date night.

Like most trendy newlyweds of the 21st century, my husband and I schedule a weekly date night where we set aside an evening to spend some quality non-school-related time together. It's usually Friday night, when we're both pretty tired and burnt out (well, more so him... although I do clean the house on Fridays which generally exhausts me which probably means I should exercise more). We do a variety of things, ranging from $1 sundaes at McDonalds to Scrabble at Starbucks (free refills!) to whatever super cheap things we can get our hands on.

This past Friday neither of us felt up to leaving the house, so we planned on an evening of catching up on some of our favourite tv shows. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened, but we instead found ourselves watching a debate that had been posted online. The subject was "Does God Exist?" and the participants were Joe Boot, a well-known Canadian/English Christian apologist, and Christopher DiCarlo, who in 2008 was announced to be Canada's Humanist of the Year. The debate was long -- made longer by the breaks we took to take apart diCarlo's lousy arguments and to scoff at his sad attempts to appeal to the audience with sixth grade humour. Like my husband said, I'd have been ashamed to be an atheist.

Then I thought 2 things:

1) When I was 16 and dreaming of true love and Gilbert Blythe-esque dates I never pictured myself sitting on a couch beside my husband at 10pm on a Friday night picking apart philosophical and logical fallacies while eating stale tortilla chips. All this was made weirder by the fact that our neighbours, whom we had over for dinner the following night, had also spent their date night watching a Joe Boot debate online. We are super seminaryish.

2) I probably shouldn't approach debate-watching with a vengeful, vitriolic attitude, because that absolutely goes against how I'm supposed to act as a Christian. It's easy to see DiCarlo as the arrogant, all-knowing enemy and secretly hope that "our guy" totally destroys his arguments. But that's not how we should be looking at things... instead, we should view these events as opportunities to get the gospel out there -- to get people into a place where they'll hear the good news. One may even hope and pray that the "other guy" will feel convicted and experience a heart change... not hope and pray that he gets flummoxed and embarrassed and totally flattened so that us Christians look good.

It's so easy to think of ourselves as the smart people who have it all figured out. We don't. We ourselves would be in Chris DiCarlo's position if it weren't for the beautiful grace of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only good guy out there. Remember that.

Chris,

Joe,

Gilbert,

Jesus! The Good Guy.