The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 27 – Lisa Anderson

Episode 27: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews Lisa Anderson, the director of Young Adults for Focus on the Family. Anderson discusses her upbringing in a devout Christian home, her personal faith journey, and her work leading the Boundless ministry.

Anderson details the primary challenges facing young adults today, including navigating dating and singleness, finding authentic community, and engaging with divisive cultural issues from a biblical perspective. Anderson emphasizes that the core of her ministry is to equip young adults to trust God with their future, especially through seasons of suffering and uncertainty, drawing from her own personal experiences with chronic illness and prolonged singleness.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:00):
Thanks for tuning into the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Edifi, Spotify, Overdrive, Liftable and wherever you get your podcasts. Hey gang, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

Today I’m speaking with a friend of mine, the director of Young Adults for Focus on the Family, Lisa Anderson. She leads a podcast called The Boundless Show. She’s got a website called boundless.org, which you should check out. These resources help 20 and 30 somethings navigate life from issues including dating and marriage to finance and employment. Her show now has over 700 episodes and she speaks with such humor and with such honesty that I can’t wait for you to hear what we get to talk about. Lisa Anderson, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Lisa Anderson (01:01):
Hey, it is so great to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:03):
I am really looking forward to our visit. We’ve talked before on your show and you are an author. Because I’ve only done 25 episodes or something like that on my podcast, you’ve done 700 podcast episodes, which I think officially makes you a super podcaster. I don’t know if there’s a term for that, but maybe we could just make it up. And then your website, boundless.org that you operate as part of Focus on the Family, which I love. I have loved that website for a long time because you’re a voice speaking into now two generations of young adults.

And I can’t wait to talk about the lessons that you’ve learned, what are some of the key themes that you’re seeing that young adults need to pay attention to. And that’s a huge part of our audience, young adults who are in college, in their 20s, thinking about their purpose in life. A lot of people who are their parents as well, watching and listening to the show. But before we dive into all of that, Lisa, can you tell us a little about your growing up years?

Lisa Anderson (02:03):
Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say, when you were talking about lessons learned, I was like, I think I’m still learning some of those. I don’t know. I don’t know that I’ve arrived. So we’ll see how that plays out, but you want me on your show as a result. No. So growing up, I actually am the youngest of six kids. If you could be fully churchified, I’m like super churchified.

My parents were missionaries before I was born in the Philippines and all my siblings grew up there. And then I was born after they came back and then my dad was a pastor and all of this. And I really, I mean, I have to say, and I feel like not many say this enough, but my family, my parents were great in the sense of, they gave me a Christian heritage that they lived out at home and in the public square.

(02:55):
And so I feel like there was a lot of integrity there. There was a lot of weirdness too that they just kind of embraced. So I kind of grew up, a lot of people would call it legalism, of like, “Man, when I grew up, you didn’t drink, you didn’t dance, you didn’t play cards, except maybe UNO if you got those cleared.” But that’s just kind of like how my parents were. That’s kind of what they’d inherited.

And so it wasn’t like a weird affectation of some type of false righteousness. That’s just truly what they believed. And they loved the Lord and they served the Lord. And I actually went kind of in tandem with that. I probably should have come to Summit, quite frankly, because in tandem with that, I was starting to worship success throughout school, junior high, high school. I was very successful in school.

(03:52):
There were definitely things that I could rock out and there were other subjects I knew I was not good at, so I stayed away from those. But I kind of wanted to be something and someone and make my mark. And so I really pursued a lot of stuff. I thought I determined at a pretty young age that I was going to go to Yale. And so I kind of worked towards that end, including taking calculus, which I had no business taking as a high schooler.

And so, I mean, I’m a liberal arts person all the way. So anyway, it was really interesting because I went through the Yale application process and made it almost all the way. And the one thing they wanted me to redo was take the math portion of the SAT. And for a series of circumstances, I was unable to. And so I was wait listed and ended up not going to Yale.

(04:39):
So I went to a Christian university and I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll give that a year and then I’ll transfer to somewhere more legit.” But it was there that through largely the influence of my roommate, and I would say this wasn’t like, again, I wasn’t like off the rails. I was kind of appalled. I was pretty much an apologist at my huge public high school in California.

That’s where I grew up, but just kind of like, what does it look like to take my faith for my own and get out from under my parents’ spiritual shadow and parroting all the things that I’d been taught without necessarily taking them to heart. And so her example of steadfast faith of getting up every morning, I would wake up and see her already in our nasty dorm room recliner, reading her Bible, praying. She loved people, she loved serving.

(05:32):
And for me, I credit her example to really making me, forcing me to say, “What is my faith on a Tuesday? What does this look like? Who is Jesus to me? Do I really trust him with my life, with my future, with my success, whatever I’m defining that as?” And thus began the course of the rest of my life, which, my 20s, I mean, we can talk about that a little bit coming up, but goodness, they were kind of a wasteland, Jeff. So it’s not like I said, “Okay, God, now I’m all in.” And then he blessed me with some amazing path that was clear cut because that didn’t happen. So maybe I’m an encouragement to the young adults out there who feel the same.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:11):
I know a lot. A lot of young people are struggling and a lot of them have told me they grew up in a fundamentalist environment. Is that how you would describe, is that the term?

Lisa Anderson (06:23):
Yeah, a little bit just in that, yeah. I mean, I would say my folks were very like, “This is just what we do.” And there were kind of some elements of we need to be good Christians, but again, it was like they kind of meant it. I don’t think they were just trying to people please. So it was a weird tension because, I’m going to out my brother here. So my brother was always the compliant one and I was always the in my parents’ face. I know you find that shocking. So my brother would do all the right things at home and then go sneaking around and go to Ozzy Osbourne concerts and stuff. He’s older than I am.

And then I was the one who was the good kid, but then I was up in my dad’s face like, “Dad, this is why that’s wrong and why your logic is completely flawed here.” And then I would get that, “Oh, why can’t you be more like your brother? He’s so good.” And then I was just mad. So my parents didn’t have Dr. Dobson and the arsenal of focus resources that are now available to parents. So they just muddled through and we all turned out relatively okay by the grace of God.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:30):
Well, a lot of young people don’t. And they’re telling me that they aren’t turning out well because they sort of blame that fundamentalist upbringing. It’s almost like they’re just spending most of their lives running away from it. What was different in your case?

Lisa Anderson (07:47):
Yeah, I think for me, it was seeing the way that my parents treated people, the way that they trusted God. And I often say that here at Boundless, we take a generation of young adults that, or, kind of, to put it crassly, I say we kind of clean up from what a generation of parents and churches didn’t do and largely parents.

So my generation, I’m on the tail end of Gen X and then now millennials and Gen Z. My generation, it was all about like, you just get your kids in youth group and as long as they’re in youth group, they’re going to learn about the Bible and they’re going to turn out okay. And so parents kind of scuttled their kids off there, but at home there was no reflection of, how does the Bible intersect with our life on a daily basis when we can’t pay the bills, when we’re faced with an ethical dilemma at work?

(08:43):
And so kids didn’t see their parents living out their faith in the way that like when the rubber hits the road, this is what it looks like to trust God. And I feel like my parents really did. I grew up quite poor as, being the child of missionaries, that accomplishes that pretty quickly, but quite poor. My parents often trusted God for our next grocery bill, and yet they served and they loved God and they trusted God and they prayed for us.

I mean, I still remember I have an older sister who went off the rails for a while. I remember coming home in the evenings and seeing my dad kneeling in his study, praying for her. And so that example of, this is where our dependence lies. This is all we have. We can’t rely on the American dream. We can’t rely on a bunch of sexy theological premises or meme theology or gifts on our social media followers that so many are going to now.

(09:48):
And I think that made a big impact on me because like I said, where I’m seeing a lot of our young adults today is just kind of this, what does it mean? It’s kind of the most popular people, the funniest people, the outliers are getting all the attention even within the church.

And they’re having a hard time saying, and I can say this now because now I’m old, Jeff, compared to our audience, there’s a lot that if it were not for Christ, I wouldn’t have made it here. I’ve lost both my parents now. I am single and never thought I’d be single this long. So there’s a lot that as life goes on, you trust God or you implode. And so I’ve had to walk that out and I feel like my parents set a great example in that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:40):
And you continue to set a great example for your readers at boundless.org. I’ve always appreciated the website for being unflinching and dealing with really tough issues, the real things that Christian young adults face. And I really like, what I especially appreciated about it is that each of the articles helps build the plausibility of a biblical worldview.

Because even if somebody says it’s not, I’m not sure if it’s true or not, and I can find a hundred explanations, reasons why it would be true, and I can be very logical about it, but my friends don’t find it plausible, then I don’t embrace it. I see a lot of that thinking, and you really address that specifically. So anyway, I hope that one result of this show is that a lot of people will check out boundless.org.

Lisa Anderson (11:36):
Well, and it’s really our privilege to do that, Jeff, because I say there’s a lot of great things that have been written. I mean, first of all, let’s be honest, beginning in scripture about what it means to understand God’s plan for humanity and how to walk that out. But we like to say that we take what we know and what is true, absolutely true, and then we just apply it to those everyday circumstances. And that’s what we’re trying to help young adults walk out.

So we have got, I talked about myself being super churchified, but Jeff, in our audience, we’ve got those hardcore Christians and they’re going to be podcasting every sermon out there and they read their Bibles and they’re loving Jesus. And then we kind of have that middle crowd that’s like, they’re probably going to a mega church, they’re probably in a small group, but they’re living with their girlfriend.

(12:27):
And for them, there is no difference. There’s not a disconnect with that. They don’t understand like, “Oh, I might need to reframe this through scripture and through an application of sin and grace and what does that look like?” And then we have folks in our audience who aren’t believers at all. And so we’re trying to just give a word for everyone and say, “Hey, let’s grapple with this a little bit because you’re going to meet up with this in the middle of your week, probably in the context of a conversation with a coworker or whatever, and you need to figure out, what does this look like to walk it out?”

And so it’s very much, I jokingly said, especially in the last year or year and a half now, man, I just wish that we could get back. We could do an innocuous dating article because we have in the past year dealt with everything from, I mean, beginning at the start of the year, we hit the pandemic and isolation as single young adults, George Floyd and CRT, then we went into Pride Month, then we had to gear up for the election, then we had cancel culture, and then we had the Capitol riots.

(13:32):
And so we have not, there’s been so many issues that we’ve had to grapple with because just our audience is in the middle of it and that’s where they need to be and they need some guidance along the way.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:45):
Well, you’re a guiding friend and advisor to them, you’re a mentor, long distance to them. Can you give us an example? So let’s say an issue comes up, we’ll use cohabitation as an example because you brought that up, but how do you approach it? I know you have certain questions that you ask or a certain sort of framework. Okay, if we’re going to seek an answer to this, we start with questions A, B, C. Can you walk us through that because that might be helpful. And we face 10 things every day that there’s no boundless.org article for. Help us learn to think that way.

Lisa Anderson (14:26):
Sure. Yeah. We tend to begin with an approach of like, what does the individual or what, in our case, because we’re talking to a bunch of people at once, on average, how is the average person going to approach this issue? Like what are the questions they’re going to be asking? What space are they going to be in? How are they going to be thinking about this? And we can’t be assumptive that everyone, say with cohabitation, is going to be like, “Oh my goodness, that is sin, that is wrong. I need to wait until marriage to have sex and to live with someone,” and whatever.

Because some will absolutely believe that. Some will believe that, but they just think it’s entirely impractical. And some will be like, “I think this is outdated. I’m not sure that scripture says this.” And so you realize you have to think to yourself, my goal at Boundless really, I mean, people think like, is Boundless just about helping people date well and get married or helping them learn how to find a job and whatever.

(15:29):
And I’m like, practically there’s a lot of that, but really our goal at Boundless is to equip our audience to read the Bible for themselves, understand it and apply it. And so because again, if they don’t know who God is and who God says they are, everything we have to offer is just tips and tactics. There is nothing unique about it without the power of the Holy Spirit and the transformative nature of the gospel. And so that’s where I’m trying to head with folks in that direction.

And so getting back to cohabitation, it’s like, let’s start from that framework and then let’s start asking questions. Because I spoke a few years ago to the convenience issue, I spoke in Hong Kong to a large group of single young adults. I mean, Jeff, for there, people are dropping 4, $5,000 a month on an apartment that is about 400 square feet.

(16:22):
So they’re like, “Of course I’m going to live with my boyfriend or girlfriend because that’s just good stewardship.” They’re going to spiritualize it. And so it’s like, okay, there’s an element of stewardship that I can understand where they’re coming from, but there’s also a lot of fear wrapped up in that question of like, what if I can’t make ends meet? Or what if I step out and I try to trust God in this and I end up not having the ability to find an apartment or find someone, a same gender roommate that will live with me.

And so it’s kind of getting to the core of those questions and then saying and kind of almost being cash about it, like including them in the conversation rather than saying, “I hope you all know that cohabitation is a sin and you better just stop it.” Especially with younger generations, to exclude them from the conversation and from wrestling with that on their own is a bad move because they’ve got to come to these conclusions and convictions, quite frankly, by themselves.

(17:23):
And so seeding those questions, putting it out there, but also kind of being willing to say a few things straight up, because a lot of times they can’t, if they don’t have a strong biblical background, they’re not going to put two and two together. And so saying a few things and then saying, “Okay, what do you believe about the Bible? What do you believe about God? Do you really trust God enough with your future to say that you can maybe lay this down for right now and then let them kind of wrestle with that?” Another great example of this is, I’ve often used the example.

I heard John Piper say once that he was speaking on the topic of premarital sex and a guy came up to him afterwards and he said, “Dr. Piper, I’m 25 years old and I am a virgin. I am giving God until I am 30 to find me a wife, otherwise all bets are off because I cannot go into my 30s not having had sex.”

And I thought as Dr. Piper relayed that, I thought to myself, “First of all, who says that to John Piper,” because you know you’re going to get reamed. But secondly, it’s a question that makes sense because at its core, what he was saying was, “I am afraid that if I give God my future, God won’t handle it correctly or God won’t handle it gently or God won’t show up for me.”

(18:45):
And so again, what we primarily say at Boundless, whether it’s about gender dysphoria or cohabitation or any of the issues that are out there, we say, “Are you willing to lay your life down and trust God with your future knowing that you don’t know where he’s going to go with that, but you know that he’s good and he is sovereign and he’s got your back.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:08):
Lisa, as you’re mentioning that, I’m thinking of Dr. Larry Crabb, who recently passed away and during a very difficult season, I read a book on suffering from him. And I think I wish I could remember word for word the opening page, but it says something like, “God is not waiting to bless you at the end of your pain. He is blessing you now in the middle of your suffering.” But that is a very hard thing for a young person to hear when it doesn’t seem like when they’re looking at the social media pages of their friends, that other people are similarly suffering.

I mean, this is something that you address in some of your writing, the sort of the Hollywoodization of sex and romance, that it’s made to appear that a biblical conviction just doesn’t make any sense. It’s guaranteeing that you will be unhappy when everyone around you is happy. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

Lisa Anderson (20:19):
Well, and a lot of that, I mean, you kind of just said it, Jeff, is this idea of where in scripture does God promise us that we’re going to be happy? I mean, so first of all, that is just a heresy of the world and now the church that God’s number one goal is to just make us all comfortable. I don’t think that was the case for any of the apostles, again, for Christians throughout the centuries in the church.

And so it’s this shortsighted view of faith and of our whole purpose and really of our identity. Because I often say, we even talk at Boundless about death and about what 20 something is thinking about death, not many, but we say how we’re already living immortal lives. We will spend eternity somewhere. What is that going to look like? And so we can’t be shortsighted in looking towards our futures.

(21:16):
And so for me, it’s kind of crafting that conversation. And I think that’s why it’s helpful that I’m a few steps ahead of our audience, because I’m able to say, “Here’s what it looked like for me when my dad died. Here’s what it looked like for me when my mom died. Here’s what it looked like when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis for which there’s no cure. Here’s what it looked like when I took my mom in for two and a half years with dementia and was her caregiver.”

And I’m like, this wasn’t a season, Jeff, when because I have such a generation gap with my parents, none of my peers were dealing with that. Their parents were healthy and great, and here I was a caregiver. And so thinking that through and saying, “Wow, what has God promised us?” God has promised us for those that are his, what I’ve heard referred to as, from our perspective, it’s like the cosmic lottery of plucking us out of our own sin and setting us on a course that ultimately is perfect relationship with him.

(22:19):
Now, how that plays out, there’s a lot of sanctification in there and there’s going to be a lot of messiness, but the end result and the end goal is so amazing that are we willing to give up in all these little skirmishes that we talk about here on earth, whether they’re self-inflicted or they’re what people have done to us or it’s, what does that look like for us?

How are we going to walk this road out trusting that God is good, that we are his kids, that he, I mean, again, the two tandem things that I mentioned of, if you don’t truly believe that God is absolutely in control and he absolutely has your best interests at heart, you cannot survive this life with any source of hope or any sense of hope. And I think for the Christian, that’s where the true gift comes is that we have the ability to say whatever God wills.

(23:16):
I mean, and I’m not saying that in a Pollyanna-ish way, I’m saying that in a way that is like, we have got to have that ironclad hope that because of God’s love for us, because he has chosen us, because he loves us, we can have supreme confidence in who he is and in the path that he’s set before us. And so if that is, and again, and he gives us grace for the moment that we’re in it. He doesn’t give it to us for three weeks ahead of time like, “Oh, prep for this. Something bad’s going to come.”

But I was just talking about this with my friend recently. One of my dearest friends might be in the process of, looks like she might give a kidney to my sister who needs a kidney. And we were having this conversation because when she told me this, I was a little bit, it’s like I want my sister to have a kidney, but I don’t want my best friend to have to give it up.

(24:13):
I want to control this story. And what that taught me is first of all, I’m a control freak and that plays out in many areas of my life. And I say, “Oh, I trust God and whatever.” And then I’m over here trying to manipulate everything that’s going on. But she said to me, “Lisa,” because I’m like, “Well, isn’t that going to compromise you and oh my goodness and why?”

And it just brought up a lot of stuff and she said, “Lisa, if I wake up tomorrow, I mean, I could not have a kidney or I could wake up tomorrow and end up by the end of the day having a cancer diagnosis.” Either way, God is not shocked by that and I need to be okay that he will equip me with what I need for walking out that story and that applies to the big things, the little things and everything in between.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:59):
And it especially is meaningful to me that you’ve walked through that path of physical suffering and are able to say that because my experience is I’m just on the recovery side of a cancer battle and boy, it compresses your timeframe, doesn’t it? Absolutely. When you realize, I don’t know what’s going to happen six months from now, but there’s God saying to us through.

Passages like Lamentations 3:22 and 23, that his mercies are new every morning, there he is saying, “We’re not doing six months. We’re doing today, so I’m going to show my mercies anew today.” And it’s different than this sees the day mindset, isn’t it? It’s living this day in the light of eternity, not just sort of waiting until I go to heaven to experience eternity.

Lisa Anderson (25:55):
Yeah. Well, and I think it’s so much because, again, this is where I easily see my flawed thinking because for me, I every day want to make the story about me. I want to make myself the central character. I want to make everything around me have to conform to exactly what I think I should be doing. And I think whether it’s me, when I first got my RA diagnosis, I went through.

I was undertreated for about the first three years and I had days where, and here I was in my late 20s, Jeff, when I got my diagnosis, I had days where I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t move. And here my doctor told me, “Well, this is a chronic disease. There’s no cure for it. We’re not close to a cure.” And many people do die early of this. And I was like, “You’re like the worst bedside manner ever.” So anyway, that was the diagnosis I got.

(26:45):
And I think, but in light of that, or even in light of your story, thinking that God is not saying, “The only way I can accomplish my purposes is if I give Jeff or Lisa X number of days and they’re just rocking it out and they’re doing…” He’s not limited by time or by our stories.

And so we think we want to be the main players and be like, “Lord, I’ve got a good 40, 50 years left for you. So keep me in the game and be,” and that may be the case, God and he may have me limping across the finish line, but he’s already got all that worked out and all I have to do is watch it unfold and be open-handed with it because I can’t say, “I’m so important to the kingdom or I’m so important to God’s purposes that, oh, he better keep me.”

(27:35):
He better use me. It might be exactly that I need to, whatever, Lord willing, I need to die in some crazy way because there is someone out there that God is going to bring to himself through that experience and through that story. And I just don’t know what that is. But again, keeping a longer eternal perspective, I can be okay with that because at some point we’re all going to be sitting around the throne being like, “That’s pretty cool how that played out. That’s pretty cool.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:04):
I see a lot of young adults and the producer and I were talking a little bit ago, just young adults who are so fearful right now, they’re dealing with COVID and it seems like they’re instinct, and maybe this is just cultural, is to sort of bargain with God. Like, “God, I know I’m your little fur baby and I have come every time that you have called me and I have not peed on the carpet for eight months and so you owe me something.” That fear kind of response, but that begins to go away when you’re living like you’re describing right now.

Lisa Anderson (28:40):
Yeah, it does. But it’s hard again, until life really starts hitting you and you start getting knocked down, it’s hard to frame your life in that perspective because we’re all, I don’t care if we’re 21 or we’re 71, we’re all trying to trend towards comfort. We all want to make our situations easier. We want no one’s out there running into tragedy or running in. They’re like, “Bring it on, Lord, this is what I want.”

But yet there is a lot for young adults right now to be discouraged by, and I’m hearing it. I mean, again, this is a generation that in the digital age has lost a sense of true community. They are, in fact, my intern, I remember my intern last summer talking about, because here we had a precious thing. She shows up for an internship and we’re like, “So anyway, just go to your host home and work all summer from there.”

(29:37):
“We’re probably not going to see you.” And she’s like, “Yeah.” She said, “I was talking with some of my friends about this and I’m like, if the millennials are the entitled/digital generation or whatever, what are we going to be? Just the masked generation?” And that was all that she had to offer up as far as their collection, active experience in what this looked like.

And of course, now we’re seeing many in our audience who have been furloughed from their jobs or they have had to move to another state in order to find work or readjust their educational goals. And so they’re kind of like, I couldn’t even find community as it was. Now I don’t have a job. Now my dreams or whatever my plan for the future is kind of on hold. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing. And so they’re a little bit at sea.

(30:30):
And then they have their parents, boomers or older Xers telling them, “It’s okay, just believe in the American dream. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” And they’re like, “That is not working for me. That’s not where I am.” And so I think the discouragement is high. I mean, you know that rates of anxiety and depression among 20 and 30 somethings are more than any other generation right now.

So again, that is a situation that is an emotional abyss that can only be met with the gospel and with community and people coming around them and saying, “We’ve got something better for you. We’ve got something that will last. We’ve got something that can give you hope. And don’t take the cues from the culture around you.” I’ve done a lot recently, Jeff, on just the division in our country, the division within the church, what we’re seeing, the backbiting, the infighting, all of that.

(31:33):
And they’re like, “If this is how the church acts, do I really need the church? Shouldn’t I just grab my best friends and go sit around a campfire somewhere up in the mountains and do life with them?” And we have to say, “No, there’s a better way. You’re going to have to push through and you’re going to have to lead the way in this because it’s not going to be handed to you.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:53):
Good words. As you think this through with the 700 podcasts that you’ve done, the number of years on boundless.org, are there any themes that seem to always come up with young people regardless of the generation?

Lisa Anderson (32:12):
Yes. So from a practical standpoint, and this is actually a little bit how Boundless was birthed because we actually started out as a web zine, believe it or not, if anyone even knows what that is, back from the ’90s, a web zine for college students specifically on how to navigate worldview in college as they were being faced with the onslaught of competing worldviews.

But then as our audience aged out of college and into the working world and all that, well, then they realized, oh my goodness, well, I thought I would be married by now and why am I not? Or why am I dating only losers? Or why can I not have a normal conversation with my parents? They won’t let go of me. They’re still treating me like a kid. So I would say the big themes are, obviously, and this has become boundless is kind of bread and butter, what we’re known for is the space of dating and relationships.

(33:10):
So I’m hopeful for marriage. I feel like I’m going to get married at some point, but it hasn’t happened. And I have, for example, I’ll speak on a college campus. I’ll have a precious 20-year-old young woman come up to me in tears saying, “I paid good money for a Christian education and I’m graduating this year and I’m still single.”

(33:36):
“Why didn’t I get what I paid for here? I thought I was supposed to meet a great godly guy.” And so there’s that assumption. And then they enter into the workspace after that or churches where churches are not programmed for single young adults. They’re largely programmed for families. And so it’s hard there. So I would say the whole relationship piece is big. In tandem with the dating and marriage prep stuff, of late, the whole issue of friendship has been huge for us.

Because again, if the average young adult is not going to marry until they’re around 30 at this point, they’re like, “I need some real relationships.” And we’ll straight up get questions from people that are like, “Lisa, how do I find friends? How do I make friends? How do I keep friends? And how do I go deeper with friends?” Because this fakeness is not enough for them.

(34:30):
The social media nonsense is not enough, especially now for Gen Z. They’re over it. And so that’s a huge theme for us, as well as themes around what does it look like to navigate singleness with joy, with purpose, how do I not treat it as a second class status? And then the whole slew of cultural issues that are out there. How do I even navigate this space and have conversations where I can love people, whether they’re family members, coworkers, neighbors, but still hold true to the truths of scripture.

A great example of that conversation we just had over the summer was during Pride Month. And I really came up with this conversation largely birthed out of what I was seeing among my friends on social media. And Jeff, when I say this, I’m talking about friends who went to my Christian college. I’m talking about people from my church.

(35:25):
I mean, I’m not talking to people that are way out there or not saved. They would have rainbow profile pictures on their Facebook or their Instagram. They would be hashtag happy pride. And it just got me thinking like, I know that these people want to love their LGBTQ neighbor. I know that that’s where they’re coming from, but do they not understand, again, what does that mean? Is a rainbow profile picture going to solve that? Is that going to show true love to your neighbor?

And so entering into that space and having the conversation around what does it look like to truly speak the truth, but backfill it with love and be in relationship with people who are made in the image of God, but still being able to call out sin, any kind of sin, my sin, their sin, whatever, and call it for what it is and say, “We’re all called to at the feet of Jesus lay down our sin.” And he will love you where you are, but he will not leave you where you are. And so you better be ready for a change in that sense.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:32):
Wow. Well, I know you’ve got articles on all of these things and podcast episodes where you’ve talked through all of this specifically. So I think a lot of people listening to our conversation are going to want to go there. Can you tell us a little about, you wrote a book called The Dating Manifesto, speaking of the issue of finding love. And I would be curious if you could just give us just a little bit of some of what you learned as you were writing that book.

Lisa Anderson (37:01):
Yeah. So first of all, the summary, when people ask me, why’d you write this book? I say, “This is the book that I wish I would’ve had in my 20s. It’s everything I wish I would’ve been told about dating and navigating singleness in my 20s, but I got total crickets from the church.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:20):
Wow.

Lisa Anderson (37:20):
So who I didn’t get crickets from was my public school in high school from my friends because like I alluded to going to the public schools in California, what I heard was, “Girl, no one is going to take care of you.” So you go out, you get your education, you start your career, you become successful, and then in the future on your terms, you can tack on a little marriage if you want, but only do it on your timetable and when it’s right for you.

And I was a believer, so I’m not going to be like, “Oh my goodness, that sounds so amazing.” I didn’t buy it hook, line, and sinker, but it definitely influenced me in the sense of because the church was so assumptive about marriage and the path to marriage, I kind of just sat back and made marriage my plan C kind of.

(38:08):
So it was like all this other stuff I have to work at, but then marriage, I’m going to just sit in a Starbucks and lock eyes across the Starbucks with someone at some point and he’s going to be super godly and most likely a billionaire and then it’s going to be awesome. Okay. So that was how it was going to play out for me in my head.

And so really for me, I kind of use myself in this book as a little bit of a cautionary tale where it’s like the front end of the dating manifesto is a kick in the pants for the younger Christian adult who’s like, “Oh, I’ve got all the time in the world. This is going to happen. I’ve watched all the appropriate rom-coms that are going to tell me how this plays out in an hour and a half.” And so it’s a little bit like really talking through the intentionality needed towards marriage and towards singleness and towards dating.

(39:02):
And so the fact that you don’t wait for it to hit you like the flu, you don’t assume that like, “Oh my goodness, everyone out there, someone amazing will be handed on a silver platter.” And so I have a lot of like straight up instructions really on the front end of that book, even to the point where there’s some stuff that’s so simplistic because it’s again, generations that have not been told.

So for example, there is a section of the book where I talk about breakups, Jeff, where I actually script out for a woman how to turn down a guy for a date, whether it’s a first date or a second date, because women don’t know how to do that. They don’t because they want to be nice. And so they’re going to say something lame like, “Well, maybe I just want to date Jesus,” or “I’m just trying to work on myself.” And really what they’re trying to say is, “I have no interest in you whatsoever and I would appreciate you never asking me out again.” But they can’t.

(40:04):
So I’m like, “Okay, here’s how you say it. Let’s work on this.” So there’s an element of that. And then the second half of the book is for the person, maybe a little bit older who said, “Lisa, I’ve tried it all. I’ve tried dating, I’ve tried waiting, I’ve tried trusting God, and nothing’s working for me and I’m super discouraged. Has God forgotten me? Does he not care about single people?”

And so that part of the book is my arm on their shoulder saying, “Look, I’m there too. I thought I would be married by now and I’m not. I thought that this was going to be a story that God would give me. ” And to just say, in fact, I have an entire chapter in the book on grieving singleness because I think not enough people do that well to say, I had to tell myself, I wasn’t married in my 20s and I had to grieve that.

(40:58):
And then I wasn’t married in my 30s and I had to grieve that because that was just a factual reality that those decades passed me by. And now I say my 20s, I guess I blamed it on myself because I was just out and about and not caring about marriage. My 30s, I ended up just blaming it on men because I ended up getting all these weird guys in my life that I dated and whatever and passivity and everything else we can yell about.

And then I said, “Well, now in my 40s, I guess I just blame God because there’s not anyone left to blame.” So I suppose he could take it, but walking through the grief of singleness and then also the gift of singleness, what God does with our singleness and the fact that it is not a plan B, it’s not a waiting room for marriage.

(41:42):
It’s not like let’s just live hedonistic lifestyles and then when we get married, we have to start sacrificing and reading all the Gary Thomas books and being super spiritual. But we’re all called as believers to sacrifice. And so what does it look like to do that in your 20s and beyond and to live others focused and God focused. And so in fact, my final chapter is on the sovereignty of God and how God truly has a plan and a purpose. And your unique part in that story is exactly what God wants you to walk out and can you do that with joy and with hope.

And so, and in it, there are just a lot of wacky stories of my own experiences and what to do, what not to do, how to stay encouraged through the process. So it’s actually the only book, I think, Jeff, I tell this, that it’s the only book for which the advice has not worked for the author personally, but I hear from many others who say, “Oh my goodness, I’m so glad I read your book. It just helped me to get out of an abusive relationship or stop just dating a string of guys that go nowhere relationships.” Or, “It allowed me to trust God with my singleness.” And so that’s time well spent then.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:01):
Well, your vulnerability means so much because you’re addressing the things that are really in the heart in a conversation, especially in conflict, it’s never about what it’s about. So you’re addressing those deeper things. Lisa, as we get ready to close, are there things that when you get up in the morning that you remind yourself of every day that may really be an encouragement to young adults who are watching or listening to the show right now?

Lisa Anderson (43:35):
I do. And it’s so funny because we’re so, I think as Christians, especially people that have been Christians for a long time, we get so self-righteous and we think, “I’ve gone to church for so long and I’ve read the Bible for so long that I need to act more mature or maybe I should spout off a little more theology or get into random obscure doctrinal commentaries.”

And we’re so about living, and of course, this is mostly like us Westerners, Eastern Christians, I think do this better, but we’re all about let’s just stay in our heads and be super smarty pants and just try to strong arm everyone into the kingdom. And that never worked for me. I remember I had a friend, I was in this group here in town that was people from all different worldviews and we would have conversations and I was the only Christian in my group.

(44:32):
And not long after my dad died, one of the ladies in the group said, “Lisa, when your dad died, I just sensed such a peace about you and I just couldn’t even believe it. And I’ve never seen anyone respond to death in that way. And I’m wondering, would you be willing to do lunch sometime and just talk to me about that?” Okay. You would think that I would say, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing. This is an open door. Praise the Lord. He’s just using me, whatever.”

No, my first thought was, seriously, I have articulated the gospel to this woman at least three times with very compelling illustrations and humor. And here I was arguing with God that my super sensible, fun, put together presentation of the gospel wasn’t what he chose to use. And so I think to myself, just backing up, every day, I am becoming more aware of the fact that I am a child of God who was plucked out of my own sin, out of my own selfishness, out of obscurity that, I mean, just that alone is like, end of story.

(45:42):
Do I even need to talk about anything else because my whole future is set and is secure. And so it’s almost childlike to have to wake up now every day and remind myself of that because I want to rest on all the things I know or the things I’ve done or the pedigree of Christians I’ve been associated with. None of that matters to the Lord Jesus Christ. What matters is that I’m sitting at his feet and that I am taking direction from him and that I am looking towards his face and loving him and leaning into him and others, those that he puts into my path. And so I think that’s something I have to remind myself of every day on a more personal personality level.

The other thing I have to remember every day, and this may apply to some people or everyone or whatever, is as someone who now for 13 years has hosted a podcast with an international audience, as someone who is stuck in the throes of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and did I post that picture and blah, blah, blah, getting out of the nonsense of competitiveness and just comparison.

(47:01):
And I’ll never forget, I think it was Beth Moore when I heard her speaking one time, talked about, and she was talking specifically about women leaders, what it looks like to consciously every day, push and pray other people forward. If someone is doing good ministry, if someone is loving other people, if someone has a message that needs to get out, what am I doing to help facilitate that?

And as someone who has a platform for that, I constantly want to be reminding myself to step back, to give others that voice, to elevate Jesus Christ in the process, because again, he’s the star and to realize that, I don’t need to worry about my followers or how much influence do we have or am I an outlier or not?

And so that’s just another thing. Those two things, again, reminding myself of my position in the kingdom of God and in the family of God. And then how does that play out when the world is trying to tell me to be so important and so successful, and that is not what the end game is. So I need to stay away from that as much as possible.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:04):
Lisa, thank you. This has been a delightful conversation. I’m so grateful for your coming on the show today.

Lisa Anderson (48:09):
Well, this has been a blast and I just love what you guys do there. And I’m so glad we’re in the same town and that we have the chance to connect. And so likewise, Jeff, thank you for the great work that you do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:19):
Thank you. Special thank you to my guest, Lisa Anderson, for coming on the Dr. Jeff Show today. You can find her on Twitter @LisaCanderson, her ministry, Boundless, at boundless.org and the Boundless podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’re in the dating phase of life, you might also find her book, The Dating Manifesto, really helpful. You can find that wherever books are sold. We hope that you can benefit from Lisa’s boundless insights as you explore your future in Jesus’ name.

And listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share this show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review, if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

(49:29):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.