I was watching wifeswap a few nights ago (one of my ADD posts that I forgot to finish). If you have ever seen it you know how crazy it can be. Well this one was probably the craziest ones I have seen. You had one family who was a very Conservative Christian family. Like, I'm not lying. The dad was the breadwinner, the leader, the gate keeper, he was all of it to the T. The mom was a regular Proverbs 31 woman. She yielded to every command, lowered herself to be a servant, and raised her children to be so. Her daughters were not to date until they were ready to get married, and even then they had to wait until God brought then their Future Husband. Once they were married, they were not brought up to work at all. They were to be the 60's wife. They cooked, they cleaned, they were baby producers, all the while yielding to the husband. Their house was Dictated by the Father.

On the other hand, you had a Christian family (and I say this lightly because they didn't put themselves in the category of a regular Christian home), but a bit different. The mom was the breadwinner, the dad cooked, cleaned, was everything you'd want in a woman. (ha.) He spent his whole education in Theology. Studying the bolts and pieces, nuts and screws of Christianity; the Greeks, the Hebrews, the way the Bible was drawn out, all of it. Way more than they teach you in Honors Bible Studies at school, that's for sure. He couldn't stand, more than anything, Conservative Christians. He lost respect in them, what seemed like, a long time ago. They were all about being open minded. Their two girls, who were in middle school or younger, wore make-up and were encouraged to be extremely open minded and make decisions for themselves. It was a democracy in their household and they didn't seem to think it mattered to really truly listen to their dad when he told them to do things, until he asked a trillion times.

So you can see the possible problems in the household. It was crazy. Normally when I watch these shows the family is normally a little bit lenient when it comes to the new wife. You can tell that it's a different lifestyle then they are used to but they seem to generally listen to what they have to say and make some kind of improvements or changes. That was definitely not the case on this show. The Conservative Christian dad from the first family went so far as to take one of his daughters out of the house and wouldn't let her come back because she was taking so much to the new mom and what she was talking about. The mom of the second family was encouraging her to think about what she wanted for herself and not to feel that she HAD to be the woman that they were training her to be. The daughter was the youngest and she wanted to be a doctor but always felt bad because she felt that she was disobeying her parents. The dad especially, taught her that this was the woman that she was SUPPOSED to become, that she was to devote all of her time to her family when she had one and that she shouldn't be in the working force. When the daughter came back after being taken out by her dad it seemed that she was a robot. She said that the woman she was supposed to be was what her dad had taught her and that she didn't want to disobey her parents ever and stray from their ways. The mother of the second family asked the father if he felt that he was brainwashing his kids. He said yes. But then, after the kids found out he explained to them that he was brainwashing them in the way to go. Yeah. Bad choice of words. The guy seemed crazy.

The second family, the theology family, seemed to take on the mother of the first a bit better. The mother of the first seemed to genuinely want the Holy Spirit to speak through her, she said that in the beginning. She didn't seem as drastic as her husband, but was still set in her ways. Now picture this, a man that is very well educated about the bible, who wrote it, what they were thinking about while they wrote it, everything - in the same house with a strong-church goer Christian who was confident in what she was taught in Bible Study and what she read in her Bible. Not evenly yolked for sure. They would get in arguments all the time, she arguing with him about what she didn't know. He was a bit emotional and at one point he broke down and cried. He was so upset about how she was belittling him when he spent a great deal of his life studying the bible. She didn't mean to and was extremely upset about how she hurt him, but still didn't understand where he was coming from. He finally came to the realization that she would never be at the level that he was at and that he couldn't relate to her in anyway. So case closed in that area.

When they all met at the end, the couples, it was not good. The theologist was trying to talk to the first Conservative husband about how it was wrong for him to be enforcing his beliefs on his kids and brainwashing them until they couldn't make disc ions for themselves. At some point the wife of the first husband seemed to agree with the husband of the second and the Conservative looked at her really fast and got a little fearful and started to speak more about how he was the Gatekeeper of his house and all of that. The theologist caught him and said, you seem to be afraid and unsure. It was just a big mess that no one got to an agreement on.
The first family seemed to be so caught up with what the ideal Christian family was, that they forgot about the important things. They were so caught up in following the Bible to the T that they forgot about other people and seemed to be stuck in their box. In the beginning of the show the Conservative father said that he had a horrible horrible life before Christ and so he didn't want his children to ever go down that road. So it seems like he went to the extreme in making sure that never happened.

I have no idea where the souls of the Theology family lies. They are so caught up in the Theology that they forget about the love. Love and Justice. One family has so much of the 'love' and I put that in quotations because of the father, and focuses on the rules. They are so stuck in their Christian ways and Christian 'Holy art thou', that they forget that everything isn't always black and white. They just read a section in the Bible and have a "one way or the highway" view point on things like women that they forget to read about women like Deborah who lead an entire nation. The second family is so caught up in the theology that they forget about the simplicity of God's love for us and the fact that He sent His son.

For me, after the Bible Class, I've become extremely interested in the Theology of the Bible and I've increasingly wanted to learn more about the writers of the Bible and what was going on during the time that it was written. But I want to make sure that I don't loose track of the simplicity that comes from the Clouds and the trees and how the seasons change. I don't want to be so stuck in my books that I forget to look up at the Beauty all around me. But I also don't want to be so stuck in looking at the beauty around me, that I forget to learn so that I am all the more wiser and confident in my faith. A happy medium that I wish these two families could have learned from each other.







(Ignore the guy in the beginning. lol. and it's really bothering me that he used the wrong 'you're')