Okay, another for February: about Christian romance novels

Because I read books aloud to Janalee, I've grown
very familiar with Christian romance fiction. Some
of it is very good, such as the works of Karen
Kingsbury; but even in good Christian romances,
a problem persists. Numerous authors don't seem
entirely to grasp the command of Scripture not to
be mismatched with unbelievers.

Hypothetically:

Sarah Slushy writes a novel called "Love's Ooey-Gooey Sentiment." In it, Christian man Bill Whitebread has been continuously and unwaveringly in love with Tina Guttersnipe since he was four years old and she was three. We encounter them in Chapter One at ages twenty-five and twenty-four. Throughout the twenty-one years preceding the opening, and on through the first thirty-eight chapters of a forty-chapter novel, Tina continuously and unwaveringly denies the existence of God, accuses Christianity of being the direct and sole cause of the Nazi Holocaust, throws rocks through church windows, and supports every subversive Marxist cause she can find. She also brags incessantly about how much smarter she supposedly is than any Christian, including and especially the hero. During all this, Bill ignores the dozens of good Christian women who are interested in him, remaining fixated on Tina, insisting that she is sure to become a believer any minute now.

Somewhere around Chapter Thirty-Three, Tina decides she likes Bill after all--that is, likes HIM, without agreeing to anything about his professed faith. So they have some fluttery kissing scenes, leading up to their becoming engaged... with Tina STILL denying Jesus as much as she ever did, and Bill seeing no problem with this. Not until Chapter Thirty-Nine does the author slip in a deus-ex-machina, having God speak audibly to Tina. God is depicted as saying to her: "My dear sweet cuddly child, I know that your only problem is that you don't love yourself enough. So let Me assure you that I absolutely adore you and EVERYTHING about you, exactly as you are, with no need to change anything, except that it would be nice if you acknowledge My existence so that I can feel better about showering My unconditional blank-check approval on you." Tina's cool with this, and she marries Bill in Chapter Forty.

Bill is never called to account for having utterly disregarded First Corinthians 6:14-17; and the reader fails to derive the important lesson that compassionate concern for a soul in darkness is not supposed to be the same thing as becoming emotionally DEPENDENT ON that unbelieving person WHILE he or she REMAINS in darkness. And girls being the chief readers of these novels, we get another generation of disastrously naive Christian girls who think they can marry a man who contradicts and mocks their faith, and somehow he'll spontaneously change after the wedding.

Even if I only get one post entered in February....

I want to display these haiku that I wrote for
my wife Janalee for Valentine's day:


Adult concerns, yet
Childlike pleasure in worship:
This is Janalee.

Seen at odd moments,
In the midst of dull routines,
Her beauty leaps out.

Like an Amazon,
Slaying monsters, she defeats
Depression, sometimes.

New glasses don't make
Her eyes lovelier; her eyes
Improve the glasses.

By necessity
She crosses the streams of pain
On stepping-stone pills.

As long as she still
Is able to stir a hand,
My hand will hold hers.