I was SO blessed to be able to speak at my beloved Mission Covenant Church last Sunday! The topic was how cohabitation hurts women and children, but we focused on the why–WHY do women get involved in relationships they know are bad for themselves and their children, or stay in abusive, dysfunctional relationships that bear no resemblance to a 1 Corinthians 13 kind of love?

The answer, I suggest, lies in women’s idolatrous tendency to get their identity from their relationship with others, instead of from their relationship with God.

Some of you asked for a link to the sermon–you can listen to the streaming version here, or find it on Mission Covenant’s media page.  Unfortunately, this is the sermon from the last service, in which I blew right by the statistics about domestic abuse in cohabitating relationships–oops! (Suffice it to say, they’re not pretty.) But the Bella-Katniss continuum is there in living color, and that seems to be what people remember most from the message, anyway. 😀

Enjoy!

The Bella-Katniss Continuum

(Updated to add: Wrong! It was the message from the first service, and the stats are intact. Whew!)