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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 106>Prostatitis got my attention. It took away my ability to play it safe and forced me to get down into the nitty-gritty issues of my erotic temptations. I couldn’t work around them anymore; I had to find God’s solutions.
I went to the urologist. He examined me and told me that I had a significant infection in my prostate. His recommended treatment was hundreds of dollars’ worth of antibiotics and other medicines, hot baths every night, and ejaculating every day for two months. When I let my wife know, she asked if I was joking. I told her it was the truth, and we set about to follow the doctor’s orders.
It wasn’t easy. Prostatitis had made me partially impotent to start with. On top of that, one of the medicines had a side effect of taking away my sex drive, and hot baths did the same. Then there was the fact that I had a job and two children living at home, so it wasn’t an option to sneak away with my wife at the best times during the day. Finally, even in the best of circumstances, how often can a forty-three year old man ejaculate?
In order to be able to even approach what the doctor had prescribed, I had to do a little theological work to allow myself more freedom. I had studied Christian ethics, so I applied what I knew to see if I could come up with something to help. You might not agree with my conclusions, but please bear in mind that I was in a difficult trial. I tried to remain true to God’s word, but I stretched the limits as far as I in good conscience could – and probably a little further.
The details of how I handled the problem aren’t important. It is enough to say that I didn’t head into obvious sins like lusting after women besides my wife. At the same time, I moved beyond what most people would recommend. I took the same approach with my sexuality that I had previously taken with my anger. I embraced my emotions in their current state and looked for ways to help them to grow. Smoking fetish-based fantasies presented themselves, and I no longer suppressed them and chased them away. Instead I tried to understand them and figure out God’s way to handle them. I accepted that they had been a part of me for years, and I looked for ways to deny them that would allow my emotions to grow rather than antagonize them.
As the treatment began, I felt uneasy. I feared what it would do to my marriage, and I doubted my motivation. How could I trust myself when I was giving even a small amount of room to my wayward sexuality? After I had repressed it for years, it was eager to come out. I didn’t know if I was supposed to feel guilty about how much I enjoyed the relief I was beginning to feel.
As I look back and try to understand what reason God might have had for allowing me to face these sorts of quandaries, one issue stands out. I had for years been hurting myself emotionally in <page 107>order to try to keep my wayward sexuality in line. I had done whatever was necessary to get it to retreat into grumbling submission, relying on self-induced emotional abuse to keep myself in line.
I needed to repent from this. Though I was sincerely trying to protect my family, my methods were destroying me. If I didn’t change, I was likely to end up in some sort of personal breakdown. Only God knows the damage that this would have done to the very people I was trying to protect!
But how could God convince me to go through the risky change process? My emotional self-abuse was part of how I stayed pure – part of how I served Jesus. I was deeply afraid that leaving it might lead to a moral disaster. I had seen plenty of other men give into their sexual cravings and destroy their families. The Christian landscape was riddled with the corpses of marriages that have fallen in this way. I valued my wife and children too much to gamble with their lives.
Prostatitis got my attention. It took away my ability to play it safe and forced me to get down into the nitty-gritty issues of my erotic temptations. I couldn’t work around them anymore; I had to find solutions.
A few months earlier my family’s difficulties had forced me to face the darkness of the buried anger in my heart. Now prostatitis was forcing me to face the darkness of my sexual desires. I had to trust that Jesus would move in this area in which for almost thirty years I had found few emotional answers. It was the day of adversity.[77] The supports that had protected me in the past had been removed. I needed to find God’s grace for something new.
One thing was clear from the beginning of the treatment; I sensed the Holy Spirit affirming my emotions. My mind began to think of them as gifts from God in spite of their sin twisted form. I wasn’t sure how to explain that. It seemed just about impossible to separate my emotions from the sin that had twisted them, but I found a growing desire to somehow include them in my life.
About a week into the treatment, I sensed God speaking a prophetic message to my heart. It was that a part of His call on me was to share with people about sex. Western culture had led to all sorts of problems in this area, and He wanted me to help some of those who had become confused. He had arranged my whole life to teach me about this subject. Everything from my crisis with fetishism to the prostate infection had been allowed to prepare me for this work. Even my tendency to be totally open and honest was part of my calling. I also thought He told me I would write a book.
I thought to myself, “Could that really be what this has been about for all these years?” I was a little dumbfounded. Though I believed God had helped me to find insights about my sexuality in the past, this was the first time in over twenty years I had sensed a clear prophetic message directly to my heart that mentioned the fetish.
…And what an unexpected time for that message to come! I had just made the most embarrassing concessions of my life, stretching the limits of acceptable sexual behavior beyond what anyone would recommend. If my experiment didn’t work, my life would turn into a disaster!
Even if it did work, was there any room in ministry for a man who had made the kinds of choices I had? Many conscientious Christians would have a hard time believing God would allow a disease like prostatitis to exist. (I certainly would have if it hadn’t happened to me.) I wondered if my present situation had disqualified me from ever being able to minister to those who struggled with sexual sin.
<page 108>It had seemed as if God had ignored my cries and abandoned me to a lonely fight that I was slowly losing. My current crisis felt like one more disappointment in a story that had already had too many disappointments. I had searched for answers to my sexual emotions for almost three decades and hadn’t found them, only to be stricken with a disease that seemed to justify sin.
That was too long and too bizarre for someone who wanted to inspire hope in others. Even if God cleared up my strange desires, how many Christians would be able to handle what I had to say? How many would care to?
Beyond the awkward sexual, emotional, and length of time revelations that would be required, I would also tell people about the questionable prophetic approach I had recently added to my walk with the Lord. My understanding of the subjective voice of God had turned the entire planet into a huge mailbox for subjective messages. I was hearing God in everything from dreams, to my mother’s battle against cancer, to horror movies.
I was swearing in some of my prayers, I was no longer fleeing from a number of temptations that many good Christians said I should, and a few short months earlier I prayed a prayer that might have made others flee my presence for fear that they might be struck from heaven if God sent lightening to quiet me. This all seemed to be working for me, but it certainly wasn’t the recommended approach to growth in Christ. How could I explain what I was doing?
Along with all of this, I was at one of the most uncertain points in my life. Within a period of three months I had embraced my anger, started dealing with my mother’s struggle with cancer, and made a radical change in my approach to sexuality. For ease of reading, I have described these separately in this book, but in real life, they were all happening on top of each other.
I wasn’t sure if I was handling them well or was headed for an emotional breakdown. I hadn’t yet experienced many of the answers I have already shared in this book. Everything was too new to know if I would end up healed or in a psyche ward.
In spite of all of this, however, I couldn’t deny a simple fact: I felt like God was doing something wonderful in my life. I had devoted the past ten years to learning to hear wisdom as she shouts in the streets,[78] and I believed I was now hearing her in ways that thrilled me.
She was leading me to embrace far more risk than I had expected, walking me through the devil’s playground and explaining how its deceptions worked. I was growing spiritually stronger every day and discovering answers that had eluded me for my entire life. I was even starting to have fun again. Maybe others would benefit from what I was learning.
I told God that I would do whatever He wanted.
After two months of almost every day ejaculation and antibiotics, my prostate felt much better. My urologist gave me a clean bill of health, and I set about getting my life back to normal. Unfortunately, after a few weeks some of the symptoms came back. I went to the urologist, and he put me on the same treatment for another two months.
This time, I found myself running out of ways to inspire my sexuality. Even with the questionable allowances I had made, it was becoming harder to come up with mental images that would help me ejaculate. I could feel my resolve weakening and realized that it was only a matter of time before I started fantasizing about women besides my wife.
<page 109>Shortly after that, my wife woke up very upset because of a dream:
She found out that I was taking a shower with another woman. The woman and I hadn’t done anything really wrong yet, but the situation was obviously a bad one. My wife was shocked to realize that she hadn’t known about this.
As she shared it with me, I thought to myself, “How come she only remembers her dreams when they show me getting into trouble?” I knew what the dream meant right away, but I didn’t know what to say, so I told her I would pray about it. I got by myself and said, “Lord, if you want to correct me, you don’t have to tell my wife. I’ll get the message if you tell me directly.”
My best shot at an interpretation was that though God was doing a cleansing work in me (I was taking a shower), the woman was symbolic for the temptation to lust after other women. I hadn’t done it yet (I hadn’t done anything really wrong yet), but I was clearly in a situation that couldn’t continue (the situation was obviously bad). If I didn’t make some changes, it was only a matter of time before I went astray.
I faced up to what was now becoming obvious. I had chronic prostatitis and was going to have to come up with a long-term solution. Frequent ejaculation was helping my prostate, but it was going to destroy the rest of me if I continued it.
As I meditated and prayed, my emotions kicked in and surprised me. I saw that deep down in my heart I missed the sexual relationship my wife and I had enjoyed before this trial had started. Prostatitis had given me lots of sex, but it wasn’t the loving caring kind I had enjoyed for the past twenty years. At an emotional level, I wanted to do whatever was necessary to return to that.
I was pleased to see my emotions respond like this. Rather than selfishly demanding that I seek pleasure, they were seeking a godly relationship. They had never been that mature before.
I went on the internet and looked up information about the only other effective treatment for prostatitis I was aware of, prostate drainages. I had asked my doctor about prostate drainages earlier, but he wanted me to try ejaculation first; prostate drainages were less natural for my body. (From a spiritual and emotional perspective, however, prostate drainages were more natural. They provided a way to relieve the symptoms of chronic prostatitis without turning sex into a medical procedure.)
I sat down with my wife and told her the interpretation of her dream. We decided to give up on the frequent-ejaculation-based treatment and switch to a prostate-drainage-based approach. Although prostate drainages were less than ideal, I was excited about the new direction I was taking. For the first time in a long time, I was making a correct and significant sexual change with all of my heart – my spirit, mind, will, and emotions. It was no longer a case of my intellect forcing truth down the throat of my conflicted inner self.
Though my emotions continued to tempt me toward the fetish, they were softening and seeing more clearly. I knew that I shouldn’t return to suppressing and disconnecting from them. I should instead let myself feel whatever I felt and trust God to give me the wisdom to grow inwardly. Through a struggle with a physical disease, He was performing a spiritual and emotional healing.
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