Hello Everybody,
As you can see, I'm in a mode where I have some questions floating around in my head that I hope other people might want to discuss as well.
Have any of you been running into this: you meet someone, and of course, it could be a man or woman (keep in mind though, I can only write from a woman's perspective) and they seem like an awesome person of God... They talk boldly about their faith, they speak earnestly about God's roles for men and women, especially within marriage (man as the provider, women in the more domestic role and submissive, etc.)... and then... you find out they are having a very difficult time with pornography. Or maybe it's not even a so-called addiction yet, but just a "casual curiosity", so they might say.
Would this be something that would cause you to lose interest? I see Christian bookshelves nowadays filled with stories of marriages, ministries, careers, etc. torn apart because of porn...
I know so many women (again, I apologize, but I can only speak from a female point of view), Christian and not, who put up with it because they say, "That's just how guys are."
Is it totally unrealistic to hope for someone who ISN'T bound to this kind of chain?
I have found personally that if you ask God to show you a person's heart, He will (and I always ask that my heart be shown as well, because I feel I have nothing to hide--and in my experience, God won't do it in an embarrassing, everyone-is-going-to-know way.)
Long story short--I was dating someone once, and stopped over at their house (he lived with his Mom) unannounced one day... and there on his desk... was a three-inch stack of "pictures" he's printed out from the internet... and they all featured Asian women. Being Asian myself, I was especially appalled by this and felt completely stabbed in the heart. I felt like nothing more than some kind of fetish object and curiosity to him. And for some reason, I felt completely ashamed of who I was.
Stupidly, I hung on for a while (because kids were involved and I thought I could help them) because I was trying to "be understanding." He would buy children's Bibles for me as gifts and say, "This is great, now you can read this to my kids."
Yes, I do want to be compassionate. But no, I don't want to be in a relationship that involves sexuality with with others in any form, which is what I personally view pornography to be.
Anyway... aside from all of that...
If you meet someone who's into porn (seeing as you can find it in so many forms--I have, unfortunately, been exposed to some of the animated things out there and think they're 100 times worse than the "regular" varieties), how will you react (or how have you reacted) and what will you do (or what have you done)?
Or will you just let it go, figuring God is still working on them, or "boys will be boys"?
As you can see, I'm in a mode where I have some questions floating around in my head that I hope other people might want to discuss as well.
Have any of you been running into this: you meet someone, and of course, it could be a man or woman (keep in mind though, I can only write from a woman's perspective) and they seem like an awesome person of God... They talk boldly about their faith, they speak earnestly about God's roles for men and women, especially within marriage (man as the provider, women in the more domestic role and submissive, etc.)... and then... you find out they are having a very difficult time with pornography. Or maybe it's not even a so-called addiction yet, but just a "casual curiosity", so they might say.
Would this be something that would cause you to lose interest? I see Christian bookshelves nowadays filled with stories of marriages, ministries, careers, etc. torn apart because of porn...
I know so many women (again, I apologize, but I can only speak from a female point of view), Christian and not, who put up with it because they say, "That's just how guys are."
Is it totally unrealistic to hope for someone who ISN'T bound to this kind of chain?
I have found personally that if you ask God to show you a person's heart, He will (and I always ask that my heart be shown as well, because I feel I have nothing to hide--and in my experience, God won't do it in an embarrassing, everyone-is-going-to-know way.)
Long story short--I was dating someone once, and stopped over at their house (he lived with his Mom) unannounced one day... and there on his desk... was a three-inch stack of "pictures" he's printed out from the internet... and they all featured Asian women. Being Asian myself, I was especially appalled by this and felt completely stabbed in the heart. I felt like nothing more than some kind of fetish object and curiosity to him. And for some reason, I felt completely ashamed of who I was.
Stupidly, I hung on for a while (because kids were involved and I thought I could help them) because I was trying to "be understanding." He would buy children's Bibles for me as gifts and say, "This is great, now you can read this to my kids."
Yes, I do want to be compassionate. But no, I don't want to be in a relationship that involves sexuality with with others in any form, which is what I personally view pornography to be.
Anyway... aside from all of that...
If you meet someone who's into porn (seeing as you can find it in so many forms--I have, unfortunately, been exposed to some of the animated things out there and think they're 100 times worse than the "regular" varieties), how will you react (or how have you reacted) and what will you do (or what have you done)?
Or will you just let it go, figuring God is still working on them, or "boys will be boys"?
