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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
Surprisingly, a long-needed hope inspiring feeling of relief rose from my inner being as I at last allowed myself to feel the fetish rather than trying to annihilate it from my heart.
I fairly quickly embraced Brokenness in every major area of my emotional life except one, the smoking fetish. It wasn’t that I didn’t try to get in touch with it. I simply couldn’t figure out how to do that in a way that wouldn’t threaten my family. What if my wife asked me what I was thinking about while I was letting myself feel it? An honest answer would have hurt her, and a dishonest one would have been a lie.
Also, many of the feelings behind the fetish were Fun Emotions and Desires, which seemed different from the Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow I was currently allowing to surface. Painful emotions reassured me that I wasn’t selfishly indulging sin, but pleasurable ones made me suspicious about my motives. Just allowing myself to feel the fetish was enjoyable even if I didn’t follow it. Though there was some suffering involved in not acting on my feelings, after what I had been through over the past few years, just letting them exist was a welcome relief.
I’m not sure exactly how to explain what happened next. I believe the strain of the long battle caused a part of my body to weaken, and this forced me to face the fetish in a way I hadn’t in decades. Two months after the angry prayer I described in the previous chapter, I came down with a serious case of a disease called prostatitis.[57] The treatment my doctor prescribed was ejaculation every day for a number of months together with antibiotics.
While I knew I would enjoy the treatment, I also knew that there was no way I was going to be able to carry it out without the fetish becoming front and center. Tentatively wading into its issues would no longer be an option. The feelings I had run from for years were going to come surging to the surface, I was going to experiment with them, and I would either find answers or be destroyed.
After moving through an initial time of feeling betrayed by God, I realized that despite its craziness, this treatment fit perfectly with much of what He was doing in my life. He was teaching me how to explore my emotions and desires. In addition, the fetish was already rising to the surface because my mother had recently been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. This brought back memories of the initial situation that had given birth to it. Most importantly, however, prostatitis was exactly the excuse I needed to allow myself to feel the fetish. I had perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity to limit the damage done to my wife while I examined it. I could honestly claim that I wasn’t selfishly toying with sin; I was trying to treat a serious medical condition.
Treating prostatitis allowed me to engage in controlled Brokenness with my sexuality. I held onto enough Self-Control to stay away from blatant sins (adultery, lusting after women other than my wife, smoking …), but I allowed myself to partially fall to the influence of the fetish. I honestly admitted that in this situation, I didn’t know how to stay away from it. I relied on the blood of Jesus to cleanse me from sins. Then I looked for God to show me what He wanted to do to save me from them.
Surprisingly, a long-needed hope inspiring feeling of relief rose from my inner being as I at last allowed myself to feel the fetish rather than trying to annihilate it from my being. It was as if a huge weight was melting off of my shoulders. Although I knew I was allowing myself to experience a mindset that was highly questionable at best, it was hard to deny the healing release of emotion that almost immediately flooded me.
I didn’t sense the Holy Spirit convicting me about my choices, even though I was obviously allowing myself to touch a sinful orientation. Instead, He seemed to rush to my side to encourage me about the emotions I was now feeling. I didn’t need Him to tell me that they were expressing themselves in the wrong way, but I did need Him to affirm my sexuality.
He let me know that the physical and psychological machinery behind the fetish was a good gift from Him. It had obviously become twisted, but He stressed the beauty of His creation rather than the foolishness of my bondage. I cautiously discerned that my emotional health was more important to Him than whether I did everything perfectly.
By this point, little that I sensed Him saying surprised me. My life was in the throes of a major worldview change; all of the old rules and expectations were being called into question. Still, I was suspicious about counsel that so conveniently encouraged my pleasure, especially when it disagreed with other counsel I so deeply respected (the counsel to avoid anything associated with sexual sin). I doubt I would have believed what I was sensing was from Him if I hadn’t been so thoroughly Broken by the long, hard war. It was only after all of the other answers had failed me that I became open to this approach.
I was a little shocked when shortly after I began the treatment I sensed God telling me that not only would He deliver me, but He wanted me to share with others about sex – and even write a book!?[58] That was somewhat surreal and scary. By all outward appearances, I was crashing into one of the worst disasters of my life. Yet God seemed to be telling me that I was at last receiving the answers that had eluded me for so long. It was so crazy that I was hesitant to fully embrace it, but I cautiously went with it by faith.
Day after day, my emotions related to the smoking fetish rose within me, and day after day I examined them. I listened to the Holy Spirit and experimented with what He seemed to be showing me. My heart used all of the wisdom He had given me in over thirty years of walking with Him to try to understand this insane part of my personality.
I was convinced He was speaking to me. I wrote down and studied hundreds of my nighttime dreams, and He seemed to be guiding my heart. It is doubtful that I would have been able to embrace the level of Brokenness I did if I hadn’t seen evidence that He was working through it. I would have concluded that I was selfishly indulging my sin and condemned myself for yet another failure. I would have tried to repent, only to end up returning to a self-abusive approach to purity.
God’s Appointments in the middle of the mess convinced me that I was still on His path to freedom. I did my best to walk in each new insight He gave me.
After a number of months, it became clear that the “frequent sex” approach to prostatitis couldn’t be a long-term solution. It helped manage the disease, but it was going to eventually (and perhaps soon) lead me into actions that were clearly sins. Even if it saved my body, that was too high a price to pay. I gave up on that treatment and started a different one, which worked just as well if not better.
As I tried to get back to “normal,” I did this with an entirely different attitude than I had used in the past. Instead of suppressing my emotions or disconnecting from them, I continued to let them surface, even if they showed up in “smoking fetish form” (a form which tempted me toward the fetish). I used Self-Control and everything else the Lord had taught me to make sure they didn’t progress to “smoking fetish actions,” but I tried to stay on the road of controlled Brokenness.
Along with this, I also changed my approach to temptations; I stopped backing away from all but those that were obvious trouble. Allow me to illustrate with an example I shared in Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose:[59] I saw a woman smoking outside a building at my workplace. I let myself look at her for a few seconds, and I felt my mind being pulled into the sort of mindset that is reserved for a husband and wife in their bedroom. I was upset by this, so all sorts of inner defenses rose within me to block what was happening and squash my feelings. Nevertheless, I was so affected by the sight (and the desire to see it again) that I had similar feelings whenever I was near that building.
Finally, I decided it was unwise to treat my emotions as if they were foreign invaders. They were a part of me. I didn’t want to chase them into hiding anymore, so I let them be what they were, which felt as if I was walking right up to the edge of lust (and I wondered if I was stepping over it). I looked to Jesus to help me understand what I was feeling and show me what to do about it.
He fairly quickly reminded me of what I was learning about His Appointments. The key to experiencing life as something beautiful was to walk in His time and way for everything.[60]
He has made everything beautiful in its time …
I realized that the fetish was a counterfeit of this experience. It was my heart’s attempt to make the ugliness of smoking beautiful, a protection mechanism I had developed as a child against living in a smoke-filled world. I sensed the Holy Spirit showing me that the answer to this wasn’t to deny or squash my emotions; it was to work with Him as He reshaped them to find their satisfaction in the true beauty of His Appointments. My feelings were designed to cause me to seek Him; that was where they would find the fulfillment they were vainly seeking in the fetish.
Faith rose in my heart as I realized I was seeing another piece of what was behind my seemingly impossible to understand sexuality. Almost immediately, the worst part of the temptation lifted, and the insight I had received ended up playing a large part in my recovery. It has been at the heart of much of what I have shared in this book.
That sort of experience happened to me more times than I can recall. My temptations became classrooms in which God spoke to me; they turned into stepping stones to His answers. Twisted emotions would rise to the surface, He would help me to see them for what they were, and I would be empowered to reclaim them for His purposes.[61]
In time, after I had learned what I could from these sorts of experiences, I returned to avoiding them, but for a season, I actually looked forward to what God would teach me as I ran into people who smoked. I even believe He led me, on rare occasions, to intentionally look for them on TV shows and movies. For example, in 2007 and 2008 I sensed I should watch the TV show Mad Men.[62] It was specifically written to show the culture I had grown up in during the early 1960s, which was full of smoking and drinking. (The show also had a large number of sexual parts which I skipped over and didn’t watch.)
Mad Men stirred the emotions of my youth, which God then used to heal them. I realized I had never fully forgiven the business culture of that time for its influence on my parents, and this had kept me from fully putting my issues behind me. As I worked through my anger with the Holy Spirit’s help, I was able to resolve another piece of the puzzle.[63]
I repeated this process perhaps hundreds of times as different aspects of the fetish became clear to me. Some emotion would show up in “smoking fetish form,” I would talk to God about it, and He would show me how to reclaim it. Sometimes the insights came quickly, and sometimes they came over a period of years. Each touch from Him brought me a little closer to understanding the mystery of what He was doing in my life.
When I put it all together, the story I have shared in this book emerged. Before I embraced Brokenness in the year 2000, I understood only a fraction of it. God opened it to me little by little as I let myself feel what was going on inside of me.
In the process, my emotions transformed from enemies to allies. In their reshaped form, they sought true fulfillment rather than never ending imaginations. The change process was scary, however. My first reaction when they showed up in “smoking fetish form” was usually to be horrified by them. Then I had to exercise a good deal of godly wisdom to keep them from leading me into sinful actions. It seemed ridiculous to think that allowing myself to feel them could be part of my walk with God, but it was hard to deny the fruit of what was happening.
I gradually grew to understand that my hedge of thorns had caused all sorts of different flavors of Fun Emotions and Desires, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Sorrow, Brokenness, and Contentment to become tied to the fetish. In order to get those emotions back, I needed to let them be what they were while God led me into what He was reshaping them to be. They didn’t need to be squashed, cut out, or avoided. They needed to be led and nurtured out of “smoking fetish form” into “Jesus form.” So I controlled my reactions and settled my spirit. God had a plan for me in the temptations, and I trusted Him to show me what it was.
A major breach was being cut in the walls of the Unprotected Heart Stronghold. I was finding answers to the threats that had fueled my insecurities for decades. I was also learning to leave behind the painful mental gymnastics I had relied on to keep my emotions from ruining my life. God was empowering my internal Parent to be an expression of Him taking care of me.
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