One of my faithful readers sent me an e-mail with thoughts after reading a profile that boosted the “Left Behind’ books into a 60-million-copy bestseller

“Female, Forty-something, Stay-at-home Wife/Mom, and attends an Evangelical Church”.

It was through this e-mail that they talked about how the “Female, Fortysomething, Stay-at-home Wife/Mom, and attends an Evangelical Church” is much like the reader of the Harlequin romance novels. Looking for love, some other man to sweep them off their feet, and a better life where they live happily ever after.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the ‘Desperate Housewives’ who live on Wisteria Lane are now attending the ’seeker sensitive’ churches like Willow Creek.

The Desperate Housewives are so desperate for affection from some man (because they feel their husband does not give them enough) that they are searching and seeking it elsewhere and they are finding the affection…

at the seeker sensitive church
and the affection is burning and adulterous…

why?

Because the seeker sensitive churches are teaching the ‘Jesus is your husband’ teachings and Jesus will give them all they really need. And some of the women are leaving their biological husbands for a new husband named Jesus. There is one major problem here. Jesus is supposed to be their savior, not their husband.

Jesus is seen as their lover and the sacred and the sexual is mixed into a very lethal combination that is explosive and corrosive at the same time. Where the balance of this is the marriage covenant where the man and the wife become one, this becomes adulterous as the Christian woman tries to correlate the sexuality and intimacy in the spiritual places where it never was intended to be.

Explosive enough to wreck a marriage beyond repair… Corrosive enough to eat away at the foundation of truth…

All this does is really raise doubt from “Did I marry the wrong man’ to ‘can I have a better life and what could life had been. It’s kinda like the movie “Peggy Sue Got Married” where

…middle-aged Peggy Sue Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is an unhappy mother of two and considering divorce from her weasel of a husband (legally seperated fromhim), it doesn’t seem like a great time to have to attend her 25-year high school reunion and contemplate all those youthful dreams that didn’t come true. But at the party Peggy Sue faints…and wakes up to find herself 18 again and back in high school in 1960, where she gets the chance to “do it all over again.” Peggy Sue reveals to her shocked brainy schoolmate Richard Norvik (Barry Miller) some of his future “high-tech” inventions and has a fling with a dreamy Beat poet (Michael Fitzsimmons). Now realizing she has the ability to rearrange her future, she must decide if her true happiness lies with future husband Charlie (Nicolas Cage), a Fabian wannabe. Helen Hunt is Peggy’s supportive daughter and Maureen O’Sullivan appears in a small role as the grandmother Peggy gets to revisit.

I am now beginning to wonder if the typical evangelical Christian woman does not want a relationship at all but a ‘one night stand’ much like a ‘one time event’ of a particular spiritual experience? It seems as if the salvation experience is not the cleansing of your sins to no longer be bound in order to to go forward as a testimony of victory, but another ‘opportunity’ to try to eradicate all the mistakes and ‘do it all over again’ to ‘right the wrongs’ and rearrange the future into the Christian utopia.

Like Peggy Sue who in retrospect, maybe married way too young because she was pregnant, I sometimes wonder if some of these women got saved at such a young age and did not realize and look far down into the future and see everything and they are wondering in hindsight (because most married while unsaved) that if they decided to leave it all and ’start all over’, would it be better?

But in the end of this movie, it was just a hallucination from the fainting and Peggy Sue looks at her husband with a new perspective and it seems there’s hope for them possibly reconciling their differences.

However, Evangelical wife seems to not want to get off the eternal ’slain in the Spirit’ experience and seems to not want to reconcile with her husband and working out their differences. They want to see if a different life by divorcing the husband and marrying Jesus will cause her to live happily ever after because she is still seeking affection, to the point where if it has to be adulterous, it will be adulterous.

She’s waiting for the man to come back home to the mansion on Wisteria Lane but he never shows up. Therefore, she goes to another mansion and listens to the seeker-sensitive social theories (pioneered by Saddleback and Willow Creek) and is contemplating leaving her husband for another man named Jesus

It was like the lyrics from a Tanya Tucker song the loyal reader sent me:

“Delta Dawn?
What’s that flower you got on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone byyyyyyy?
And did I hear you say
He’d be meeting you here today
To take you to His mansion in the skyyyyyyy…”

In both places, they found love. However, what if the real problem is really that they have not found Love (God)?