my long response-- grab some coffee and sit a spel
Submitted by sally on March 24 2002 22:50:08
In reply to OK, here's why submitted by Dakota on March 24 2002 16:45:30
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Dakota, you say: ****It not only CAN be but IS [that you love boys}. It is a documented fact that most pedophiles have a sincere love for boys, not just a sexual attraction. **** Dakota, I was not clear. I didn't mean to suggest that you don't love boys. What I was grasping at is how is your love for them different from my love. I love boys but I would never think to call myself a boylover. Why do you call yourself a boylover? What does it mean? Now you are telling me that it means a combination of things-- that you love them with a deeper agape love for boys than you have for girls, men and women and a deeper agape love for all boys than the rest of us have. I'll speak to that in a moment. ******As far as the name "boylover," I didn't start it. But since the media constantly uses the terms "pedophile" and "child molester" as if they mean the same thing, a different word seems to be needed. Boylover fits the bill. I can't speak for everyone, but I think it's meant to convey the idea of someone who has both a deep innocent love for boys and also a sexual attraction. Yes, it's possible to have both. How do I know? Because I have both.****** Again, I'm sorry that I was not clear. I did not mean to imply that you didn't have love for the boys along with sexual attraction. I meant only to suggest that the sexual desire is what makes one person a boylover and another person not. I have agape love for boys. I have a deep innocent love for boys (whatever on earth that means!). I am still not a boylover. Why? Boys do not attract me sexually. My point, made so poorly in the rush this morning, was that the label itself points to something that you would consider sin. It singles out the sexual attraction aspect of your love for boys... Even if you are right and I'm wrong about your ability to love boys better than I do (and how can that be, we are equally commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves-- there is no class of people that are just naturally more loving-- we all love ourselves and want to use other people if left to our natural desires) even if you think boylove is not about the sexual attraction-- why label yourselves? What is so dadgummed important about finding others who share your particular sin or desire? Why don't you just say, "Sally I'm a sinner and you're sinner, you can understand my trials." I can understand. Your sin may differ in kind but not in severity from mine. My mother who is a tea-totalling, old school, minister's wife and who I am quite sure never slept with any one other than my father, can understand your struggles. She is a sinner. And any other sinner can understand the struggle against sin. Where are we told to find others of like kind to hang with? That is not what the church is about. Now I hope I'm not breaking Bach's bounds here. I think his intent is that I don't say you with your feelings can't be a Christian. And that is not my point. My point is that you, with your feelings, need not think you are different from other sinners. No temptation has overtaken you other than what is common to man. (1 Corinthians 10:13) I think a strong scriptural argument can be made for taking hold of your inheritance in Christ and leaving behind the labels of our sin. Chris posted an excellent post on this and Splash saw it but no one else commented on it. ****So you are acknowledging that you do have desires, like everyone else, but resist the temptation. That's all we are doing also. *** No, I don't think that is ALL you are doing. I think you are saying that your desires are well and good and fine with God. I'm saying my desires (if I have sexual desires for men I am not married to) are sinful and I have to repent for them. ****I once heard temptation described like this. To have a sinful thought is not sinful in and of itself, since even Jesus was tempted. **** Jesus never had a sinful thought originate with him. He was not born with original sin as we are. He had no predisposition to sin--no sin nature. His temptations came from without. They didn't pop into his head from his heart as they often do with us. We sin when our own evil desires entice us and carry us away. Jesus never had any evil desires. ****But if to invite that thought to come in for tea and cakes (ie, dwell on it) then it becomes sinful. I'm afraid you think we are all here just to have tea and cakes with our sinful thoughts, and that isn't true. But those thoughts are still knocking on our door and it helps to deal with it in the fellowship of others who have similar trials.*** Who have "had" similar trials or who are "now having" similar trials. Should the alcoholic hang out at the corner bar and talk about how it is fine for him to love alcohol as long as he doesn't drink it? Or is it better for him to find a support group made up of people who have not had booze in many years? You have heard that when the blind man leads the blind man they both fall in the ditch. We all have blind spots in our lives--areas of sin where we really cannot see clearly. We need others who are not blind in our areas to show us from scripture what we are unable to see on our own. It does little good for us to hang with others who are just as blind as we are in that area. Why can't you come to my church and say, "I struggle with this sin will you help me by keeping me accountable, " so I could say, "Oh sure, I don't have trouble with that sin but I have trouble with a different sin." ****I think you are mistaking dealing with it with affirming it.*** I guess so. How are you dealing with it here? I keep hearing all this talk about YFs. One guy even talked about his boy... as if it is fine to have a boy. It is not OK to have boys or YFs. You are to love the boys the same way you love everyone. As yourself! And when you single out boys for some special love and affection you are warping what God has given. He saw that it was not good for man to be alone and he made woman, not boy or YF. This affection that you have for some boys is not OK. It is not pure. It is not the way God wants it to be. I am not saying that you are monsters. I am not saying you deserve hell more than my mother who has never dreamed of the sinful things we find acceptable today. We all deserve hell. I am saying that just abstaining from sex is not good enough. You should not even "have boys". Please understand I am not saying you need to be locked away from the general populace. I'm saying in your heart you should fight tooth and nail against holding one boy in a special place in your heart. You should never choose a YF. God does not allow for this to be consummated so you should not play with it. It is one thing for you to say that you have an attraction for boys. You like them. You like to spend time with them. You would like to have sex with them if that was acceptable to God and society. But when you realize that it is not acceptable to God why pick a YF? Do you think that God is so concerned about sex that he commands the homosexuals in Israel be stoned? I don't think it is sex that God is worried about. He could have just as easily made a different world with no sex or with free sex or whatever. It is that God reveals himself in the family. This is the reason he commands the homosexuals in his covenant community to be stoned. That community was to show forth God to the world. It had to be pure-- it had to be holy. Is homosexual sex unholy because it is somehow uglier than heterosexual sex? Why isn't having a bowel movement sin, it's pretty ugly? It is not the sex. It is that God has given us a picture of himself in the family and he doesn't want that picture becoming obscured, I am convinced. We see in the Godhead three persons--completely equal in substance and yet with an order of authority in place-- all in one unit. God gave us the human family as a picture of Himself. We have the man and then the woman that is actually taken from the man's side-- equal to the man but in submission to him (just as Jesus said he only spoke what the Father told him to speak and just as we say in the Nicene Creed that the Son is begotten of the Father) and then we have the child, proceeding from the father and mother-- equal to both parents but in submission to both (just as the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son and as we say in the Nicene Creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son). We also see in the marriage between a husband and wife the relationship that Jesus has with the church. When you pick a YF it seems to me that is just as sinful as bedding a child. You are obscuring the picture that God has given us of himself. You may think that in your love for the child you are showing him a loving God but he is to see that in his own family, not in adult male friends. God is his Father, not his AF. Jesus is the elder brother and by all means you should all love your younger brothers and Jesus is the friend and you should all love your friends. But this YF business is just not a valid way to show forth God as far as I can see. *****I can't believe you are arguing against love. Perhaps you mean erotic love, which is not the kind of love that is promoted here. You seem to be stuck with the preconception that if we have a sexual attraction to someone, we can't also have Agape love for them. That isn't true. And I honestly don't think God would want us to dump Agape love just because it might be....uhh....inconvenient since there is a sexual element present also.**** I am not arguing against love. I am arguing against you having a stronger love for boys than for girls. We are ALL to love ALL our neighbors as ourselves. If you love one boy or some boys or all boys in a special and/or sexual way this is not how it should be. If you want to work on Agape love work on loving the little boy's mother. Work on loving the gay man who distances himself from you and claims he is not in sin but you are a predator. You don't have to dump Agape love in order to flee from temptation. You should have special love for one woman and you should restrain yourself from loving other women, men, boys, girls, animals or yourself in that way. If you have no desire for a woman that is fine, too. But you may not hold little boys in a special place in your heart, I don't believe, and consider yourself guiltless. *****Another misconception I think you have is that we are all looking for boys to mentor, and that is one of the purposes of this board. I see nothing wrong with having a YF (young friend) and being a mentor to him, but I have not had a YF in my life for many years. But I still need to interact with others that are like me. Trying to deal with pedophilia in isolation is very difficult and quite depressing. It helps to have people who understand.**** I'm happy you have not had a YF for many years. Not happy about your loneliness but happy because I believe it is sinful to have YFs. But this part about the isolation is what I don't understand. Why must you interact with others like you? And how am I different from you? Are we not both sinners deserving of hell? Are we both covered by the precious blood of Christ? What do I need to understand about your condition that I cannot understand? Do you think that I have not struggled with sin? What about women and men who live "normal" married lives? Do you think that they are constantly "in love" with one another? I have never thought that the other women in my church couldn't understand me because they had able-bodied husbands. In fact I think that some of them may be much more sinful than I am in their desires. God has perhaps given me an extra measure of grace because I have not had much trouble with temptation. Or maybe he just gave me to the good sense to flee it at the very first sign. =0) I'm not sure why dealing with pedophilia with others who don't share the sin is so very hard. Why is it? What makes your sin different from my sin? Don't we both deal with our sin the same way? Don't we both rush boldly to the throne of mercy, covered by the blood of Christ? *****I also noticed that a big theme in your post was avoiding temptation. Yes, the Bible says to flee temptation. But it's impossible to never be tempted. To become so isolated that you hardly ever become tempted is to become useless to God. He called us to be the salt of the Earth, not hermits. Each person deals with temptation is his or her own way, and each individual must decide how much temptation can be handled and when the time comes to flee. I have always believed in the truth of a quote I heard when I was a kid. I don't know the author. "A ship in the harbor is safe. But that's not what ships were built for."**** The ship was made for sailing and if it doesn't sail it is useless. What of man? What was he made for? Our Catechism has this question: What is the chief end of man? And the answer: To glorify God and enjoy him forever. To do both of those things-- to glorify God and to enjoy Him-- we must obey him. He tells us to flee temptation. When we refuse to obey him we are not glorifying him nor can we enjoy him. When we refuse to obey him we grieve the Holy Spirit. And a wall of sin blocks our view of God and our enjoyment of him. I did not mean to imply that I don't have much interaction with men. I do know many men. But they are not my friends. Their wives are my friends. And some of the men I know I also like very much. Some are smart and some are funny and some are righteous and some are good around the house. I told one of my friends I lusted after her husband's skill at fixing anything that broke in the house. But without a doubt I will go to great extremes to stay away from a man if I thought that if we were both single we might get together. I won't even go there. Why should I? And I am not freaked out about being alone with a man. I'll take rides home from the car repair shop if I have to. The point is not that I have some superstitious paranoia but that I am realistic. I know that I am capable of sin. My track record stinks. Even though I've been celibate for so long and I've never cheated on my husband I've learned from other sins that I've fallen into without intending to that I can never say "Never." I cannot act just however I want and be secure and think I will not fall. God has let me smash my face too many times for me to be under any delusions about that! The upside of this diligence is that I have a husband who gives me so much freedom I can't even begin to use it all. I have friends whose husbands keep them tied down and my husband, of all the men, should have reason to feel that I might be looking for something that he can't provide and yet he is completely secure in our relationship and never has asked me to stay home or curtail my activities. Some of my friends think I'm just lucky. Well, yeah, I married a great guy. But I have also worked hard to protect the trust that he has in me. OK I'm done for a bit... Sorry I've carried on so long. sally sally@paraklesis.com |
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