📖 Chapter 5: Co-Creating Love
(An Open and Relational View of Humanity, Marriage, and the Body)
What if your body wasn’t a battlefield?
What if marriage wasn’t a hierarchy?
What if your humanity wasn’t a problem God needed to solve—but a possibility God longed to explore with you?
In Chapter 5 of Flourish, I invite you to rethink what it means to be human, to love, and to share your body with others from an open and relational theological perspective. This isn’t just about affirming same-sex marriage or dismantling purity culture (though yes, we go there). It’s about reimagining the entire framework for how we understand people, partnership, and embodiment.
From the beginning, God doesn’t control Adam and Eve like puppets—they’re given real freedom, real risk, and real relational potential. That’s the pattern. God invites, responds, co-creates. And when it comes to human relationships—romantic, sexual, platonic, familial—that same relational dynamic applies.
So here’s the big claim of this chapter:
Bodies are good. Marriage isn’t a mold to fit into—it’s a covenant you co-create. And humanity isn’t fallen beyond repair—it’s still becoming, with God.
That means your desires aren’t shameful.
Your capacity to connect isn’t broken.
Your love isn’t counterfeit because it doesn’t fit someone else’s blueprint.
I explore how open and relational theology gives us a richer vision of consent, intimacy, mutuality, and sacred interdependence. It resists transactional love, power games, and imposed gender roles. Instead, it lifts up relationships as sites of creative love—spaces where God is present not in spite of your humanness, but because of it.
This chapter may stir up questions. It may also stir up hope.
Thanks for coming with me this far. Chapter 6 is where we say it loud and clear: God loves queer people. But before we go there, we need to claim this: God loves embodied people. Relational people. Messy, longing, becoming people.
People like us.
With love,
Michael
P.S. What stories have you been told about your body? About marriage? About what makes a relationship holy? I’d love to hear how you’re rewriting those stories—or holding space for something new.
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