Revelations of a Single Woman - Part 4 of 4

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: Connally, welcome back to For Faith & Family.

GILLIAM: Thank you, Richard, its good to be back!

LAND: Now, Connally we are going to get to the inevitable questions now.

GILLIAM: Okay.

LAND: I know and you know women who, because of their singleness, have been tempted to disregard what I believe is the clear admonition of Scripture not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Talk to us about that.

GILLIAM: It is a major issue. The reality, I think, of the drive toward creating a family is so strong, and when women start to look around the church and they see not very many men or men who are there are fairly passive or who are threatened by the women’s strength, so many women inevitably begin to look elsewhere. My sense is that that is wrong. I think it is wrong, I understand it. I can empathize with it, but if at the end of the day life is really about what God wants to be doing in and through us, then I think locked onto Him in His terms is the way forward, even if it leaves us with some aches in our life.

LAND: Well, you know, I know it is easy for me to say as someone who has been married since they were twenty-four, but I can’t imagine as a Christian a marriage to someone who is not a believer. I mean, there are just so many cavernous gaps. The intimacy and the oneness that is marriage, there would just be whole realms and vistas of knowing and being known that would just not be there.

GILLIAM: Well, I think that is true, Richard. I actually don’t disagree with you at all. I think the reality is though that it feels like you have so many cavernous gaps, particularly if you don’t have a strong, either extended family or community around you. But you say, “Hey, you know what, I would be willing to trade off some of these cavernous gaps for some of those cavernous gaps,” and I think in a way the logic is that simple for people. And, again, I’m not endorsing that, but I’m saying I do see that happening a lot around me.

LAND: Well, and you have shared with us off air that you had a relationship that was with a really smart, intelligent, good-looking guy but he wasn’t a Christian and he didn’t respond very well to your comment to him, did he?

GILLIAM: No, he didn’t. I ended up saying to him, I won’t use his name but I’ll just call him Simon. I said to him, I said, “Simon, you know I could never bend my knee in any meaningful way to you if I wasn’t convinced that you had bent your knee to the God who is much bigger than the both of us.” And that angered him, and upset him and that is really when the relationship came to an end; but, for me, partially it was a struggle because there was a lot of good in that guy. I mean, it’s not like he was a slimy guy or something; he was a good, in the sense of upstanding citizen kind of guy. But I knew in my own heart of hearts that what I really yearn for in the context of marriage is intimacy, and I knew that if I can’t share that surrender to the Lord place with a husband, it is better for me to not be married.

LAND: And I think his response is indicative of that there would have come a place where you would have had needs he couldn’t meet, and it would have been terribly frustrating for both of you.

GILLIAM: And, I think at the end of the day, the thing that I respect most in men is men who have humbled themselves before the Lord. It doesn’t sound like a kind of a hot sexy attribute, but the reality is that a man who has humbled himself before God has a kind of strength that commands respect, I believe.

LAND: Talk to us about dads and daughters.

GILLIAM: My dad, this has been a learning curve for my father. I will never forget when I was in about my mid to upper twenties, and I was struggling through in some relationship and my dad said to me, he said, “Honey, your generation makes it so confusing,” he said, “You know when I got married,” and he was twenty-two and my mom was twenty-one, they had both graduated from college that spring, he said, “When I got married, your mother, she was beautiful. She was from a family of five and so was I. I thought she’d make a good wife and mother, and she was Baptist, and that was it.”

LAND: I like the way he thinks. I like the way he thinks.

GILLIAM: He’s kind of a bottom-line guy, and he didn’t think twice about it. So, he didn’t have any vocabulary or really any understanding of the culture into which I was being raised, and when I hit about thirty, I started to feel the need for some kind of male strength in my life and I found myself having to be real explicit with my father and having to explain like, “Dad, I need a sense of your protection as I am going through my life.” Now, my parents and I don’t live in the same town and that protection partially had simply being a more intentional prayer component, but it was me being able to be really honest about my heart with my father and then hearing his affirmation and his, “Honey, it’s going to be okay” voice along the way.

LAND: Did your dad ever go through any soul-searching about whether he had any role to play in this because, you know, he had failed in some way?

GILLIAM: Well, he did. Though I have to say I think probably I am the one responsible for his being motivated to soul-search than he was. He is a business guy, a numbers guy, he is not naturally inclined to soul-search. But I guess when I was in about late twenties, I picked up two copies of a book, I think it’s called Always Daddy’s Girl, and I had my dad read it with me. So we would read a chapter, and we would discuss it, and you know, we read one chapter that had talked about the issues of fathers with their daughters and how the father affirms certain things, those were the values that the daughter took away, and he read through that chapter and we sat down to talk about it, and all very awkwardly, and so now, I didn’t ever do any of those things that, you know, kind of made you have issues with me, did I? In his own way, that was his willingness to go there and explore himself as part of the process.

LAND: Sure. And I think it is doubly tough for girls who don’t have dads.

GILLIAM: It is. I mean, I have one girlfriend whose parents both died by the time she was twenty-one. She has lived in a couple of different cities so her community has been somewhat scattered, and I think she yearns for that—just a sense of father in her life who could nod and affirm, give her a little advice periodically and tell her, “Hey, I’m behind you, and I’m in your corner,” and a lot of women don’t have that, and that is really hard.

LAND: Connally, we just have a couple of minutes left and I have not talked about the elephant in the room, sex. You talk about it in very responsible but very courageous ways and very clearly in the book; but I just want to ask you this question. Do you think that a lot of men are missing the woman that God has for them because they have fallen prey to the siren of sexual promiscuity and have been blinded by it?

GILLIAM: Oh, no question. I have become more and more convinced that men discover the joys of intimacy, true intimacy, in the context of marriage, that their orientation may be at first toward sex; but they can almost end up using sex as a narcotic, which keeps them somewhat drugged and so they never get to the place where they have actually chosen to commit to a woman in marriage and then get to discover the richness that really could be there. I see this happen a lot and honestly, Richard, I see it happening in the church as well.

LAND: No question, and, of course, the elephant beside that elephant in the room is pornography, isn’t it?

GILLIAM: Oh yes. Internet pornography is a major issue, and because I work with folks in their twenties and I have candid relationships with both my male colleagues as well as some of the guys, they are like, it is a struggle, and I think it is more of a struggle for Christian guys because they know how they are not supposed to have sex outside of marriage, but then they are all around their computers all the time and so I think internet pornography is really disabling a lot of men.

LAND: Well, as I’ve said, it is shriveling and shrinking and distorting and twisting millions of men and boys and denying them the ability to be the husbands and the fathers that God created them to be.

GILLIAM: Which would actually be an incredible blessing in their own lives. I mean it is really their loss.

LAND: Yes, and it is, as I have said, pornography is the satanic counterfeit of God’s purpose for sexuality.

GILLIAM: And you know, I mean, the reality of a whole culture is being affected by it. I mean, if you took the Metro to work everyday, you see these ads, just on the walls, for women stores or, I mean, I won’t name names but these women were called predators and that start to be what appeals to men and that has nothing to do with love or intimacy or commitment or vitality. It is about being seduced into what feels like, as C.S. Lewis says in The Chronicles of Narnia, it feels like the Turkish delight is giving you this special, special joy or buzz; but in fact, it is bad magic and you lose a taste for real food.

LAND: As often is the case, it can’t be said better than Lewis says it. But I must confess, you come awfully close sometimes.

GILLIAM: Well, thank you. I’ll take that as a great compliment indeed.