Re: How can BL orientation be good?
Submitted by Ben on October 12 1999 at 19:37:43
In reply to How can BL orientation be good? Submitted by Mark on October 10 1999 at 21:06:46
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Mark - I particularly like the replies from Heather and FOD, so I won't repeat much of what they already said. There are many other challenges of being human that are also from God, including hunger, thirst, famine, sadness, disappointment and disease. We are placed on this earth as creations of God, but highly imperfect and susceptible to myriad pitfalls in our life. In most cases, I believe that BL comes from very adverse circumstances such as an abusive household, molestation or perhaps something more subtle. No less, our lives as kids were challenging and in many cases unhappy. I don't think that God necessarily planned it this way, but I do think that God calls us all in different ways. Because of this challenge that we faced, we also heard a special calling by God to reach out to boys who need someone who cares about them more than a heterosexual man possibly could. Let's face it, most BLs have a tremendously higher level of patience, understanding and affection for boys who are not their sons, not to mention the potential to be way more effective in dealing with them. I have spent my entire life working out ways to make friends with boys because I desired so much to be with them. This has given me an incredible gift to relate to boys at a much deeper level than other adults around me. Without that sexual drive I would NEVER have had the interest in or ability to work so effectively with boys. Your parallel of boylove, or gay love to straight love is one that I have struggled with myself. I completely agree that our love for boys is not different in quantity or quality from the love between man and woman. However there are a huge number of physical indications that this is not how God intended sexual love to be. Homosexual love is physically damaging and carries a high risk of disease transmission. Boylove is rooted in attraction to a passing phase in a human life. Why God would allow desire and love to be oriented towards something that we can't or shouldn't have, IS a mystery. But, as Heather points out, there is a distinction between sexual love and just plain love. There have been times in my life where I absolutely believed that the two were inseparably linked. I think that our world has oversexualized relationships so that we have difficulty knowing if love can exist without sex. But I think it can. Like you, when I stopped masterbating, I too became obsessed with desire and became sleepless. That is for a while, until I became aware of how dependent I was on sexual release to survive! This might not have happened if I had grown up in an environment where my sexuality didn't have such a ripe soil in which to grow. Those who discover their sexuality later in life often are less obsessed with sexual release than those who come upon it very early. Finally, I continue to ponder Paul's life and the 'thorn' that he claimed to have in his flesh. He had young men as his companions always and never married. I really do wonder if Paul himself wasn't a BL. Although I believe that he remained celibate after his conversion, I wonder if he himself didn't struggle with purity and masterbation. Paul understood sexual thoughts too well (based on his letters to various Churches) to be someone who didn't struggle with sexuality. This was a burden that he had to deal with, yet at the same time Paul was perhaps the most powerful of all of the Apostles of Christ. Were we not dealt a challenging hand from God, we might not have the spiritual exercise needed to become true Christians. You are not alone. Ben |