Thought for Food

On Sunday night, I went over to Joy's for dinner, along with Bob, Byron, and Maria. The food Joy prepared was excellent, and I think we all ended up eating a lot more than we expected.

As good as the food was, the more interesting thing about the night was some of the conversations we had. Some of the topics we covered were, in roughly the same order:

How did your parents meet?
Answers varied from the mundane boy meets girl, all the way to international drama that would make for excellent K-soap material. Actually, I was surprised everyone present knew how their parents met. To be frank, in my experience, many people don't think of their parents as actual people, and as having once been kids themselves, so it doesn't really occur to them to ask about their parents' childhoods.

What's worse, being the guy and asking a girl out, or being the girl and waiting for the guy to (get a clue and) ask?
As usual, the guys said they had the toughest job, while the girls said if they were a guy, they don't think they'd have any problem asking a girl out. Now, I can already sense some male readers out there getting their feathers ruffled over that last statement. But hey now, I can kind of see where they're coming from. After all, if I were already in a safe and secure marriage, I'd probably forget what "fear of rejection" meant, too.

During high school/college, what did your church teach you about how to conduct guy/girl relationships?

Wide range here, though it really just boiled down to Canaan vs. Bread of Life Church. Back in the day, Canaan youth group had no official teaching on this topic that Bob is aware of (he wasn't that consistent back then). He picked stuff up mostly from supplemental reading. BOL, on the other hand, lay on the other extreme, overdoing it a bit, with legalistic rules, all in the name of our mantra "Above Reproach", with rules governing dress, 1:1 conversations with the opposite gender (don't), necessity of early DTR's ("Hi, my name is Nancy, and we're Just Friends, right?"), etc. We can look back now and laugh, but we admit that during that impressionable time of our lives it was still better to be too conservative than too liberal.

Is childbirth really that painful?
Yes.

How close are you with your grandparents? What were they like when your parents were just kids?
The two take-home messages I got from this was a) Being 2nd generation, some of us are not close to our grandparents, despite the best of intentions, because of the language barrier. However, we will not have the same problems with our own grandkids. b) As Christians, our marriage life (and eventually children) is a powerful witness to our parents, i.e. "How come my Christian child's family turned out so much better than my non-Christian kids'?"

As a Christian, should choosing to attend a gay friend's wedding be any different from choosing to attend, say, a Buddhist wedding, or even a Wiccan one, complete with pentagrams (like Bob's coworker's wedding)?

Along the same lines, if a gay couple were to come to our church, how can we show that we accept them, and yet show that we don't condone what they're doing? Just food for thought, because we weren't able to come to any set conclusions.