[I'm currently in week 2 in a 5 week long summer project/missions trip in NYC. I'll post more stories soon!]
If there was one word that I could use as the theme of my time here in New York, I would use the word broken. Not that brokenness is only seen in New York and not anywhere else, but that God is really opening my eyes to see how things are not as He had intended or designed. And it breaks my heart. To see such deep family hurts in students’ lives, to see homeless people sleeping on the stairs in the subway station, to see sex shops on street corners, it breaks my heart. Then I realize that as much as these things break my heart, I’m sure it grieves God all the more. He fully sees what the world was meant to be and He fully sees how far the earth is now.
And yet, I have hope. The world has hope. This, right now, is not the end of the story. Students with deep hurts is not the end of the story. People going to those sex shops on the street corners is not the end of the story. Homeless people sleeping on stairs is not the end of the story. In Him, we have hope; we indeed have hope in Him who sees the beginning from the end. God is the ultimate Redeemer and He is coming to redeem the world. He will come back to restore the world to the way it was supposed to be. And I can’t help but long for that great day. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away (Revelation 21:4). How I long to live in the world that is as God designed and intended!
Serious question: what's heartbreaking about sex shops?
ReplyDeleteHey Anna,
ReplyDeleteSorry I didn't respond to your comment for 2 months. :( I hadn't realized that you had commented. [Just fyi, I have now changed the option to receiving emails when people comment. So hopefully next time you comment I won't take 2 months to respond.]
So for me, what is heartbreaking about sex shops is that I really feel that sex is something that should be in the context and safety of marriage. And the reason why is because I believe that marriage is the closest we’ll get to understanding and experiencing God’s love on earth. I think that marriage is supposed to be the most intimate of relationships on earth. It’s being in the relationship and knowing (though I know this is oftentimes not the case today, but I still think this is what marriage should be) that regardless of what happens, the two of you are in it for the long haul. And in this safe context both of you are free to let barriers down and really be real with one another—emotionally and physically and everything else.
With that said, sex shops break my heart because it takes sex and sexual pleasure outside of the context of marriage. And I think that maybe people feel lonely or aren’t satisfied with their current sex lives and so they venture into sex shops for pornography or sex toys or things like that. And there are a lot of negative things that come out of going to sex shops for those things. For example, pornography may cause people to objectify other people or can become an addiction. Also, I don’t believe that God doesn’t like sex or approve of sex, I think it’s just the opposite—that God thinks it’s a great thing, but wants it to be in that safe context of marriage. And I think that God doesn’t want people to be led and guided by these sexual feelings or urges, but rather, He wants us to be masters over them. (…if that makes sense.) So it breaks my heart because it takes what God intended to be a precious gift shared in the safe context of marriage and makes it commonplace. [I hope that made sense? Let me know if it doesn’t.]
What do you think? I'd love to hear :)
Stacy