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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 102>He had allowed me to come down with what felt like a spiritual death sentence. …it seemed as if He had misled and betrayed me.
At about the time my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my wife dreamed this dream:
My wife’s father drove me to a college. She was in the car also, and they were going to drop me off at the dorm and leave me there for the semester. When we got there, she walked into my room and realized that I had three sexy female roommates who smoked. She was extremely upset.
My wife told me the dream, and I gave her my best shot at an interpretation. The female roommates were symbolic for some sort of temptation I would face, and the fact that they were smoking meant that it would be very enticing for me. Even though it would be hard, however, my wife’s father was symbolic for the Lord, and the college was symbolic for a time of learning. God was letting her know that He was taking me into a tough temptation in order to teach me something good.
I explained to her that erotic images in dreams can be symbolic for any kind of temptation, so she shouldn’t assume that it would be sexual. It might have to do with finances, spiritual warfare, or any number of areas in my life. She shouldn’t worry; the best thing to do was to pray.
A short time after the dream, I noticed that my prostate (a sexual organ near a man’s bladder) was bothering me. I had developed swelling in my prostate seven years earlier, and my urologist had unsuccessfully tried to treat it with antibiotics. It hadn’t bothered me much over the past seven years; it kind of felt like a little knot in my lower abdomen. I had learned to live with it, but now it was getting much more uncomfortable. The knot was growing and becoming inflamed.
I arranged to see a urologist with an excellent reputation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an appointment for a few weeks, so I endured increasing pain. One night it became so bad that I couldn’t sleep, and I got out of bed to search the internet for information about prostate infections. What I found scared me.[68]
First, I discovered that my condition was called prostatitis. It is sometimes caused by an infection, but at other times doctors aren’t sure what is behind it. Some have theorized that a sudden change from sexual activity to abstinence may contribute to the formation of the condition.[69] Though this was just one of many unproven theories with little evidence, it matched my experience. My troubles had started during a two-month period of abstinence while my wife <page 103>was recovering from surgery.[70] I had also noticed that just about the only way for me to find relief from the discomfort was through sex.
Once the prostate has become compromised with the disease, regaining full health can be difficult. When I first searched the internet, I found only a few recommended treatments (many more are available now). One that made a good deal of sense recommended taking antibiotics while ejaculating frequently. Ejaculating kept fluids moving through the prostate and allowed disease fighting antibiotics to move in. To fully recover might take months of reaching sexual orgasm almost every day.
I must admit …I was intrigued. I’d been a fan of lots of orgasms for a long time, and if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been excited to receive such a prescription. But at the age of forty-three, I knew what this meant for me. That kind of activity would lead me back down the road toward sexual addiction. Even more, it would bring my smoking fetish to the surface. Quarantining it would no longer be an option. The desires that I had so desperately wanted to leave in the past were going to come screaming out of the dungeon into which I had locked them.
During my research, I also learned about a condition called chronic prostatitis, which never goes away. The best that can be done for it is to control the symptoms, and one common way to do this is through frequent ejaculation.[71] I hoped that I didn’t have this condition. If I did, I would have a medical excuse from my doctor to be a lifelong sex addict. One web site was very candid. It mentioned privately acting out as a helpful part of the treatment and said that the local adult bookstore might have some material to help.[72]
I was wrong about those three sexy female roommates in my wife’s dream. They were symbolic for an incredibly difficult sexual temptation!
I felt abandoned by God. I thought back to when the whole problem had started seven years earlier. I had felt the disease developing inside of me, and I knew that privately acting out would make my prostate feel better, but I had held to my convictions. Now it looked like doing so might have contributed to what could be a permanent condition in my body.
I decided to let my still childish emotions do some honest praying. I don’t remember what I said, but I imagine it started out something like: “What the f’ are You doing!? After everything I’ve been through to stay sexually pure, how could You let something like this happen!?”
I poured my heart out in unguarded disappointment. God had been perfectly capable of either preventing this disease or healing it, and I had trusted Him to do so, yet He had allowed me to come down with what felt like a spiritual death sentence. And because refusing to privately act out may have played a part, it seemed as if He had misled and betrayed me. Everything was threatened – my relationship with Him, my wife, my marriage, my children, my health …. How could He have allowed a disease like this!?
<page 104> I could picture people saying, “See, it doesn’t pay to avoid sexual sin. It’s just not natural to deny yourself like that. Your body knows what it needs, and if you don’t do it, you might get messed up.” What could I answer?[73]
Far worse, I could picture the treatment destroying my marriage. My wife was hurt just by the fact that I struggled sexually. She was glad that I didn’t act on my temptations, but she was uncomfortable any time I mentioned them. What was “ejaculation every day” going to do to her? I knew that there was no way I could walk through it without tapping into the part of me that she found so threatening. I had tried to protect her from it, but now she would know the monster was being let out of its cage.
I considered not following the treatment. I could just pray that God would heal me, but I didn’t know if He would at any time soon. After all, I had been asking and trusting Him for healing for years. Also, denying treatment could be dangerous. If I had an infection, it could spread outside my prostate and damage the rest of my body.[74]
If I didn’t deal with it now, what would the doctor need to do in the future? Would he have to remove my prostate? If that happened, it would make a huge change in my sexual relationship with my wife. If sex would be possible at all, it wouldn’t be the same.
I also didn’t want to look like a crazy man. What would people think if I chose to sacrifice my health rather than take the risk of falling into sexual sin? Before turning to that alternative, I had to see if I could find some way to bring healing to my prostate without poisoning my spirit. I had to turn and face the darkness, waiting for my Lord’s command.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy staring into the eyes of the demons that had plagued my sexuality for decades. They confused and terrified me. At different times I had cast them out, endured them, rebuked them, attacked them, worked around them, ignored them in faith that they would leave, fled from them …I had tried everything I could think of, but they had never stopped haunting me.
I didn’t know whether facing them this time would end in victory or humiliating defeat, but where could I run? My attempts to outlast them had failed. They stood before me now poised for an all-out battle, and for the first time in decades, I saw no other good option.
There was hope, however. I knew what the Bible said about being free from sin, and Providence Based Guidance seemed to be pointing to the fact that it was time for this battle. My wife’s dream about the three sexy college roommates fit my circumstances perfectly. I appeared to be facing the incredibly difficult temptation it had predicted, and if that was true, this would turn out to be a learning experience.
<page 105> The whole trial also matched the general direction of my life. Although I hadn’t yet coined the phrase “Fairytale Stronghold,”[75] I knew that I had started to let buried ugliness rise within me so that the power and wisdom of God could overcome it. The evil spirits associated with my sexuality were the ugliest of “uglies.” Why not trust God to overcome them?
On the other hand – it just seemed crazy! How could a sincere Christian be in this position? Would God really allow it? To start with, His children weren’t supposed to have bizarre sexual fetishes, and they certainly weren’t then supposed to get diseases that would flush those fetishes into the open!
I didn’t understand, but I was exhausted from running for so long. I was ready to take a stand and gamble that God would bring me through the battle to victory. He had called me to be a warrior, and this fight, more than any other fight, was my fight. I grabbed hold of the insanity before me, prepared to make mistakes while working through my own filth, and hoped my family wouldn’t be hurt too badly in the process.
It seemed good to me to let my feelings drag me down into what was, for me, the most terrifying demonic slave pit of them all. I wondered if I was nuts to believe this, but it was once again time to say in effect, “I’m Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And you are …?”[76]
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