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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 147>Was there a legitimate emotional need behind my attraction …? I believe there was. It was the need to experience something wonderful in the middle of my encounters with sin and death. It was the need to find God’s wisdom and appointments that turn the battle into something beautiful in its time.
The book of Ecclesiastes played a large part in helping me to understand what had gone wrong with my sexuality: When I was nine or ten years old, I learned in school that smoking caused cancer. I remember how shocked I was. I didn’t like smoking to start with, and finding out that it could kill my mother turned me against it even more.
When I came home, I warned her about the dangers. I was sure that she would quit once she knew the risks. Her reaction caught me off guard. She told me that she already knew the risks, but she couldn’t quit. She was addicted.
She eventually tried to do better than that, however. A short time after telling me she couldn’t quit, she let me know that she had taken my words to heart and given up smoking. I was so delighted that I excitedly told my father. He responded by complaining that my mother had been irritable since quitting. He then, over my objections, gave one of my friends money to buy cigarettes from his parents. When my friend returned, my mother began smoking again, and I was left bewildered. I couldn’t believe the way my parents were acting.
This book has described much of what misfired in my young heart when these events occurred. I didn’t know the Bible’s words for it at the time, but I had for the first time come face to face with a major threat from the curse of sin and death. I had challenged its hold on my parents, and my efforts had turned to hebel. My mother was caught in the grip of an addiction to carcinogens. My father was encouraging her in that, and in spite of my best efforts, I couldn’t do anything to stop it. My attempts to help were vexation and grasping for the wind.
This left me feeling scared and angry. In the middle of my youthful angst, I made a huge mistake. Without realizing what I was doing, I withdrew emotionally from my parents. I felt that there was something wrong with them …in fact, there seemed to be something wrong with the whole world. People smoked all around me.
It seemed so dangerously stupid that I built an internal wall to protect myself from it. Unfortunately, this isolated me from the adults in my life.
Shortly after that, I started to show signs of psychological illness. I became a perfectionist who felt that I could only rely on myself. Criticism, even constructive criticism, became too much for me to handle. Words easily tore down my fragile self-esteem, and this led me to beat myself up over my inability to handle life’s dangers. I found myself publicly crying when I did poorly in sporting events (which wasn’t the sort of thing a ten or eleven year old boy wanted to do). I even began to turn to magic, talking to inanimate objects in an attempt to contact some mystical power that could help me find success.
<page 148> I believe that all of this was a subconscious reaction to the separation I felt from my parents. My distrust of them over the issue of smoking left me suddenly alone. My heart was descending into a mindset that drove me toward a panic-stricken form of hard work and overachieving. I was trying to shield myself from sin and death by single-handedly beating back the dangers of the world around me.
I was engaging in the classic form of hebel-fighting that I call “crusading.” My immature personality was battling the curse of sin and death with every resource it could muster.
Before long, however, my crusade spun out of control. My anger brought me to the point where failures in sporting events sometimes led me to such rage against myself that I jumped in the air and landed on my knees in order to inflict pain on myself. Within a short time I was cutting myself with razor blades. I wasn’t emotionally able to handle my failures, and self-punishment seemed like a natural outlet for my anger.
Amazingly, I didn’t connect any of this back to my disillusionment over my mother’s smoking. It didn’t occur to me to ask myself what was behind my actions. I felt I was just responding to the way the world was.
Then my parents discovered the cutting and confronted me about it. I took responsibility for my actions and did my best to back away from perfectionism. I lowered my standards and tried to make life easier by engaging in the hebel-appeasing activity that I call “crashing.” I opened the door to sin and death in an attempt to make peace with them.
This occurred shortly before my adolescent hormones began pumping into my system. When they showed up, they brought an incredible sensation to my emotional struggle. In the middle of my fear, anger, and depression, I sensed a growing pleasure that transformed these feelings into something amazing. My inner turmoil mixed with my emerging sexuality, and this became my “answer” to the conflict.
My mind began to construct sexually charged smoking related fantasies that electrified the sin that had so upset my world. I eroticized the habit that was at the heart of my trauma and turned it into an object of pleasure – a fetish.
Doing so changed smoking from the greatest source of angst in my life to the greatest source of delight. It no longer reminded me of the sense of threat and abandonment that had haunted me for the past few years. Instead it brought a rush of excitement that made life glow with wonder. Any feelings of separation I had from my parents dissipated. Any disillusionment with the world around me no longer mattered. The distress had been replaced by a feeling like no other.
The change rearranged my inner being and helped me to appear more successful. I became Most Valuable Player of the Little League. I bowled my way to high average in the bowling league. With the emotional release that came from limited sins, I became steady enough to fit in with others and started to become popular. Within a few years I was the student counsel president of my Junior High School.
Unfortunately, I had found relief by swallowing a poison pill. Rather than overcoming sin and death, I had made them a powerful part of me. And because of the unfortunate fact that smoking was in front of me so much of the time, the emotional toxins I had ingested were constantly stirred and reinforced.
<page 149> Eventually they spread throughout my personality. Was my heart fearful? Erotic thrills calmed me. Was I bored? I could escape into a world of bliss. Was I happy? I knew how to celebrate. I had stumbled onto an all-purpose coping mechanism for the hebel of life. A smoking fetish numbed any pain and intensified any delight.
Since sexual images have a way of imprinting themselves in our hearts and flashing before our imaginations, many everyday sights, smells, and experiences became infused with sexual connections. An incredible number of stimuli, both sensual and emotional, led to sexualized thoughts. By the time I was an adult, just seeing a billowing smokestack or smelling a burning fireplace could lead to temptation. Many activities, from working to relaxing, fed into a mindset that resulted in a rush of sexual hormones.
What had seemed to be a “solution” to a childhood crisis had become like a seemingly irresistible and indestructible monster from a horror movie. It had grown penetrating tentacles that dug deep into almost every area of my personality. They pulsated with emotion and influenced my perceptions of all of life. Like any good horror movie monster, although I killed it over and over again, it came back for sequel after sequel. Nothing less than a major intervention of God’s wisdom, discipline, and power could save me.
In my first book, Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom, I wrote that when we replace the true God with a false God, we are given over to destructive behaviors.[95] I said that this often occurs because our hearts become too dull to recognize and deal with the sin that threatens to overtake us.[96]
In the story I have just told, imagine what would have happened if I had known Jesus when I was young. He could have been my Comforter and Protector when I had my conflict with my parents. His Spirit could have assured me that everything was going to be OK. He would have worked in me to give me the wisdom I needed to grow into a healthy perspective.
Unfortunately, I was suppressing the truth in my heart.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them … but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. … they … exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image … Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity …
(Romans 1:18-19; 21-24, NAS)
I had absorbed the futile speculations of my society, added them to my own childish imaginations, and built a view of the world based on darkness. I had become a naïve young fool who had exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image. I was designed to live in a relationship with my heavenly Father, but I had replaced Him with a lie. This set me up for the consequences I experienced.
I know it is hard to hold a twelve year old boy responsible for all of this, but remember that for much of the history of the world children this age were on the verge of becoming adults. I had <page 150>been given more than enough chances to see God’s glory and respond. When I failed to do so, I robbed myself of the tools I needed to handle real life. Sin and death became too much for me, and I fell to sexual impurity. God gave me over by allowing me to give myself over.
In the Exchanged Glory Series of books, I have shared the journey by which Jesus brought me back. God knows how to shine His light into our darkness, and He has used many different circumstances in my life to do so.
In the book you are reading, He used the fact that my children became teenagers to cause the unresolved emotions associated with my adolescence to rise to the surface. Then the resulting relational trouble in my family fanned into flame the buried feelings of separation from my parents. More memories were stirred up by my mother’s cancer, which was the fulfillment of the original fear that had led to so many of my problems.
My childhood trauma was clawing its way out of its grave like a previously buried vampire, forcing itself back into my consciousness. It was stronger this time, complicated by the many added issues that had been built into it through the decades of confusion and pain that resulted from the first trauma. I could never slay the evil joined to it unless God did something powerful.
I was tempted to turn back to my former crash – the smoking fetish. It had brought me relief as an adolescent, and it had been waiting for a chance to reassert itself. Fortunately, the grace of God had made this off limits. Unfortunately it was so off limits that I, in part, fell into my former crusade. I abused myself in my attempts to keep myself from sin.
I am glad for my resolve to remain pure, but my heart was missing God’s appointments in what was happening. He was allowing my issues to rise for a reason, and my misguided attempts at obedience were keeping me from dealing with my real problems. Though He didn’t want me to descend back into addiction, He did want to help me work through the turmoil.
Finally, prostatitis pushed me over the edge. It forced me to face the off-limits parts of my personality. Avoiding them was no longer an option. Either I was going to overcome the sinful tendencies in them, or those tendencies were going to overcome me.
This was all incredibly scary, but it was time for this purpose. Jesus showed me that He could live through me even in this area that had resisted change for more than thirty years. He had a series of appointments for me that provided the solutions to my longstanding frustration.
As I look back, I can’t help but be filled with wonder over His plan. Could anyone else have orchestrated the radical transformation that restored His glory in my life and led me to freedom? The whole sequence of events – the biblical insights, the prophecies, the dreams, the circumstances, the metaphors from horror TV shows and movies …it is all amazing to me.
I will close this book by describing one appointment along the way that especially relates to the theme of this book. It happened near the end of 2003, about a year and a half after my mother died. I had already written the first draft of the book you are reading, but I didn’t yet understand how my insights from Ecclesiastes related to my smoking fetish. I was just beginning to grasp the way in which the events I have described in this book fit together.
<page 151> By this point, God had done a number of changes in me that greatly cut down on smoking-fetish-related temptations, but there was one that continued to be fairly significant. It was toward a woman I had seen smoking for a few seconds outside of my workplace. I didn’t know her, but just being in the same part of the building as her affected me.
One day while I was struggling with my feelings, I prayed and looked for God’s appointment. In what way did He want to meet me in this situation?
To be honest, I didn’t want to face what was happening in my heart. I was embarrassed that I was having difficulty, and I wanted to push away my desires and pretend they weren’t there. Instead, I asked the Lord to show me how to work with them.
My mind moved to a statement from a book I was reading at the time: An Affair of the Mind. The author said that we shouldn’t deny our legitimate emotional needs.[97] I wondered if there could be a legitimate emotional need behind what I was feeling. What was it that made this girl so attractive to me? There was a time and way for every valuable thing under heaven, and since my desires were valuable, perhaps a smoking fetish was somehow a sin twisted distortion of something good.
As I prayed it occurred to me, for the first time, that my fetish was basically a bad way of dealing with sin and death. It was a counterfeit appointment. My heart was turning to good feelings as a way to handle the hebel of life.
Addiction is perhaps the ultimate counterfeit appointment. It makes everything beautiful through a lie. Whatever kind of high we receive – whether through drugs, sex, work, etc. – we find a feeling that seems to move us past the oppression of the curse. We can continue on in the illusion that we aren’t being dragged down by it.
Was there a legitimate emotional need behind my attraction to the woman at work? I believe there was. It was the need to experience something wonderful in the middle of my encounters with sin and death. It was the need to find God’s wisdom and appointments that turn the battle into something beautiful in its time. That was what my emotions were vainly trying to counterfeit through erotic excitement. That was the reality which would relieve them from their misguided “need” to throw sexual joy onto pain.
Once I saw this, my heart immediately understood a related legitimate emotional need that had fueled the resentment I described at the beginning of this book. I had taken the wrong approach to sin and death. In an attempt to escape their pain, I had fled for safety, and this had kept me from finding the appointments God had waiting for me within their attacks. He was trying to meet me in the middle of the mess, but I was backing away before He could reveal Himself.
Why was I resentful? It was because I wasn’t designed to flee. God had placed me in this world to turn and face the darkness, waiting for His command. My heart had a need to get to know Him in the adventure of living, and my attempts to avoid danger had stifled that need with caution and cruel self-chastisement. The many unnecessary boundaries I had set up had led my emotions to rebel against my ever-increasing restrictions. I could never be happy with running and hiding.
My hesitancy may have been partly justified. I didn’t have the wisdom at an earlier age to get out into the world as I now do. But I could have been bolder, and the need for action was there <page 152>nonetheless. My inner longings were fashioned for the fight. I had no other good choice than to join my Commander as He reached out into the destruction within and around me. Using the metaphor that had become my saying for this stage in my life, I was called to walk with Him into demonic slave pits and to say with amused conviction, “I’m Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And you are …?”
When Jesus saw that the world was in great darkness, He came to die for it. He still wants to reach out to those who are under the curse of sin and death, and He has called us to join Him in that work. We weren’t created for a fairytale world free from struggle; we were created for the conflict. The place of peace is with Him in the war.
For myself, I had to lay aside my selfish desire for safety so that He could fill my emotions for the task. As a side benefit, this kept them from twisting in all sorts of unhealthy directions. They found their purpose and became beautiful in their time, bringing me to more of the freedom Jesus had promised.
The prophecy I shared in Chapter Ten of this book, “The Right Word at the Right Time,” told me that part of my problem was that I didn’t know where I had come from or where I was going.[98] Now I knew. I had come from the demonic slave pit; I was going back in with Jesus to help others.
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