Rabbit trails are dangerous things. Not necessarily bad, but you never know where they are going to lead. I went down one yesterday and it is still affecting me 24 hours later. It started with researching upcoming changes that are being made to the sexual education curriculum here in Ontario, Canada. I was at first opposed the changes because the curriculum now starts at grade three. This led me to researching a disturbing trend among pre-teens and teens. In North America teen aged girls are recruiting others as young as 10 or 11, into prostitution – all so they can get “stuff”. It’s all about getting drugs, purses, or the latest cellphones. In Europe there are the mall girls. Young girls who hang out in malls offering a quickie in the washroom in exchange for a designer sweater. Gross. My stomach turned. This then led me into wider research on the effects the culture of porn has on us by invading every aspect of our modern culture: music videos, TV, even children’s toys.
After doing this research for more than a few hours I realized something: I used to contribute to this! I instantly became sick. The porn culture exists because we let it. I wasn’t mad at the curriculum changes, I was mad that they were needed in the first place. Children are becoming exposed to sexualized messaging at younger and younger ages. Girls are discovering that the way to achieve power over men is by using sex. The younger you are the cuter and more exciting you are to sex-seeking males. By being a consumer of pornography I was a part of the porn-machine that feeds these lies into our culture. Our culture is so sick now that we don’t even have a correct view of woman anymore. I’ve had to work really hard to think through every association I have made to ensure I have a healthy relationship with my fiance. My fiance is, praise God, innocent of the knowledge that I have gained. I wish I didn’t know some of the things I know and I pray that on our wedding night I will be what she deserves: a loving husband who is concerned solely for her and not “doing it”. I hate myself for what I did to the institution and to the girls I watched over and over. Even now it is making me sick and ashamed.
I praise God for the healing presence of his spirit and for sending a woman into my life who by the very nature of who she is, challenges me on every level to become the man God wants me to be.
Your challenge is to identify what associations you have made with regards to women and what assumptions do you hold about sex. Make a list and work on correcting them. If you don’t know what a healthy view of sex is, get with a counselor, an accountability partner, and take advantage of the great resources from New Life Ministries and XXXChurch: Every Man’s Battle, Every Man’s Marriage, x3pure. You owe it to you. You owe it to the woman in your life. You owe it to our daughters. You definitely owe it to God.
Rabbit trails… they’re not always bad…