Pure Heart: A Women’s Guide to Sexual Integrity
Chapter 10 – Purity (Broken Beginnings Made Whole)
“No More Bitterness”
After I read her eulogy, Candice and I spent some time discussing what got us to a place where we were so spiritually schizophrenic when it came to our sexuality. One of the things we both admitted was that our tainted past had a lot to do with it. I won’t speak for Candice, but as for me, it really got me thinking, both about my sexual abuse and sexual misuse.
How we are going to end this chapter is a bit di!erent from the other ones. This will actually require your participation, more than your monetary donation to the book (thanks again) and your reading it. When I finally got to a place where I was saying, “God, I want your best for me. I don’t want to live a compromised life anymore,” I was startled by what he led me to do. He called me to a Past Fast.
What’s that? Well, I’ll explain in a minute, but for now, let me quickly express just how powerful it is if you remain open to really wanting to get free from the sins that bind you. From personal experience, I know that it can be really dificult to move into your future when you haven’t fully dealt with your past. Part of the reason I was “insane” (doing the same thing while expecting a di!erent result) is because I didn’t take a time-out to really see what I was doing. The Past Fast helped me put some of the ghosts that were haunting me to rest. For me, the top three were:
1. the person who molested me
2. a guy who told me that I was too unattractive to be in his family (although for years he told me he loved me and didn’t mind sleeping with me)
3. a girl who introduced me to lesbianism—probably because someone had done the same thing to her—and who was also not the nicest person I’ve known
For years I harbored bitterness, almost to the point of malice, against these people, but God continued to gently yet firmly reveal to me that malice is not a characteristic of a follower of Christ (1 Cor. 14:20; Eph. 4:31; Col. 3:8; 1 Peter 2:1). Yes, a part of the reason is because we are called to love even our enemies (Matt. 5:43–44), but an even greater part of the reason is because when we don’t forgive, when we don’t choose to release the past, it keeps us bound to the spirit of those people and what they did to us—like a sick prison sentence.
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