Malamulo  R.T  Chindongo  brings  to  this  book,  16 years  of  ministry  experience to  college  students and  young  professionals  in  parts  of  Southern Africa  and  the  USA.  Rethinking  Relationships  seeks to  provide  men  and  women  with  a  tool  and  guide in  their  preparation  for  life,  courtship,  marriage and  family. Malamulo is currently serving as one of the elders at Antioch Baptist Church, in Blantyre, Malawi.

About the Book

Why another book on dating & courtship? Dating, courtship, and marriage largely remain areas with more questions than answers for many people. Navigating through these waters has never been easy for any generation. In Rethinking Guy/Girl Relationships, you will find answers to commonly asked questions concerning dating, courtship, and marriage.

Can this book be used for self study? Rethinking Guy/Girl Relationships is not just a book for personal enjoyment or for curious readers, but a biblical guide for those who are serious about developing healthy relationships with marriage in view. The book follows a simple format for easy reading. All the chapter titles are specific questions people ask concerning singleness, dating, courtship, and marriage.

What makes this book important for African readers? Most books on courtship today are written by western authors, and in most cases they overlook addressing issues faced by African men and women. In Rethinking Relationships, the author biblically addresses cultural issues unique to men and women in Africa. As the moral compass of our culture continues to nosedive, new ideas are being suggested to many young men and women on how to go about finding a partner. The entertainment industry has taken the lead with most of its concepts of love, romance, and marriage becoming the cause of most failed marriages.

What can readers expect to learn about the Bible from this book? The Bible provides timeless and working solutions to our problems. God made the marriage relationship, and He has the manual on how to cultivate a glorifying, God-honoring marriage.

Are other topics addressed in the book besides dating & courtship? This is more than a book about dating and courtship. The author seeks to help readers deepen their understanding of biblical manhood and womanhood, and how all these subjects find their meaning in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Who This Book is For:

Single Men & Women & those in a Relationship

Rethinking Relationships is for both single men and women. Those who will get married someday. A lack of preparation is the cause of most relationship and marriage problems.

Engaged & Married Couples

If you are engaged or have  just got  married,  you will  find  this book helpful as you  reflect on things you could have done better, and as you consider the more advanced chapters in  the book together with your partner.

Pastors, Youth Pastors & Bible Study Leaders

If you are someone who is leading a bible study or counseling young couples, you will find this book to be a very helpful tool for guiding others through these difficult waters.

How to Get A Copy of this Book

South African residents can have access to the book by placing an order here: info@28distrcts.org or contacting  0827538517 on WhatsApp. This book is also available on AMAZON

The post 13 Hard Dating & Courtship Questions Answered: Rethinking Guy/Girl Relationships Book Spotlight appeared first on Proverbs 31.

“So any kids?” she followed, “no, not yet”, I said.

These types of interactions seem to happen so quickly that I find myself unable to formulate uncomplicated truthful responses. I’ve included the word “truthful” because every time I respond with a “no” to the question of whether I have a child, I lie. I don’t mean to, I just don’t know yet how to say that I had a child who died in utero.

I feel like I betray our child every time I say no; I feel as if I deny their existence with every reply. This feeling is excruciating because it is also a reminder that our child isn’t here with us. We’ve had people coming into our home and exclaiming -kindly- that we can have the light coloured furniture we had because we didn’t have children yet. Some have asked me why I don’t have children yet and others have told us that our lives are a little less complicated because we don’t have children. These interactions are gloomy, to say the least.

I replay these interactions in my head and I think about the perception that our reproduction is fully in our hands when it isn’t. I think about the perception that we’re childless by choice when we aren’t. I think about the normalcy of asking married couples about their reproductive plans. I think about all this and conclude that none of these interactions are meant to harm me; they are innocent, not malicious.

My Own Personal Nightmare

So what do I do then? My pain is raw, deep and constant. Sometimes I can’t breathe and I have to swallow so I can force myself to take a breath. Other times I lay in bed at night, wetting my pillow with my tears, wishing that I could see or even hold our child. I wish that we had had a chance to hear their heart beat or something that could linger longer than an ultrasound image. It’s been 5 months since we lost our child to a miscarriage and I am not even a little bit over that. I oscillate between the knowledge that our child lived and died in the same place and the disbelief that they were there to begin with. I still can’t believe that we lost our Bean who just needed a chance to grow.

It turns out that what happened to our family is a common phenomenon. According to the statistics, 31% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage¹. So about one in three pregnancies end in a loss like ours.

Comfort has been hard to come by. This journey has been my most difficult and loneliest yet. I couldn’t (and still cannot) understand why it seemed that mothers who lost their children in this way did not have a lot of support based on how common miscarriages were.  I wondered this because I found myself suffering alone. My husband and I were not provided with much comfort beyond sincere expressions of sorrow and prayers when the news initially broke. No other on-going support- that we were aware of- was provided for us as church going people with friends and family. I have no doubt that those close to us continued to pray but no one else reached out, save for my mother. That perception hurt me deeply as our Bean was a real human child who was wanted and loved. This also hurt because I have found that people who are grieving need support more after the initial shock of the loss has worn off.

Mother’s Day was possibly the hardest day this year as it reawakened the grief and left me wondering if I truly was a mother. Could I be a mother if my child passed before they had fully formed? Do other mothers acknowledge me as a mother? Later, I became depressed and seriously contemplated self-harm until I was able to work through my pain with a Therapist.

Where could comfort be found?

Our comfort came from the Lord who proved Himself strong, secure and unchanging, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”- John: 1-5

Colossians 1: 15- 17 says “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

In the Word, I found comfort in the truth: our child’s creation was an activity of God. Our precious child was made by God, for God. He/she wasn’t truly ours. The one who made our child saw it fitting to take them away and that is okay. I learnt that the Lord is trustworthy, although I do not have my child, I have the Lord and I am trusting in His goodness.

The Lord then directed our eyes at Him and it caused me to be grateful. I am grateful for the 2 months I got to live with our precious Bean. I am in awe of the Lord for using a small human to change our lives forever. I am grateful for the babies that make it safely through their journey in the womb, who emerge, beautiful and perfect; I appreciate the care the Lord takes while knitting together precious humans in their mother’s wombs. I am as awestruck as ever by the Lord’s creative ability. I am grateful for those who did pray for us because I could not do so myself in the beginning. I am grateful for the stories I heard of similar losses as they helped me know that I was not the only one to know this pain.

The Lord directed my eyes to the pain and suffering of others and caused me to be more mindful in future of how I support my grieving loved ones; I am now a lot more aware of how crucial providing long-term support to those who are grieving is.

The comfort also came when we realized that the Lord had been seeing us through our grief. It was the Lord who helped me note that I was depressed and in need of urgent counselling. I could not have had the desire or the awareness without Him. It was the Lord who comforted us through His faithful provision of shelter, food and faithful preaching at our local church.

I’m still learning how to navigate through interactions with people regarding the absence of children in our marriage without lying or feeling like I’m betraying our child. I’m getting better via online conversations that can be thought through; I was able to answer the question about whether I had any kiddos with a modifier. I replied, “We have no little ones running around yet”. Maybe the Lord will grant us little ones who will run around in the future, maybe He won’t; either way, may His will be done.

The post Living with the Loss of our Child appeared first on Proverbs 31.

Our mandate is as it has always been: {CHANTING}, “stay in the shadows, hide in the cupboards, men want to sin, let ‘em all in!” Yes cronies, our timing is puurrrfect! People are convinced, at last, that love is all they need- since love now stands for money and all that money promises, when they say they need love, they mean they need money!!! Hahaha! This plan combines the love of money with the love of pleasure. Humans looooove pleasure. They love feeling good; they write songs about feeling good, change their bodies to feel good and put up posters about feeling good to sell things guaranteed to make them feel good. They are primed.

Before I start, I wanted to address this: I’ve heard murmurs from the lot of you about the fact that we keep recycling one idea and changing its name.[eltdf_blockquote text=” Those who think like this have no vision and are therefore nincompoops! Humans want to deny objective morality and elevate their own desires. The Most High successfully wrote his laws on their hearts and the tension created by the knowledge of right from wrong versus their naughty desires can only be eased by telling elaborate lies with great names.” title_tag=”h2″ width=””] If you don’t understand the basics of Lyology, then you might as well submit your resignation. See if heaven will have you! No takers? Alright then!

So on with business –things are going to get technical now so I suggest all intern cronies pair up with senior cronies– our new project borrows a few concepts from one of our golden oldies. Some of you will remember it by the term “Sugar daddy”. The “sugar daddy” phenomenon was reminiscent of a genie tale: “like a genie – he may be a little old, but if a girl rubs his lamp, he’ll grant her wishes”. And grant wishes our genies did! But the humans of today don’t identify with that term; too many negative connotations have rendered this golden oldie term irrelevant. We have thus rebranded the term and called it Blessers and Blessees. The prostitute became a call girl who then became a sugar baby then a blessee… much less scandalous.

Sugar daddies and their sugar babies have been replaced by blessers and their blessees. Think employer-employee. This new name is perfect for its obvious religious ties… and if you’re adventurous, gag opportunities. This new name sounds innocent, playful and maybe even pious. And if you can find an innocent sounding name for an otherwise distasteful deed, you have won 70% of the promo battle. Now, in order for humans to continue supressing the truth, they need a little help excusing themselves and attempting to explain the sin away so we’re throwing in extra material; we are going to add a bunch of entrepreneurial-feminist sounding mumbo-jumbo to get people behind it. By the time we’re done with this, humans will feel no shame when identifying as blessees and blessers, want social acceptance and desire admiration for detecting an on-demand-resource and capitalising on it.

We will elevate the blessee to a regular employee who could no longer comply with not placing a monetary value on a prized resource and cause those who have that same valued resource but choose to give it away for free to feel a level of shame – “you can’t say you tried everything to make a living when you didn’t really try E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G now can you?” we’ll whisper to them. My absolute favourite aspect about this new gem is that it has the potential to cause maximum damage over an array of human groups; husbands, wives, women, college graduates, business men and teenagers will jump all over it. It will cut across international, class and racial barriers, bringing sinners together in a magnificent debacle of weary dressed like pleasure, opportunity and joy. They will love it, defend it, and endorse it. Cronies, I cannot emphasis enough how wonderful new project is – we therefore need to tell our prey the consistent lie of the age: pleasure is the ultimate good and suffering, in any form, is the ultimate evil. We will make them believe that giving away their bodies is a small sacrifice to pay to secure the pleasure they long for.

And when the feminists object and the Christians write blogs and submit prayers, we’ll be whispering in the ears of those who will listen “they’re just mad ‘cause you getting paid, you’re smart”; then when we’re burning together under the fury of the Most High, we’ll be sure to have them with us. {CHEERING}

As always cronies, we have to maintain full deniability. If anyone catches on to the existence of our fabulous principalities at play in this – like we feature in everything else that is naughty –, our plan may backfire and humans may come to the conclusion that our existence must confirm the existence of the Most High exists. And we don’t want that now do we?!

And with that cronies, I bid you all adieu. {CHANTING}, “stay in the shadows, hide in the cupboards, men want to sin, let ‘em all in!”

The post Do What Thou Wilt appeared first on Proverbs 31.

These stories often portray the heroes as individuals with needs, weaknesses, and even passions, like our own, who choose to set them aside, accepting the life of loneliness and secrecy to protect those they love and a city in need. In their fight for justice, these brave heroes turn into cape & spandex wearing vigilantes, answering the cries of those victimized by crime and the ill will of others. These heroes always have a rival – an enemy usually written in to create tension- a formidable nemesis set on finding and exploiting their every weakness and seeing to their doom. While some rivals succeed in wounding the heroes and sometimes even defeating them, the heroes never let up, coming back again and again. We know these type of stories well.

[eltdf_blockquote text=”There is yet another story about a hero; this hero won the victory 2000+ years ago. He was ready to execute a plan put in place before the very foundation of the earth was laid and it was in His hands that His Father’s will prospered. Unlike the fictional heroes who save men from the ramifications of crime, He was concerned with giving men life and saving them from the ramifications of sin.” title_tag=”h2″ width=””]

While He wouldn’t be known for catch phrases like “cowabunga”, tit bits like “with great power comes great responsibility” or the succinct “Hulk, smash”, He is known for disarming our enemy, in one instance, by quoting verses from the Bible. His bankable deliveries include the true-to-the-core “it is written that man shall not live on bread alone” statement, the comforting “come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”, the cautionary “repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand” and the straightforward “I am the way, the truth, and the life…”. These words were not the ravings of a mad man but of a man who was and is God. His story stands out because it is true. His story points us to our very deliverance. You can literally hang all your hope on His words because when the comic books are closed and the cameras have stopped rolling, sin will still be raging, killing you and everyone around you. If you desire to survive this war, take heed, repent and place all your faith in the Son of man, Christ the Savior. He is the complete hero before whom sin, death and the devil didn’t stand a chance. How much more crime? Or injustice? Or pain?

So the next time you think of the “fastest man alive”, the “dark knight” or the alien from Krypton, think also of the New Adam, the Ancient of Days. Beloveds, we don’t need another hero for in Jesus the Christ, we have all we need.

The post We don’t need another hero appeared first on Proverbs 31.