discovery

Hey guys. Sorry I’ve been absent for a while in writing to this blog. I’ve discovered that there is a lot of me that I need to work on, and it has taken some time to collect my thoughts into a message for you.

I’ve been reading a book called Wild at Heart by John Eldredge and it is mind-altering stuff. I have discovered that the things I have gone through in the past 10 years are a response to me neglecting who I was created to be. God created me to be a man who would live an adventure, fight battles with confidence, and find a beauty to rescue (I am paraphrasing the Eldredge book). I think the only one of those three that I truly understood before starting to read Wild at Heart was that I have a desire to rescue a beauty. In other words, I have known that I needed a woman in my life to share my life with, and I strongly believe that I have found her, and her name is Jenny. However, my life to this point is a wreck of self-degradation. I have always lacked confidence in me and I often have thought very little of myself. This is my heart wound, my deepest flaw, and with it comes the message that I do not have what it takes.

I believe that this wound manifested itself in the symptoms of low self-esteem, depression and contentment in pornography and other sexual impurities. I have always been a passive person and these are all passive responses to the wound, letting the brokenness win. When depressed, I was giving in to what I saw as my hopeless destiny. Low self-esteem I cannot remember living without. Pornography became my passive response to thinking I was incapable of dating someone. I had nothing good to offer, so why try, and even when I wanted to try, I shot myself down.

By the way, if the U.S. is ten years behind Europe in the cultural perspective, then sex will be victorious. Pornography is everywhere here. The newsstands have Playboy out front, the television has public and regular cable channels that pretty much show X rated movies, the commercials leave little to the imagination, and the Internet cafes are public porn viewing facilities. We say that sex sells in America, but we are wrong. We tease with sex. Here they sell with sex. The point of me telling you this is not to brag or to tell every man in America to move to Europe, because I know that is what you are thinking. The point is to say that I and hopefully you need to fight within ourselves to eradicate our dependence on the passive release of pornography and other sexual impurities. If we do not, then we will miss out on what we were created for, to discover a woman’s total beauty.

As for the other two purposes to life, I am still discovering what those are about. Why did God create man the way he did? What does that mean for me, and who I need to become? Somewhere in the discovery of adventure and poise for fighting a battle, I believe I will find confidence to be. Sometimes guilt hangs over me like a cloud, and I like to hold on to it because it seems to justify the old me. However, living like this has destroyed me in the past and I am realizing that my greatest battle is against my wound. I will not succeed on my own, but suddenly I remember that Jesus covered me over with His self-sacrifice so that I am not the guilty one. I do not always live like this, just ask Jenny, but I am learning and experiencing renewal. As for the adventure, I think I am discovering a passion for writing.