“A man is not established by wickedness, but the root of the righteous cannot be moved.”—Proverbs 12:3(NKJV)
OK…
So keeping (somewhat) in the vein of last week’s blog, after reading yet another article entitled, “The Big 8 Relationship Issues“, I think I have another question. Two, actually.
1) According to the piece, half (?!?) of the biggest relationship issues are:
*Brushing things under the rug
*Not listening/talking too much
*Unreasonable expectations
*Blaming your partner for the problems
I guess they’re going to do the other four this week. Doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can get some of you all to come up with *many more than that*.
That said, when you think of what it takes to make a relationship really work, what are some of the greatest challenges? If you’re broken up, separated or divorced, what would you have done differently? If you’re single, what do you think makes a good relationship?
And then my second question.
2) This website spends a lot of time addressing people’s concerns and challenges re: porn, masturbation and other areas of sexual addiction and brokenness (the tree). However, I’m not sure if we spend nearly as much (or enough) time discussing what leads people to those places to begin with (the root).
I’ll speak for myself and say that almost five years without the sexual assistance of another and almost two years without helping myself out (wink), now that I actually do take I Timothy 5:22 seriously and literally (“Do not lay hands on anyone hastily, nor share in other people’s sins; keep yourself pure.”), I know that my molestation played a part; the church doing a *horrific job* of addressing my sexuality played a part; not understanding the *purpose* of sex played a part; married people doing *very poor marital sex PR* played a part; feelings of insecurity and powerlessness played a part; believing that being sexy was more important than being holistically beautiful played a part; not knowing how to appropriately deal with stress *played a huge part*. And so, while there are still moments when I miss and want to have sex (I think there would be something a bit…off if I didn’t), getting to the “heart of the matter” (Jeremiah 17:9) helps me understand the myriad of times when I didn’t really *embrace sex* so much as I *abused (abnormally used) it*. And, so long as I didn’t understand the difference between the two, I was going to stay in cycle. Pretty much indefinitely.
And so now, understanding all of that, on this side of things, I’m not so sure if people can just stop watching porn. Not if they don’t want to *really dig deep* into those (kinds of) matters. When it comes to porn specifically, for me, I was officially introduced to it by a sex partner. It was his passive aggressive way of getting me to be more…um, creative. I think I continued to watch it because I believed that those people could teach me about how to provide sexual pleasure. Better than I could on my own. That revealed to me that sex often wasn’t about sharing myself with another person so much as getting an “A” in sexual performance.
I think you see where I’m going with this.
And so, if you’re someone who battles with porn, masturbation, sexual immorality, I’d love to hear what you think your “root issues” are. And, if you’re not, I’d still like to hear your opinions on what you believe the root issues to be.
After all, when you dig up the root, you remove the tree.