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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 214>I believe this feeling is at the heart of the fetish.
In 2012, I contacted Russell Willingham of New Creation Ministries[93] to set up a series of counseling sessions. After hearing my story, Russell said he could see I was circling in on the core issue of my fetish, but he didn’t think I had found it yet. He said a fetish is like a phobia. With a phobia there is a fear about a specific experience, but the person can’t face that fear, so it gets generalized toward a group of similar experiences that represent the hidden one. In a similar way, a fetish is about a specific experience that gets generalized and sexualized. The need behind it is always real, but the fetish is an attempt to meet the need in an unhealthy way.
We talked about my fetish, and I described my teenage years, in which the main image that turned me on was the image of me smoking. Russell suggested that I didn’t feel safe connecting to anyone around me, so my heart had used sex to connect to the only person I felt I could trust, myself.
As I considered this, a number of experiences from my past came together into a recurring theme. I saw that I have always had a strong desire to connect with others. At the same time, however, I am an artistic idealist whose unorthodox approach to life makes it tough for me to fit in. I have rarely found great peace with the status quo. I seem to need to explore possibilities – to “try on” one idea and experience after another until I find what works. In the process, I end up questioning just about everything.
Most people are focused on the practical reality of what each day requires, so the easiest way to connect with them is to fit in with their definition of practical living. My need to “try on” different ideas has been at odds with this, and it has often led me to go off by myself to focus on questions that don’t seem to concern others.
The first major example of this was when I questioned the status quo of smoking as a ten-year old. The adults around me were just being practical. Smoking was too big a part of their lives to go through the trouble of quitting. It was so “normal” for them that my mother, who knew that smoking caused cancer, told me that when I grew up I would probably smoke. It was just what people did.
That sort of thinking was far from the inclination of my personality. I wasn’t about to accept a smelly, deadly habit unless I could make sense of it. Smoking crossed a cosmic barrier of morality in my heart, which caused my “try-on-different-ideas” nature to kick in. I experimented with ignoring the problem, with perfectionism, with releasing my fear and anger through cutting …until I came up with a fetish that seemed to put smoking into “perspective.”
The fetish felt as if it established the emotional connections I needed. It helped me to feel close with myself and those around me. At the same time, it caused smoking to appear so attractive that it made sense that people would risk their lives to do it. My need to connect and my need to make sense of the world both found a place of stability within its deception.
<page 215>Many situations in my life have involved a similar internal struggle, although after giving my life to Christ I handled them much better. In my family, church, job, and community, I have often found myself torn between a desire to settle in with others and a desire to question what we were doing. When some idea didn’t seem right, I had a tough time making peace with it.
I believe this tendency is, in part, a gift from God. As a teenager, it helped me to resist peer pressure. In my family, it has helped me to break from futile patterns that would have hurt us. At work, I have been rewarded for discovering solutions that others missed. In church, I have found insights that have helped us to resolve important questions.
Several people have affirmed this gift in me, including some who have felt that God had told them to do so. In 2011, I was visiting a church far from my home. A woman who had never before seen me, but whose gift for prophecy was well-known, prophesied about me that there might be ten people in a room, and I would have a different opinion than all of them. God wanted me to know that He had made me this way, and my perspective was important.
Another time, a man started a prophecy for me with the words, “You’re different,” to which I replied, “I’m way different.” His words, together with many other experiences confirmed to me that I am called to see truths that others tend to miss.
Yet this gift contains a burden of loneliness and pain. When I challenge the status quo, it is my responsibility to go off by myself and work through the details of my ideas. Only then can I present them in a way that will help others to see the need for change. I also must realize that my conclusions may be so far from what people expect that they will misunderstand me, and occasionally they will mistakenly rebuke me. This is all a part of the price of being different.
To be honest, it is a price that I am unable, in myself, to pay. When loneliness threatens me, Fear and Guilt rise like dark beings, creating doubt about who I am and what I am doing. Anger and Sorrow come in waves as I fight through my conflicting emotions. I would like to be a picture of poise and inner strength, but those character traits don’t come naturally to me. My feelings are pitted in a war against one another, and I struggle to handle the turmoil.
This conflict – the desire to fit in, yet the drive to be different; the draw to surrender to the opinions of others yet the refusal to accept what doesn’t make sense; the need to live responsibly yet the yearning to let go and “be me” – I believe this feeling is another piece of the fetish. It leads to the fear that I will never be happy. I will spend my life off by myself trying to figure out puzzles that others don’t care about; or I will slowly die inwardly as I fulfill my role in life yet am overwhelmed by what responsibility does to my emotions.
In order to escape from these sorts of feelings, I had been tempted to turn to the fetish. Despite its insanity, it seemed to meet the needs of my heart. It connected me with an image of mature adulthood from my childhood yet allowed me to feel like myself. It gave me a sense of responsibility without taking away the childlike joy of living.
Writing these books has exposed this inner conflict many times. From the moment I started writing, it seemed good to speak from my heart – to try to connect according to who I believed God had made me to be. I felt the freedom to tell my story as it had happened.
<page 216>On a mental level, I knew that writing in this way was likely to greatly limit the number of readers. How many people would want to read a story about a struggle with a fetish? When I added to this the theological discussions the books would include, the number of readers was likely to fall to almost none. There would be few people who would be interested in a long theological description of a strange sexual problem.
Among the early readers of the books, those without sexual problems tended to say, “These contain some great insights, but healthy people won’t want to read books in which the examples describe sexual sickness.” Those with sexual problems sometimes said, “You come across as too healthy to help sexually sick people.” If neither the healthy nor the sick would read the books, why bother writing them?
For most of my life, I have tried to pay attention to what people want, and I have spent years hemming my personality in to give it to them. But the part of me that desperately wanted to connect with others was never satisfied with that approach, and I decided to let that part of me be involved in writing these books. Rather than hiding my heart to gain readers, I would be honest. I knew this might make my writings irrelevant, but I had to give it a try and hope that God would make the books relevant.
At first, I was surprised by the positive feedback I received. God arranged unique ways to confirm through others that He was involved in the project, and I was excited! Eventually, however, the feedback faded, except for the input of a few friends. All I was left with was the conviction that God wanted me to press through with the writing and trust Him to do what He wanted with the books.
That was when loneliness set in. I wondered if I was wasting my time. I hoped that I wouldn’t end up ignored and resentful. My emotions churned as I tried to figure out what purpose the books served.
I expressed some of this loneliness when I wrote Chapter Thirty-Two of this book, “King of the Butterfly Effect.” God met me at that time by bringing the “Save the cheerleader; save the world” stage of my life.[94] He told me that He enjoyed my story, even if no one else read it. He gave me marvelous times in His Spirit as He repeatedly emphasized that He wanted to know me as He had made me to be rather than as anyone else wanted me to be. He stood by me and supported me as I worked through the unique challenges of sharing my heart.
This reached perhaps its highest point at the end of 2011. I was finishing what I hoped would be the next to last draft of this series of books, and I was fighting off discouragement over the thought that they would vanish into insignificance. I sensed God say in effect, “Don’t worry whether anyone reads these books. I want you to sit back and enjoy this moment. You fought through a terrible sexual struggle against great odds, and you did it largely without the sort of human support people in your situation usually need. Then you devoted many years’ worth of your free time to recording what had happened, even though you knew that few others were likely to read your words. You kept writing because you sensed I wanted you to write.”
“This is like the end of a long sports season where the champions run around the stadium with crowds cheering and confetti falling from the sky. It is like the end of a movie where all of the suffering and hard work of the main character comes together into something beautiful. It is time for you and me to enjoy the wonder and awe of what has happened!”
<page 217>I didn’t understand the full impact of the “Save the cheerleader; save the world” stage of my life until I talked to Russell Willingham. I saw how my particular brand of loneliness was central to my fetish. My heart had been searching for a way to resolve the conflicts between my need to connect, my need to explore, and my need to be responsible. But how could I do that?
The closest I had ever come to meeting all of these needs was with the occasional friend who had the gifts and the desire to join me while exploring some theology or work-related subject. Those friends had been incredibly helpful, but the opportunities to work with them were limited. I longed for someone who would always be there – someone who could share my frustration and excitement every day.
Obviously, that person had to be God, but I didn’t know how to find that sort of relationship with Him. …During the “Save the cheerleader; save the world” stage of my life, I found it. He affirmed me and encouraged me to explore my issues in the light of His word. He told me not to sacrifice my wounded heart on the altar of practicality. He drew near to me as I became as unorthodox as my emotional personality seemed designed to be.
When I was dealing with feelings that appeared to defile me just by their presence, He knew that many of my problems were caused by the fact that practical issues tended to cause me to flee from those feelings. In order to be healed, I needed to make my way through them so I could learn to be both practical and honest. He encouraged me to make that journey, even if doing so made my testimony so uncomfortable to others that it looked as if I couldn’t use it to share Him with them.
When I found help from crazy sayings for my life like, “I’m Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you are?...” and “Save the cheerleader; save the world,” He encouraged me to accept whatever answers He bought my way, even if they came in seemingly unspiritual packages.
I sensed Him say in effect, “Forget about fitting into anyone else’s mold; be who I have made you to be. Don’t worry about what others might think. Even if the answers you find are so offensive they disqualify you from being able to share openly, it is better to have answers than to share them. I care more about you than I do about anything you can do for me.”
This was a love that touched me at the deepest level. It was more than a “you have to do this in order to be successful and practically serve people” sort of love. I appreciated that kind of love, but it had never reached down into my impractical artistic heart. It always seemed to carry the added message, “You have to make yourself be what others want you to be or you will fail them and spend your life in disappointment and loneliness.”
While writing these books, God said in effect, “I love you the way I made you, and I want you to be that person – even if doing so separates you from others.” This connected with me and affirmed me in a way I had never before experienced. And the fact that it occurred while I explored the part of my life in which I had experienced the most pain and alienation made it even more meaningful. God didn’t shy away from my worst emotions. He embraced my heart in its Brokenness and healed me there.
If He hadn’t, I would have continued to feel as if I was so messed up that the only way I could walk with Him and others was to suppress my inner self. Love would have felt like an outwardly rewarding yet inwardly debilitating form of rejection. Instead, Jesus gave me what I could never have found in human support or wisdom. He taught me how to deny myself without feeling like I was rejecting myself.
<page 218>I know that my “differentness” will always create times when I will feel lonely, but this is no longer the devastating problem it once was. My Creator set aside nine years (the nine years in which I wrote these books) to become close to me in my uniqueness. I now have a supernatural foundation for dealing with loneliness.
Russell Willingham pointed out an important fact related to this. If I had tried to share my journey with people at an earlier time in my life, I would have done so in the wrong way. I would have been searching for love and acceptance, all while blasting them with a message that I wasn’t ready to speak and they weren’t ready to hear. They would have reacted, I would have been deeply hurt, and I would have found it difficult to ever be transparent again. Fortunately, God protected me from that by giving me a wife who cautioned me in my efforts to share openly. He held me back for my good.
If at some point I do speak more openly, I trust that God will have made me ready. Though I will in many ways still be broken, I will be able to share from His supply rather than out of a grasping need for acceptance. God is my friend, and that is the foundation for offering unselfish friendship to others.
I always wondered what people meant when they said that we can never be fully devoted to Him until we know He loves us. The past nine years have taught me what this means; He has been filling the empty places in my heart. I no longer just believe He wants to satisfy my deepest yearnings; now I have experienced Him doing this.
Thirty years ago, when I first considered this writing project, I never expected that it would contain the story it does. I thought that with a few more quick touches from God I could put my sexual trials behind me. I never imagined that I would need five books to describe what He would do. One thing was clear, however; I knew how the story would end. He had shown me that my life was going to be about exchanging images for His glory; the rest was going to be details.
I have waited a long time to write this last paragraph: It makes sense that I have found freedom. My bondage started when I exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for images. I left His truth for a lie, and I was given over to sexual impurity (Romans 1:23-31). That has now changed. I have exchanged my images for the glory of the incorruptible God. I have turned from my lies to a truth that permeates my being through His living and loving presence within me. I have found in Him the friendship that delivers from sexual sin. Where once I had been given over, He has taken me back!!!
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