Theology in the Raw - 799: Is it Okay to Hug a Woman in a Post-#MeToo World? Lore Ferguson Wilbert

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Lore (pronounced Lor-ee) Ferguson Wilbert just released her provocative book Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. And it addresses lots of questions that are on peoples’ minds these days—especially men. Can I hug a woman? Side hug or full frontal? Is “the Billy Graham Rule” a good thing or an insulting thing—or a bit of both? How can Christian men avoid affairs and sexual temptations without giving the impression that every woman he’s alone with in the elevator is a stumbling block? Unfortunately, Preston’s internet literally shut down toward the end of this podcast (and, in case you care, it didn’t start working again for another 48 hours, which in these Covid-19 quarantine days is like spending two days in hell with everyone out to lunch). But the 40 minutes they did capture were too good to scrap, so we’ll have to live with the technological embarrassments. Lore Ferguson Wilbert is a writer, thinker, learner, and author of the book, Handle With Care. She writes for She Reads Truth, Christianity Today, Lifeway, and more, as well as her own site, Sayable.net. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @lorewilbert. She has a husband named Nate, a puppy named Harper Nelle, and too many books to read in one lifetime. Connect with Lore sayable.net Twitter | @lorewilbert Instagram | @lorewilbert Facebook | facebook.com/lorefergusonwilbert Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest on the show today is Lori Ferguson Wilbert. I came across Lori's work on Twitter, gosh, must have been maybe six or seven years ago. I'll never forget in the midst of writing a book, I forget which book I was working on, but I remember coming across a tweet that Lori made and thought that it captured exactly a point that I was kind of working on in a book. And so I actually quoted her. I quoted her tweet in a book. And I went back right now just to look at which book it was. And I can't even remember which book it was that I quoted her in. Anyway, she doesn't even know about that. I told her on the show that I had quoted her in a book and she didn't even,

yeah, wasn't aware of that. Anyway, Lori has, she's written this recent book called Handle with Care, How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. And so the book deals with how Christians should navigate physical touch in a Me Too era is the best way I can kind of summarize it. So we talk really frankly and really just honestly about navigating that, for lack of better terms, that balance between touching each other, like being actually physical with each other and yet being sensitive to how certain forms of physical touch can violate somebody else's space and how to navigate kind of the balance between being flirtatious on the one hand and, you know, maybe going too far with the so

called Billy Graham rule on the other where, you know, men maybe don't even, you know, minister to women, you know, for fear of being, for that being taken as a sexual advance or whatever. So I ask a lot of really good, honest questions. Like, you know, hey, if after I give a talk and I'm talking to men and women, is it okay for me to hug a woman who is like sharing her story and maybe in tears. And I'll just tell you right now, I'll say it again on this podcast. I'm really nervous about how my friendliness or even my physical touch could be interpreted. And so I do have these fears and I invited Lori on the show to help me navigate those fears in a really gospel centered way. So, so I, this episode is so helpful for me and Lori has thought through

this on a really, um, uh, on a really thoughtful and in-depth level. Um, here's, here's the bad news about 35 minutes into the conversation, my internet goes out. Okay. So my internet goes out. I have to hit pause. Everything freezes. And I go up, I reboot my internet to no avail. It still doesn't work. I did it again. It still doesn't work. So I go, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to hotspot my computer with my phone. And for some reason, my data or data, whatever LTE doesn't work. And so I spend about 15 or 20 minutes trying to fix the situation. And it just didn't happen, didn't happen. So our conversation got cut off short. And I have a little I just added a little commentary at the end, just my own kind of commentary. So to give some kind of conclusion to it, but we just got to kind

of got cut off mid conversation. And I almost scrapped the file because I was so frustrated. Um, but I was like, you know, there was so much good stuff here. I think it was good stuff that we, that we discussed that I'm like, you know what? I would rather live with the technical embarrassment of having a lame internet because I live in the podunk country, uh, like backwoods neighborhood of Idaho, where our, even my internet company says, yeah, we can't increase your bandwidth beyond like 10 megabytes per whatever. I don't know what that means, but I have a horrible internet here and it's really unpredictable. So we just have to live with that. Anyway, more than you needed to know. I, I, I. Yeah, anyway. So please welcome to the show Lori Ferguson Wilbert. Again, her book is Handle With Care, How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry.

I think this conversation is so, so important in our Me Too era in the year 2020. all right i am here with uh well i you know i used to say lore but it's actually lori technically right yeah it is. You're the only one who says lore. I don't know if you know this, but I quoted a tweet you made seven years ago. I mean, one of my books, I think it's in my book on grace called Karis, God's Scandalous Grace for Us. I think that's the book I quoted in, but I remember, and I don't, I'm not even, I mean, I'm on Twitter and stuff, but I just, for some reason, just happened to randomly come across something you said while I was writing

this book. And I was like, gosh, that captures it well. I didn't even know who you were. And since then I've been following you more. But anyway, so I didn't, did you even know that you're quoted, one of your tweets is quoted in a footnote in some book I wrote. Now I've just been found out that I haven't read your book. I'm sorry. So why don't you give us a quick backstory about who you are, your upbringing, your conversion or whatever. And we don't need to spend a lot of time here, although just offline, I'm kind of fascinated

to hear about your story a little bit. But I do want to get into your recent book and the topic of, well, yeah, we'll get there when we get there. even super religious just super fundamentalist uh family and uh did not ever really hear the gospel till i was 29 and uh that's when the lord saved me raised in the church though like you said it wasn't really uh yes kind of but but like i would say in and out a lot of like home church situations um so i wouldn't say just, it was definitely not like a mainstream Christian environment and, and certainly not a gospel environment at all. Like I, I, I thought the word grace was a girl's name.

Wow. Really? Yeah. I had no concept of the cross. I knew what sin was obviously, but I didn't, um, I didn't know what grace was or really what the cross meant. And so, yeah, the Lord saved me at 29 and I'm 39 now, so about 10 years ago. And I'm a writer, a wife, I live in Texas. I'm not from Texas. And I've been trying to leave Texas pretty much since I got here, but I'm here. My Texan audience is not going to like that. I know they hate it when I say that, but it's the truth. I'm not going to lie. So, yep.

So how many books have you written? I'm just scanning your page right now. Two? Just one. Just one. Yeah. Yeah. This is the first one. Okay. And tell us about that book. What's the title, subtitle? What's the gist of it? And then I'm going to launch that. I'm going to use that as a launching pad into the topic of your book. Okay, great. It's called Handle with Care, How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. It's a mouthful of a subtitle. But basically, I wanted to kind of think about our world is kind of reckoning with Me Too Church Too right now. We're reckoning with, I mean, we're reckoning with all kinds of things in the culture and in the church. And I just want to think through, okay, let's go back to the

drawing board and how did Jesus interact with humans as a body with other bodies? And so it's not contrary to popular opinion. It's not, I'm not trying to make everyone huggers. That's not the point of the book. The point is to how do we care for the person in front of us as a body? How do we care for their body? And also how do we care for our own body in interacting with others? That's the point. So yeah. What's your take on the whole Me Too movement? I mean, pretend like I was on Mars for the last two years and I just got back to America and I heard hashtag Me Too and I'm like, what's that?

Like, how would you explain it and what's your kind of perspective on the Me Too movement? Yeah, I think it's a needed movement in some ways, a necessary movement. I think we have a very, I would say malnourished understanding, anemic understanding of what's permissible, what's helpful, what's appropriate between members of the opposite sex, members of the same sex. And so I think Me Too is necessary to sort of say, like,

And so I think Me Too is necessary to sort of say, like, sort of lay down the flag and just say, hey, there's a problem in the way that touch is handled and inappropriately handled, both in the church and out of the church. And I think outside the church, we see it sort of carte blanche, like, take whatever you want. And so Me Too is kind of a call to just say, you can't do that. You can't treat people like that. But I think in the church, we have, sadly, we have such an underdeveloped understanding of touch and what's appropriate to the point that we just sort of lay down laws. We put sort of the Billy Graham law in place and we just kind of have these sort of arbitrary rules and we don't actually really think through how those things care for or don't care for the people in front of us and around us or even our own hearts.

So I, my, I wasn't raised nearly as fundamentalist as you are, but conservative Christian, I mean, John MacArthur environment,, everything. And I would say I, maybe intuitively, I don't think it was like pounded into me, but I would say I adopted a sort of Billy Graham rule on steroids. My motivation, and I'm not defending that necessarily. I just, I just want to, I'm only recently seeing some of the dangers or fallout of that. And I want you to pastor me through this a little bit, but I, you know, when I first got saved at 19, you know, I was a very kind of flirtatious guy, you know, loved to just kind of date around. And, and I immediately, you know, just became aware of how, gosh, you know, I'm a volunteer in a youth group.

There's all these high school girls. And the least little thing I do can be misread. I get somebody's attention. They can be interpreted as flirtatious. And the second a youth leader is flirting with high school girls, whether you are or not, you're done, you know. So out of almost fear, I was like, I'm not even gonna talk to any girls, you know? And I probably would be taken as more standoffish

with even female colleagues and stuff, largely because it was like a pendulum swing so far from where I used to be. So I think my motivation, I think was good, but now I see like, well, gosh, and one blind spot, major blind spot I had is just the, just that idea gives the impression that I think every female is kind of an erotic, you know, potential,

or like you're just a walking kind of stumbling block rather than an image of God barren, you know? And as several women have said, well, a lot of women have now missed out on opportunities to be pastored by you in this whole process. So I'm just, I'm on a learning process. So anyway, take it from there. Help speak into maybe the pros and cons

of a Billy Graham rule and help me, you know, navigate this really touchy issue of male-female relationships? Yeah, I think it is touchy. I don't think you're alone in that. And I think some of it starts, stems from, like, we are so busy thinking about what everyone else is thinking about that we're not thinking about what God's thinking about. And so my husband and I have a saying in our home that we have to be faithful to the word of God and not to an outcome. And I think that's a really scary place to be because we, you know, we are all about outcomes in American individualism. And we're afraid of outcomes. We want particular outcomes.

And so we basically just put these laws in place in order to prevent us from having to exercise faith and obedience and righteousness. And I think when we look at the life of Jesus, we see a man who he did not avail himself to the narrative that might've been told about him. He availed himself. He said again and again, you know, I'm doing what I see my father doing. My food is to do the will of my father. And so how do we do that? Cause we're not Jesus. How do we do that? I think it means we have to, I think in a lot of ways, you have to take a really big step back. So a lot of people are like, oh, you just want to make everyone huggers. I'm like, no, I actually think we need to take a big step back from both laws and licentiousness in these areas.

And we need to take a good hard look at why we're doing particular things or why not and so in the book I talk about a pastor I knew who he refused to he refused to engage with women so he wouldn't hug them he wouldn't meet alone with them and I asked him one day we had good friendship and I asked him you know what's what's behind that? What's going on there? He said, well, my wife had an inappropriate interaction with a pastor when she was young. And I just don't want to give her any reason to think that I might do the same thing. And I thought about that for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, and I came back and I said, have you ever thought about how like it's instead of just sort of caving to your wife's fears here, that this is an opportunity for you to pastor your wife and shepherd your wife and help your wife come to a place of healing and wholeness and instead of walking sort of around and with kid gloves and everything.

And have you thought about how the women that you pastor might perceive your lack of attention to them or interaction with them as them being the problem? And so by not shepherding your wife, you're also not shepherding all these women. I think those conversations are really hard because they help us to see when we are so idealistic in the way that we talk about shepherding people and caring for people but when it comes down to brass tacks it's just a little bit more difficult than than we we actually want it to be it's not quite as simple as you know three points in a poem yeah that's good um how do you so for for several guys i think the me too movement has like made us skittish you know like i don't you know like you you know i speak and travel and stuff and um you know after i'm done speaking i'll get a bunch of people want to talk half of them are women um sometimes i'll have a woman sharing her story. She's crying, you know, and I'm like, I'm nervous. Well, just as a general

rule, I'm nervous about giving a hug to a woman that I don't know. And I would say I'm fine hugging strangers, whatever. I hug guys all the time, you know, but I'm nervous. Is that, I mean, is that okay? I mean, because it's like, what if they've been sexually abused? What if my hug communicates something that I'm not intending? But then by not hugging, I don't the reader understand that they are, we are people of faith. So we are not people who walk by arbitrary rules. And so we have to, so every interaction that we have with every human, including our own self, is an act of faith. So it's an act of faith to practice self-care. It's an active faith to have platonic, good, healthy touch in marriage that isn't sexual. These are all sort of acts of faith that we engage in. And when it comes to people we don't know, so I would say in the situation that you came up with, and I'm also,

I just want to say this, I'm very, very careful in the book to not give prescriptive advice or counsel. I think that that's the worst thing that I could do because I'm not you and I'm very, very careful in the book to not give prescriptive advice or counsel. I think that that's the worst thing that I could do because I'm not you. And I'm not that person standing in front of you. You have a story that's unique to you and no one else has your story. And she has a story that's unique to her. No one else has that story. And I think sometimes we tend to bring our story with us and think that everyone needs to sort of meet

us on our story's terms instead of meeting them and just saying, like, I don't know your story, but I'm going to sit with you and hear it and then maybe make a faith call of what needs to happen in that moment. And so sometimes a woman, a person, a human, I'm going to say a human, does need a hug. I used I, I used to be on the prayer team at my church and I was standing up front last summer. And, uh, this woman, she never saw her before in my life. She came up and, you know, there's 1500 people in the sanctuary. This woman came up and just said, I need a hug. Can you just, can you just give me a hug? Can you just hold me? And so I just held her for five minutes and I thought you know like sometimes that's just what people need that's what they need in the moment

they just they do need to be held and even for someone and this is this is not prescriptive I just want to be really clear about that um but even for someone who's experienced abuse to be pulled close to to to be held by someone can be profoundly healing. Now that needs to be on her terms. It can't be something that we force her to do, but it's perhaps what she needs. And I think when you look at the life of Jesus, we see him entering into, I mean, you just see all through scripture.

We see the woman at the well, Mary washing his feet, Mary anointing his head for burial, Mary clinging to him in the garden after he was raised. You see all these interactions with women that I think in the American church today we'd be suspect of. And yet Jesus did them with, I mean, with great grace. And I mean, he was sinless. So how do you, so mean, he was sinless. So. How do you, so yeah, not helpful. I mean, is it as simple as, again,

going back to my scenario, just asking the person, if I sense like, man, I feel like this person might need a hug. I feel like that'd be good. Just asking them, Hey, do you mind, can I give you a hug? And is it a side hug or full frontal? I mean, I really, these are important. They are. So, and again, I don't want to be prescriptive, but I think in your position, I think it would be right and good for you to say, Hey, um, I'm sensing you might need a hug. Do you need a hug? And then to let them, let them decide how they just hug you. So if they come in for a side hug, great. That says nothing about you. It says nothing about whether God loves you or you're a good man or you're a man of purity.

And if they come in for a full hug, you are a son who is loved by God. And like that is, God has put you in a place where you can minister and you can go to him with thoughts or concerns you might have. So does that make sense? No, it totally makes sense. Here's another fear I have too. And I don't know how to say that. It's so awkward for me to even voice this, but like speakers look really good on stage. And I'm a speaker, I'm on stage, and there's this perception of me that's just simply untrue, because they don't see me being a jerk of a husband to my wife, an idiot father,

you know, an aloof Christian, an apathetic Christian, a poor leader. They don't say, on stage, I'm funny, I'm a good leader. I'm spiritual. I could give this perception that, let me just say, some women, maybe even some men, because I don't assume everybody's heterosexual, could see in me what they wish their spouse was, even though what they think they see in me is just completely untrue. And I'm just nervous. I'm just, and maybe I'm just have too high of a view of the forward. I'm just nervous about not like, you know, it's not like some affair is going to break out, you know, in the middle of it, you know, but like, I just, I'm nervous about filling a void in somebody's life in a really unhealthy way.

You know, I don't know. Is that, is that is that even i'm just is that a legitimate concern yeah i think some things are real monsters and some things are just sort of a monster under your bed you know it's not real um and i think because there are so many narratives out there that have been like i mean really damaging narrative really damaging situations have happened where people in some kind of relationship an abusive, where there has been that sort of thing taking place. I think as a speaker, you're not, you're not going to like, that is, I think, too high a view of ourselves to think that we're going to like somehow replace something that someone needs in a deeper way. And it can be perhaps what they need in that moment is just to know that there is someone out there who

walks in, who, who is a good father and a good husband and that, that can be healing too. And again, we can't control the narrative. I think we want to honor all people. We want to, we want to outdo ourselves in honoring everyone i want to assume the best about everyone um but it's not my job to control there um so even i think the scripture that says like avoid all kinds of of evil appearance of evil like i think that scripture gets taken out of context so often. And so we're not, that's not the, that is not that scripture verse does not apply to 99% of the situations in which we're in. And it is not evil to care for the person in front of you any more evil than

it was for Mary to cling to Jesus when he was, when he was newly risen from the grave. Yeah, that's good. Okay. So now on the flip side, what about, um, it seems like the growing number of church leaders who, um, weren't giving innocent hugs that were again, maybe not fat, maybe not, maybe not having full on affairs, but really going way farther than they should. Like, how do you, should, should that caution us at all or how do we navigate that side of the whole thing yeah and i think it absolutely should caution us and i talk about this more in the book too like we we we should and that's why i say we've got to back way up here this isn't something i'm not saying rush headlong into these things. I'm saying back way up,

start to consider your actions, start to think about your actions. It's really a book about embodiment and a theology of touch. It's about creating a theology, a personal theology of touch. And how am I going to conduct myself in the spaces around me and how do I want my family to conduct themselves in the spaces around me. And so I think it is, we are right to feel a sense, not, not of, I think a collective, a collective sense of guilt is I think appropriate for us in the church today. I think what I mean by that is we should feel a sense of,

of weightiness to how many people have been abused and how sinfully many shepherds have taken their role with many people. And so we should have a bit of sort of circumspect, we should be really circumspect about this um this isn't these aren't there aren't easy answers to these questions yeah um there should be some hesitation on behalf of both male and female leaders um what are what are some what did you say some negative things that the me too movement has done or created um if if there are any? Oh, gosh, you're going to get me in trouble here. Yeah, I think I heard a politician, of all people, say this a couple years ago. He said, it's a needed movement,

but there are going to be some mistakes. And that's, I think, when we look at any sort of revolution, any sort of movement, we can see sort of, if we're discerning people, we can see the goodness in the movement. We can see the needed things, but we can also see that, man, hashtag activism can lead to a sense. I mean, here's one thing. It can lead to a sense of accomplishing something without actually accomplishing something. It can lead to false accusations, which are profoundly damaging. I mean, personally, I know several men who have been falsely accused and how devastating that has been for them and their families and just everything about them.

So I think we do need to be really careful and mindful. I think this is a moment when we need to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. And by that, I mean, we need to believe people when they come to us with a story. We need to believe that they have an experience and whether the experience that they're communicating to us is fully 100% true, it feels 100% true to them. 100% true, it feels 100% true to them. And so we need to begin to interact with them as human image bearers and not just sort of sweep their experiences under the rug and things like that. I am nervous about, and I don't think I see this in the church as much, but I guess in the broader culture, the whole, you know, believe all women. I think, I mean, that's just the biggest crock. I mean, I get where it's coming from, but I mean, really, it's, it is ironic with the people promoting that then they get accused and like, Oh no, yeah. Believe all women,

except that woman who just accused me of something, you know, it's so, I don't know. It's just, it's, it has a, in a very thin distorted anthropology behind it as if just because you're a female means you don't lie or you're sinless. At the same time, maybe it's an overcorrection of not believing any women or assuming that they're not telling the truth when in many cases they are. Do you have thoughts on the believe all women? Am I out to lunch on my, I think you're right. I think that the, the Christian worldview says that like, I mean, from the, from the,

our first parents, you know, sin has entered the world and we, we don't believe all people. We, we should be judicious and wise and we want to be wise people. We should be judicious and wise, and we want to be wise people. God has given us the fruit of the Spirit. He's given us His Holy Spirit to help us to be wise and discerning. Proverbs talks about the first to state his case seems right until the second comes along. Fortunately, we live in a land, sadly, we live in a land that's like you know whoever's making the loud the squeaky wheel kind of is the the one who's who's right um but we do live in a country where there are laws and hopefully a due process process that will take you through that and and hopefully the truth is the truth comes out i think it is very much in black backlash to i mean generations of

women who haven't been believed um which is really grievous i mean if you think about it just years and years and years i mean generations yeah generations and generations of women haven't been listened to and i think um one of the things i i think i i really like it's necessary for us to consider is that um one of the books i quote from extensively in the book is the body keeps the score by bessel van der kolk such a good book but he he talks about sort of um the way that even generationally bodies keep the score so he's talking in reference to slavery and how black bodies are still keeping the score today. They are still bearing on them, sort of the, the, these scars of slavery from generations ago. And that's really profound.

And if we can, if we can, if we can understand even the scars that our own bodies bear, and we talk, I talk about this in the chapter on broken bloodlines, if we can understand our own stories and the scars that we bear and the wounds that we bear on our bodies, we can begin to see that everyone around us is carrying a story with them. They're carrying scars. They're carrying wounds.

Their body is keeping a score of something. And so this sort of believe women mantra that's out there is, is in some ways the, you're just seeing the scar of generations of women not being believed. Yeah, no, that's, that's, yeah, that book, it just blew me away. I mean, that's, yeah, it's, I'm glad to see it's being so wide. I think it's, I mean, it came out like five years ago and it's still like bestseller. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a good book. Um, apart from physical touch, what about, uh, just verbal compliments, you know, and again, I'm going to get really specific cause I have, I just, it just goes through my mind all the time. I mean, I, I, I am nervous complimenting another female on their physical appearance. Is that, help me navigate that. Like if a girl, yeah, I mean,

and part of this is, is, is, you know, my wife who doesn't have a history of abuse or anything, she's, you know, grew up good church experience, good, good, you know, uh, good experience with guys and everything. But when another man like compliments her physically, she gets a little bit like a little bit like, like, ah, it just doesn't feel right to her. And that's just, that's just her, you know, whatever. Um, so I, I kind of wear that a little bit like, man, if I compliment, Hey, that's a beautiful dress. That really makes you look good. Like, I should I be nervous about giving physical compliments on another female or again

i know i know you're not going to give be prescriptive but help me well i'm going to say this i'm going to say this we are uh we are complex humans so we are bodies minds spirits souls hearts we're all those things and sadly i think we have um sort of deconstructed the body we've deconstructed all that that complexity we've deconstructed it and have sort of deconstructed the body. We've deconstructed all that, that complexity. We've deconstructed it and we sort of compartmentalize all these different parts of humans around us and even our very, even our own selves. And that has led to all kinds of, of, of issues in the church. And I think when we merely see or appreciate a human image bearer

in front of us for one aspect of who they are, their beauty or their mind or their heart, and we continually affirm that part of them, we are participating in a desecration of their whole complex image-bearing personhood. And so when we merely treat them as bodies or merely treat them as minds, and we see this everywhere, when you start to see it, you can't unsee it. You don't, when you start to see it, you can't unsee it. And so our job as believers is to begin to, our job as believers is to image God in the way that he brings all those things. He brings sort of compartmentalized things together.

And we see that in the Godhead reflected in his oneness. And so I would say that's a sort of a theological answer to your question. And I think when it comes to practical, to a practical answer to that question, I want to, I want to step back from seeing my brothers and my sisters as primarily, this might get me in trouble, primarily men and women. And I want to see them as humans and I would see them as image bearers primarily. And so, um, and even I talk about this in the chapter on marriage, I'm not primarily a wife and Nate

isn't primarily a husband. He's primarily my brother in Christ and an image bearer of God. So my interactions with him need to be primarily as my brother in Christ, secondarily as his wife. And so, and I think when we learn that in marriage or even before marriage, that helps us to interact with all of our sisters and brothers in a way that is, I think, we can't control what they think. There's no question about that. We can't control their thoughts. We aren't in the business of mind control.

So would you say we shouldn't be concerned about that? So again, going back to my, again, I'll just confess my fear of like, gosh, if I'm nice to this girl, man, you look so good today. Have you been working out? gosh if I'm nice to this girl man you look so good today have you been working out or I'm not like if I if I mean something in a non-flat I'm not I just I'm just trying to honor another human being if my motivation's right I shouldn't worry about how that might be received I think it's it's always going to take some sort of um inventory of the words that we speak. And so if your words primarily to a particular women or to women in general are about the way that they look, I think it's time to do some inventory and some soul searching. But if you find that you are like, if you're being very self-aware and you are taking

regular inventory of the ways that you are talking to specific women and women in general, and you are finding, man, I'm trying to affirm their hearts, their minds, their emotions, their knowledge, their body. Like I'm trying to affirm them as whole people. So each woman in particular is sort of getting a whole, the whole package and women in general are getting the whole package. Then I think that's okay. Okay. I think that's great. And, and is it right to say there, there will be some fallout. There will be another person, man or woman who might take that. And maybe they're in a healthy spot,

unhealthy spot where they're just craving some kind of affirmation. And maybe they're in a healthy spot, unhealthy spot where they're just craving some kind of affirmation and maybe they will latch onto that and maybe an unhealthy, maybe idolatrous. Well, I mean, there's all kinds of negative effects that can come from good deeds, right? Or, I mean, that's just the way that we did. That's just going to happen. Wouldn't you say though, that there are negative effects that can come from an absence of? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. totally. Yeah, yeah. So sometimes we get into unhealthy places because no one has. So you don't want to be the sole person who's giving that to them. You want them to be in a healthy community where they're receiving that. In the book, I open up with a story from John Piper, and he talks about how this woman continually cut herself. She was a single woman, an older woman. She would constantly self-harm

to put herself in the hospital. And after a dozen times of this, he said, why do you keep doing this? And she said, I like it when they touch me. Wow. So she was harming her body. So she would go to the er because she knew she would be touched there so we need to understand that there are people who are in they are in really unhealthy places and they're they're doing really unhealthy things to get the the care the actual care that she needed to be touched she needed to be treated like a human being and the only way she needed to do it was to harm herself and so there's plenty of people out there like that. I would say the majority of people out

there are probably like that. And so we want to help people get the holistic care that they need so that they're not running to empty cisterns. You don't want to be a sole place where they're receiving that. But again, you can't control, you cannot control their outcome. And maybe you're just one person in the sort of stream who affirms them and loves them. That's true in any case. I mean, you can preach a great sermon

that proclaims the truth and some knucklehead's gonna take it in the wrong direction. That's just always gonna happen, you know? We need to be sensitive. That's why we have the, yeah's always going to happen. You know, we need to be sensitive. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, you go ahead and go ahead. That's why we have the, you know, we have this print in our home that says, fidelity to the word of God and not to an outcome. Like we just have to remember that again and again.

Yeah. That's good. Did you get into, did you do study research on the science behind like human touch? I heard that like if a newborn is like, they will die or whatever, like they need the physical touch actually, especially if they're in critical condition that keeps them alive. Or I mean, is there a science behind just the physiology? Yeah, there is. I don't talk about it a lot in the book. I was trying to stay mostly in theology, less in science. But yeah, there's all kinds of studies out there about the need for human touch. I mean, we're learning so much in sort of psychology right now about attachment theories and the need for like healthy attachment at a young age. And it's absolutely necessary for a child to have that in order to be a healthy well-attached person as they grow up and so yeah there's all kinds of science the science I always tell people make sure when you give someone a hug you hug them with your arms on

the outside someone you someone you know and someone you love and you with whom you're in relationship with you give them a hug with your arms on the outside and hug them for nine seconds because that's how long it takes for endorphins to come out. And then you put your arms down at your side and let them do it to you for nine seconds. So you both get to the physiological things that happen in our brains when we do hug and when we are hugged. And those things are profoundly profoundly healing so hugging somebody for nine seconds it takes that long and endorphins are released yes really yeah

yep wow it's brain science that's great well okay what about the love languages you know some people are what's the love language of touch is it it called? It's physical touch or something. Physical touch. So are there some people that need touch and other people that don't, or is it some need it more than others or how does that work? So I make the argument that we all need it. And I think we all need all five love languages to some degree. Some of us want particular ones more than we want other ones. And I think it's because God wants to heal something in us. So I hear lots of people say, well, I'm not touchy. I'm like, I think God might want to heal something in you. I'm not going to tell them that most of the time.

But I oftentimes just, I think that it's, it is something that all humans need. God didn't make us spirits. He made us with bodies and he, he, not only did he make us with a body, but he came down as a body. There's a reason for that. And I think that we don't want to think about it. We don't think about the, the, the implications of what it means that we have bodies and God came as a body. And so, yeah, I think we actually need all five love languages. No, that's good. So you're saying if somebody is like, oh yeah, physical touch.

No, no, that's not my thing. You would say that that maybe some people need it more than others or resonate with it more than others. But if somebody is like, I don't want that, it makes me uncomfortable. Then there might be an, that that's coming up a place of unhealthiness, would you say? Typically. Oh, are you there? And that's where we got cut off.

Oh, man, I'm frustrated. I literally spent about 20 minutes racing around my house trying to get the internet going, rebooted it twice, tried to hotspot my phone to my computer, and nothing's working. My internet is gone. My internet has the coronavirus, I think. I don't know what happened. But that was such a bummer because I was so enjoying the conversation. Um, man, I just so appreciated, um, Lori's perspective, just that, that balance between, I don't know, like being sensitive to someone else's narrative, you know, and, and being

sensitive to how your actions might be taken, um, and yet not letting that sensitivity or, or we, you know, let's just say fear, um, dictate our, um dictate all of our actions. And so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Again, the book is Handle with Care, How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. And I want to just read, she has a blurb on the back of her book that I think is really helpful in connecting the gist of the book to a lot of the things we're talking about. Laurie says this, whether it's fearful side hugs on one side or sexual abuse on the other, both the culture and the church aren't doing very well with touch. Singles are staying single longer, dating is wrought with angst over purity, and marriages struggle to not interpret all forms of touch as sexual. Even the Bible seems to have

endless rules about not touching things. There is simply no place where touch doesn't seem threatened or threatening. But a curious thing happens when Jesus comes into his ministry. He touches. Jesus touches the sick and the outcast, the bleeding and the unclean. What can it mean for families, singles, marriages, churches, communities in the world to have healthy, pure, faithful, ministering touch? Somewhere in the mess of our assumptions and fears about touch, there is something beautiful and good and God-given. As Jesus can show us, there is ministry in touching. So yeah, I don't know. I, I, you know, I reflect on my own trajectory in this kind of conversation. And I, you know, I talked about it a little bit in this

podcast and I've talked about it in other podcasts, how I've, you know, just for lack of better terms of kind of error in the side of the bill, the Billy Graham rule, you know, and just not being, um, just being overly maybe concerned with, um, not sending mixed signals or not, um, being, just being overly maybe concerned with not sending mixed signals or not touching somebody in a way that could be offensive or taken the wrong way. And I've erred in that direction, but I do, I want to grow in this area and figure out, I mean, and it's so cliched, I hate even saying it, but I truly want to figure out how to embody the rhythm of Jesus when it comes to touching other physical humans. And some people might say, well, you know, Jesus was sinless. And so he could touch and be touched by other

females and it wasn't an issue. Well, I don't like that line of reasoning. Yes, Jesus is sinless, but he was tempted in all ways that we are. So all of the temptations that we experience, according to the book of Hebrews and other passages, Jesus experienced those too. I mean, the whole point of his, not whole point, but a large point of his incarnation is to embody the pure essence of what it means to be human, which means going through the struggles that we went through, though without sin. So I just don't like always punting to Jesus's sinlessness and therefore say, well, you know, what Jesus did here isn't really what we should do. Or I just don't think that's, I think it's the exact opposite, right? I mean, we should look at the

life and rhythm of Jesus and say, we should live like that. So if Jesus did, you know, have a healthy boundary between, you know, or healthy balance between boundaries and also not letting fear control how he touched other people, then I think we should model that. So I'm going to keep working at this. I'm going to keep trying to navigate that balance. It's not easy. And I'm, you know, I will continue to wrestle with fear of how things might be misread. But I also, I want to embody Jesus to both males and females. And so, yeah, I'm going to keep trying to wrestle with how to do that. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. And sorry again for the technical difficulties towards the end there. But I almost just ditched the whole thing and said, all right, well, we'll just scrap this.

But I think there was just too much good stuff here I didn't want to throw away. So we'll just have to live with kind of the technical lameness at the end here where my internet just got taint. So thanks for listening again to Theology in the Raw. Um, I encourage you to go by and read Lori's book and until next time, we'll see you on the show. Thank you.