Gifts

I try to reframe my attitude about my day.  Often, I am unsuccessful and need reminders of what is truly important.  Today's thought is, "What have I given today?  What have I given to make somebody's day better?"

I also try very hard to think this way before the end of the day so that there is time left.  Have I given time to others?  Have I given my attention to others?  Have I given any of the many gifts God has given me back to others?

Many times the answer is no.  Why not change that?  Why not change the answer to yes?

This is the pep talk I gave myself today.  I need lots of pep talks.  I'm tempted to set a reminder on my cell phone to give myself a pep talk when I need it.

Was my day about myself?  About my aches and pains, my frustrations and fears?  Or, was it about others?  Was it about living in the present and giving of myself so that when I lay my head on my pillow at night that I haven't held myself back in reserves out of fear or selfishness?

There is always something that can be given, even if prayers are it.  Prayers can be the most important of all.  Even if I think about my little pep talk right before falling asleep, I can always give prayers.  I can always give thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is a gift to others as well, even if it is made in private.

Why?

The more thanksgiving I give, the better able I am to recognize that everything I have is a gift.  Everything is mine only because it was given to me by God or by others.  I can then give away anything I have because nothing is mine to begin with.  (Oh, and I hate dangling prepositions, but even those are given to me by God, so they're free to hang out-- Praise be to God for the ability to speak, to write, to read, and dangle prepositions!)

There are so many gifts in life.  I pray for the ability to recognize them, to give thanksgiving for them, to give them freely, and to always remember to pray.

Amen

Learning From Sin: Lies About Sexuality. Having a Master/Being a Master in a World of Fantasy

Upon attending church today, I swallowed hard when I heard today's Gospel reading from Matthew 23:1-12.  The verse that stopped me in my tracks was, "Do not be called 'Master;' you have one master, the Christ."

As I have written elsewhere, I will repeat briefly here in case someone randomly reads this post without reading any of my previous posts.  Before I returned to the Church and sought forgiveness for my sins, I had been writing erotica and erotic romance as well as an erotica blog as a side business/hobby.  The works I had been writing all had BDSM themes, and usually the characters were in service to a master or masters as part of one of the main themes of my writing.  Many of those same characters had dilemmas because they had to choose between different masters.

Ok, this is perhaps more than you, my reader, wanted to know, but I have to put it all out there because I felt called to leave church and immediately write a blog post on this topic because it is so important.

The human person seeks to have a master.

Jesus addresses this fundamental human longing in today's gospel, and it is a key idea to why some perversions of sexuality (BDSM) draw people so strongly, especially with the written word.  There are people who act out BDSM but there are many, many more who buy written works containing BDSM themes as an escape to reality.

It has been my experience that when one shuts out Christ, the soul still seeks its master.  We were made with this longing, this yearning for God so boldly written upon our hearts that when we shut out Christ we cannot stop seeking a master.  We take many paths through dark valleys and then wonder why we experience discontentment with seeking out a human master, even if it is only within the world of fantasy.

"It's only a fantasy," I told myself time and time again when writing erotica.  "It hurts no one."

What a lie!  I lied to myself over and over again.  The many rooms of our minds contain parts of hearts, parts of our souls, our yearnings, our longings, our passions, our emotions, and so many other parts of ourselves.  When we fill many rooms with destructive fantasy, our minds become a house of mirrors in which those good longings become perverted until we no longer recognize them for the good things that they are.

Christ is our master, and he wants us to be of service to him and to others in his name.

And the desire to be master over someone else?  This desire isn't something I wish to address in today's blog post because it contains too many subtopics for a single blog entry.

In Christian, married life, there is much freedom to living in the present.  In contrast, seeking to always distract oneself from the present with fantasy is destructive on multiple fronts, not the least of which is that it opens the door to losing site of the many gifts one's spouse gives in the married life.  It opens the door to disappointment in one's spouse because a person can never live up to a fantasy, regardless of how harmless the fantasy may seem at the time.

My prayer as I learn from my past is to be ever mindful of who my spouse is, how wonderful a man he is, and how blessed I am that God gave him to me to be my husband.    

Learning From Sin: Lies About Sexuality. It's not about the Present.

I firmly believe that one of the many blessings we have as followers of Christ is that when we sin, God gives us the ability to learn from our sins/failings/omissions.  It is the ability to reflect upon what we've done wrong, why those actions were wrong, and that we can do so much better with God's help that we can pick up or cross and follow him.  Even St. Peter who denied Christ three times was given the opportunity to affirm his love for Jesus three times.  Then, later in his life, St. Peter was killed for his faith in Christ.  I have no doubt that St. Peter had a lot of time to reflect in between those events.

With this idea in mind, I am going to do a few blog posts on the same topic: What I have learned about the lies of sexuality through my own sins of writing erotica.

Lie: Spending an lot of time fantasizing about sinful things enhances the sexual experience with one's spouse.

I do believe that God gave us the ability to fantasize, and that the mind is where all the sparks fly.  But, where does the mind really go when thinking about unholy things?  What I mean is, if I am thinking about a wonderful, intimate sharing with my spouse in the past, this is a good thing.  If I am thinking about something I intend to share with my spouse in the future, this is a good thing.  If I am thinking about something creative that my spouse might do to share with me, this is a good thing.

If the mind wanders to impossible situations, to adding more people than just the spouse, to sexual situations rather than the sharing of sexuality with one's spouse as a person, then this is sinful.  I used to think that if I dreamed up all these elaborate scenarios that I knew would never happen that there was no harm to it.  I even went so far as to think that it would enhance the time with my spouse.

It was only after I stopped writing erotica that I realized how twisted this line of thinking is.  It is such an easy lie to believe that almost the entire romance genre of books and movies is built upon it, even those that aren't entirely erotic by nature.

It is in the present that we live most fully.  It is in the present that God dwells within us.  It is within the present that we can give to each other as man and wife.  It is within the present that we can share the sexual experience.

By no means do I want to convey that there is not supposed to be build-up.  There most certainly is build-up and there should be build-up.  But, it is a shared build-up that happens in the present with each other.

I don't pretend to have the answers for how to retrain the mind to stay in the present and to stay focused on the other and the gift that sexuality is.  I am very much in the learning phase of this.  I'm sure I'll be learning for a long time.  But, I feel strongly called to put my hands on my keyboard and write.

Focus on the present.

This is my own personal lesson for the day.

Amen