The Book Stop Blog is featuring excerpts from chapter 1 of The Whole Guy Thing: What Every Girl Needs to Know about Crushes, Friendship, Relating, and Dating by Nancy Rue and available from Zondervan.

The Whole Guy Thing by Nancy Rue

What do you do when you talk to God? You can journal your thoughts — unless the idea of writing page after page makes you want to scale the nearest wall, in which case you might draw what you’re feeling and thinking as you pray, or go for a run and pray, or make lists, or shoot baskets and pray. Anything to keep your focus so you can really get it out there where you and God can take a serious look at it.

Study the Scripture we’ll talk about in this book. Read it as if God is talking directly to you in the context of what you’re going through. Stop when something speaks to you and write it down

(draw it, etc.) and keep it where you can go over it again. And again. And did I mention again?

Just in case you’re thinking, “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve been married for a million years!”, let’s look at what one of your own kind commented one day on the blog:

“Something that’s really struck me recently is the verse: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ (Matthew 22:37). Everything in our lives should be focused on God. If we are fully loving God with everything we have and everything we are, then all our other priorities will just swish into place. This is a pretty hard concept for me to accept, because one of my weakest points is how I can get so crazy about a guy. The more I think about it though, the more it makes sense. Everything will fall into its proper place in our life, even a guy, if we put God as number one.”

I love the idea of priorities “swishing into place.” It’s not about guilt. (“I’m a horrible person because I thought about the guy holding my hand instead of the prayer we were saying.”) It’s not about shame. (“I can’t even talk to God now because I daydream about my crush instead of reading the Bible.”) It’s not about being so godly that guys never enter your mind. (“If I really want to be a God-follower, I have to ignore half the people God created.”) It’s about being so hungry for God in your life that you set aside time to feast with God every day so you’re filled with the Spirit as you go out into that world, where guys are so everywhere you’re practically tripping over them. Not noticing them, not thinking about them, not wanting to be accepted by them is a pretty ridiculous goal. The real goal is to be aware that God is there, helping you keep it all in perspective. You only know that by loving God
with everything you have.

And that’s the truth.

The Twitter Version

If you develop a close relationship with God, you’re going to know God’s there in everything you face. Including guys. Especially guys.

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