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Tag Archives: relationships

What’s Wrong with Guarding your Heart?

30 September 2013, 06:00

Moderator

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I was raised in an ultra-Conservative Christian homeschool environment, during what I consider the heyday of the “guard your heart”/purity/courtship movement (90s and early 2000s). Needless to say, that teaching affected and continues to affect me deeply. What started out as a (presumably) well-intentioned effort by parents to prevent their children from experiencing pain, has […]

Life Isn’t a Role-Playing Game: Part Three

22 August 2013, 06:00

Moderator

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This is Part Three of a three-part personal story. Click here to read Part One; Click here to read Part Two. After much thought and prayer, I settled on pursuing a marketing degree at a local, small Christian engineering and flight school called LeTourneau University. Most of my first two years were spent obsessed with […]

Life Isn’t a Role-Playing Game: Part Two

19 August 2013, 06:00

Moderator

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This is Part Two of a three-part story. Click here to read Part One. During my early high school years, I was very blessed to find an incredible youth group with leaders who valued relationships over rules and encouraged guys and girls to know each other more intimately as friends instead of remaining isolated from […]

Why Be a World Changer?

28 March 2013, 06:00

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Am I the only one who gets triggered by the idea of being a world changer? My news feed is full of calls to be a world changer — all from different camps. One is from the “Truth Project,” another from IHOP (the ministry, not the restaurant), another from YWAM, another from…. well, I could […]

Here’s The Courtship; Where’s The Love?

25 July 2012, 06:00

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When I was twelve, my parents came home and said, “Just so you know, you’re never going to be allowed to date.” This was fine by me; I was more into books than socializing. In fact, although I had a speech prepared on why I didn’t date, I never did get to use it. Still […]

Sensitivity vs. Callousness

24 January 2012, 06:00

Moderator

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Callousness Sometimes Won The leadership at Advanced Training Institute (ATI) training centers could be incredibly insensitive in dealing with personal tragedies and misfortunes. Especially if those situations affected, in any way, the performance of one’s duties at the training center. Sometimes, just the fear that leadership would misunderstand or react insensitively to a situation could […]

Breeding Relational Immaturity

18 October 2011, 06:00

admin

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It is no secret that Bill Gothard and the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) have a bizarre outlook on male/female relationships. In a world where falling in love means losing a piece of your heart forever, relationships are a spiritual distraction, and in a place where marriage is a last resort, it is no […]

Dividing Sister and Brother

27 July 2011, 12:45

WendyA

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The cardinal rule for those who live and work at Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) training centers is that unmarried persons of opposite genders do not mix. They especially do not “single each other out” or show any form of affection to one another. In some ways, this is perfectly understandable: you can hardly […]