Learning From Sin: Lies About Sexuality: Service and Humiliation vs. Service and Humility

Humility and service to others are deeply written onto our hearts because it is God's will.  We ought to live in humble service to God and to each other.  Seeing Christ in others and then offering ourselves to others is a fundamental part of the four Gospels.

This is why service and humiliation within a BDSM context are so easily sought, especially within fantasy.  It is easy for the mind to say that there is no harm in these kinds of fantasies or actions because they are a direct perversion of service and humility.  It is no wonder that BDSM grabs hold of people within the context of fantasy. For someone who has shut out God or who is confused and not actively focused on God, service and humiliation are made to feel right by the twisting of the world, the flesh, and the evil one.  It is humble service to God and to others that the soul truly seeks.

Just as food is not a sin but gluttony is, service taken into the wrong context confuses a wandering soul.  Unfortunately for many, wandering souls truly seek God, but stumble upon evil that appears to be good.  Evil is seductive.  It rarely jumps up and down, proclaiming itself for what it truly is.

I praise and thank God for showing me why my own sins were able to hold me hostage for so long.  Now I must put this knowledge to good use, making sure I am serving him and serving others.  Knowledge is the first step.  Action must follow.  I will continue to write about this journey for many reasons.  One reason is that I feel called to do so.  Another is that this message must be heard.  Sexual perversion within the world of fantasy and within the world of BDSM exists for a reason.  It isn't evil for the sake of evil.  It is a twisting of one of our most intimate threads of a human fabric.  God created us as sexual beings, and praise be to him for doing so!  He is wise indeed!  He is a creative creator who gave us such a wonderful gift in our sexuality.

Sexuality, in my opinion, draws many people away from God because God desires intimacy with us.  Intimacy and all of its mysterious ways is what we desire.  Intimacy with God and intimacy with others.  False intimacy is destructive, but we can't see its destructiveness until we are removed from it, as is the case of someone who has committed sexual sins but later returns to Jesus.  Because of the private nature of sexual sins, we must always pray for those who have wandered away from Christ in this way.  People don't feel comfortable talking about sexual sins.

I don't feel comfortable writing about my own sexual sins, but I feel that I must because there are so, so many who are sinning in this private way behind closed doors.  The doors may be the doors of their houses, but so many times it is behind the closed doors of their minds.  The mind is both a spiritual haven and a spiritual battle ground.  Prayer is an effective weapon because the Holy Spirit uses prayer to open the doors and windows of our minds so that our minds, bodies, and souls can clearly see each other within the houses of our whole person.  They are interconnected in a way that only God understands, for he made us.  He made us well.

Let us rejoice in the wonder of his creation, in us!  Let us rejoice that God has designed us specifically for intimacy.  Let us seek true intimacy with him and with others with joyful hearts.  He calls us to draw near to him and take refuge, to delight in his peace.  Let us serve him with humility.

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.