) last year my wife made me this t-shirt for my birthday. we like it. actually, we like it more than some people do. you’d be amazed at the types of responses this shirt awards me - from friends as well as strangers - each and every time i wear it. i have instantly made both friends and foes simply by wearing this shirt into a coffee shop or a sporting goods store. if you must know, i am not a very politically minded person; therefore, my feminism is not entirely rooted in civil liberty or jurisdictional prudence. although those hopes are there, my feminism runs much deeper into who i believe i am becoming as a husband, a son, a brother, a friend, and a heterosexual male. my feminist beliefs are just one of the many glorious traits wound up in this big lumbering paradox of me. i have been meaning to write a list of my feminist ideas for a long time now. i credit eve ensler’s THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, which i will see tonight with a lovely batch of women and my brave friend felix, with challenging me to finally write this down. i bring this to you, dear gendered public, all you out there with your vaginas and penises, with a hope to stir up conversation, emotion, prayer, art, anger, conviction, confession, healing, and mercy. i firmly believe that one of the great mysteries of the gospel of Christ is not a denial of our sexuality, as the church has tried to teach us for centuries, but, rather, a redeeming of our sexuality. our genders are a great and precious secret about us as individuals. bringing those secrets into relationship - both with same and opposite genders - can be tricky. the following list, and hopefully the conversations to follow, comprise a small attempt to share myself and to celebrate others well.


i call myself a feminist because . . . .

. . . . i entered this world through a vagina.

. . . . my life drastically improved the day i began sharing it with a woman.
. . . . i need more than a male perspective.
. . . . all the married men i know literally fall apart when their wives go away for even a weekend. i honestly forget to feed myself.
. . . . girls are not born with a natural desire or tendency to despise and compare their bodies. we teach them to do that.
. . . . i want to raise daughters.

. . . . i want to raise sons well, too.

. . . . as an english teacher, it makes me angry that the core of our great literary canon - all the books we tell students are “important” - were written by dead white guys. this is ridiculously unnecessary on many levels.

. . . . too many girls in the american high school learn that the only way to socially succeed is to play dumb.

. . . . too many other girls are learning to play the slut. neither of these behaviors reflect a natural social inclination. young people learn this form of gender misidentity at a very young age.

. . . . there also exists a narrow margin of american high school girls completely ignored for refusing to play either dumb or the slut.

. . . . at the end of the day, they still call the boy the “stud” and the girl the “whore.” this is enough to make me want to turn somebody’s other cheek.


. . . . little boys are learning the “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” mentality of sex at younger and younger ages.

. . . . the words “bitch” and “ho” are regular parts of most adolescents’ vocabularies.


. . . . women should never apologize for their menstrual moods. in fact, thank you for being the sole portal of life on our planet. that’s pretty frickin’ boss.

. . . . the church has stroked their steeples for too long on misread scriptures.

. . . . the bible does not give men the right to tell women what to do or how to do it. that is not what “submit” means.

. . . . the bible does not tell women to be silent. you were not a member of the church of corinth, and paul knew something about them gals you didn’t. maybe he knew them corinth girls were buck wild.

. . . . for all the machismo in the scriptures, especially back there with some of them burly old testamenters, Jesus had a phenomenal way of seeking women, speaking to women, and listening to women. i like that about Him.

. . . . my social, emotional, mental, intellectual, relational, spiritual, and creative consciences demand it of me.

. . . . today, while wearing my feminist shirt in the grocery store, i was called a “fucking faggot” by a young texas male. he then told his friends to look at my shirt. another guy said, “yeah, that’s fucking lame.” and they all laughed. i just held their eye contact and smiled.

. . . . regardless of what the next guy might say, the majority of institutions in america are still patriarchally geared, even those without malicious intent.

. . . . too many men too easily walk away from the seeds they have planted.

. . . . neither 100% patriarchy nor 100% matriarchy work. we need balance. as a man, i want to both recognize this and accept the challenge.

. . . . women are mysterious.

. . . . women right now, even in our own country, are being bought and sold as commodities.

. . . . even in america, there are places where it is culturally accepted and expected to physically abuse women.

. . . . sex should never be viewed or demanded as “a wife’s duty.”

. . . . somewhere today little girls are abandoned on the side of the road simply for being female. the prize of a male child is far too great.

. . . . somewhere today little girls are losing their clitoris to a cultural blade.

. . . . women i personally know still believe the violence against them was their own fault.

. . . . women i personally know remained silent far too long out of fear.

. . . . the consistent narrative in romantic fiction shows a helpless woman in need of a rescuing man. and while this is a good and true story for some people, i have lived the opposite many times.

. . . . my wife constantly astounds me.

. . . . many of the strongest, most profound voices in my life were those of women.

. . . . it was a woman, my dear friend sarah were, who first put me on a right path of considering my masculinity.

. . . . even though i dearly love God, my wife, and the women in my community, i still struggle with a desire for pornography.

. . . . when i am very honest with myself, deep down in the middle of my humanity, the idea of a strange, beautiful woman taking off her clothes and dancing on me for ten dollars is very appealing.

. . . . i want my heterosexuality redeemed.

. . . . too many people (mostly men) refuse to talk about their own sexuality, as if it were something in a concrete fixed form that does not breathe or grow or shutter in certain corners.

. . . . i refuse to pretend, just because i love Jesus and i am married, that i am asexual.

. . . . i do not believe it is wrong, perverted, or adulterous to consider or proclaim the physical beauty of women other than my wife. she doesn’t make me feel otherwise, so i sure don’t need anyone else making me feel otherwise.

. . . . i hate side-hugging the women i love. listen, i know you have breasts. in fact, i’m glad you have breasts. and, you know what, your breasts are very pretty. but they are not what i’m moving in for here.

. . . . i want to view my wife, my mothers, and the women in my community well.

. . . . i need healthy relationships with women.

. . . . i am still learning how to have healthy relationships with women.

. . . . women are beautiful.