The writer of Ephesians understands that to tell the thief not to steal and leave it at that doesn’t have a very high chance of being helpful. The thief will be left with a battle on their hands that will pit them against their craving.
Whatever it is that has its hooks in you, you will never be free from it until you find something you want more. It’s not about getting rid of desire. It’s about giving ourselves to bigger and better and more powerful desires.
What are you channeling your energies into?16 Because they will go somewhere.
If they don’t go into a few, select, disciplined pursuits that you are passionate about and are willing to give your life to, then they’ll dissipate into all sorts of urges and cravings that won’t even begin to bring the joy that the “one thing” could.
You are crammed full of the “madness of the gods.” And you will end up giving the force of your being to something.
Maybe it’s as simple as asking God to show it to you, to give it to you, to make you aware of it.
There was a story all over the news about a television star whose boyfriend videotaped the two of them having sex and then put it on the internet. Apparently lots of people were watching it, and she was crushed. Which is sad. But what’s tragic is that she was known for having sex and shopping. It kind of became her schtick—she was making a career out of being shallow. Now, of course, she was all over the media, and she was making lots of money, so she was clearly much smarter than she let on, but she was made for so much more than this.
Her life force was tremendous. But the problem was she hadn’t channeled it into something, or a few things, that were good and true and beautiful. She hadn’t focused all of that God-given sexual energy into the ongoing creation of a better and better world. And so she fell for all of these temptations that robbed her of the joy she was made for.
The last thing she needed to do is tone down those energies.
She simply needed to redirect them.
What is it you’ve given your life to?
Life is not about toning down and repressing your God-given life force. It’s about channeling it and focusing it and turning it loose on something beautiful, something pure and true and good, something that connects you with God, with others, with the world.
What do you want more?
How can you make your life about that so that you won’t be tempted to give in to this?
CHAPTER FIVE She Ran into the Girls' Bathroom
When I was twelve, I went to a dance at my school. It was held in the cafeteria, where they folded up the lunch tables and brought in a DJ. The girls stood on one side of the room, the boys stood on the other. Every once in a while, somebody would bravely venture across this massive chasm to ask someone to dance, and then everybody would watch them. Perhaps you endured this particular form of torture at some point in your adolescence.
It is not pretty.
I remember walking up to a girl, whose name I can recall with clarity twenty-four years later, and asking her if she would like to dance with me. Those of you who have walked this road know the determination and fortitude it takes to leave the boys’ side, walk across the lunchroom-turned-dance-floor to the girls’ side, and make your request. It takes all that a young man has in him not to buckle under the enormity of the pressure. But I did it. I made it to the other side and asked her if she would like to dance with me.
Her response?
She burst into tears and ran into the girls’ bathroom, where she spent the rest of the evening.
Strange the things we remember, isn’t it?
But perhaps there’s a reason certain stories stay with us years later. It’s not just that they’re true in that they actually happened, but they’re true in the sense that they point to something else, to larger truths about how life is.
When I asked this girl to dance, I gave her the choice of saying yes or no. I gave her options. If she had said yes, all sorts of new possibilities would have opened up, namely my getting to dance with her. And then maybe another dance. And then maybe a phone call the next week. Perhaps passing some notes in class. Whatever it is that twelve-year-olds do in a “relationship.”
But if she said no, then things weren’t going to progress at all. And this was her decision, not mine. By extending myself to her in the invitation to dance, I took a great risk. I risked that she would say no and I would be left standing there on the girls’ side of the cafeteria humiliated.
Which is what happened.
I had to live with her decision.
I was at the mercy of her choice. I had given her the power in the relationship, at least what there was of a relationship.
When you make a move toward a person, when you extend yourself to them,
when you invite them to do something, when you initiate conversation, you give them power.
Power to say yes or no.
Power to decide.
This is true from junior high dances to marriage proposals to inviting someone for coffee.
Everyone who has ever received a no knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The Invitation to Risk
Anytime we move toward another in any way, we are taking a risk. A risk that she may say no. Our gesture may not get returned. Our invitation may be rejected. Our love may not be reciprocated.
A few years ago I was on a trip with a friend, and we had just gotten on the plane and sat down and fastened our seatbelts, and the flight attendant was just about to tell us how to . . . fasten our seatbelts, when my friend leaned over to me and asked, “Remember that business trip I took to the East Coast a few weeks ago? Well, it wasn’t for business. I went to be with this woman I’ve been emailing.”
But he wasn’t done.
“And remember when my wife went out of town last weekend? I wasn’t alone in my house. The woman I’ve been emailing came and spent the weekend with me.”
Where do you go from there, when a friend drops a bomb like that? Needless to say, the trip had a dark cloud over it. I begged him on the return flight to leave the airport and go straight home and be honest with his wife. I promised to help find a counselor to guide them through this mess. But as I was saying goodbye to him, I realized I had a question that was more important than anything we had talked about. I asked him if he wanted to be married to his wife.
He said no.
As he said no, I had flashbacks of their wedding ceremony, the vows, the “till death do us part” section, all the friends and family who had been there. The dresses, the flowers, the toasts. The kiss.
So he went to his home, I went to mine. I had been back probably fifteen minutes when there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and there stood his wife, sobbing. She was trying to talk, but not much was coming out. She came in and sat on the couch between my wife and me, and we put our arms around her and she cried and she cried and she cried.
There are a lot of different ways to cry. There’s the “somebody close to you is dying” cry, the “confessing dark secrets” cry, the “I’m angry and want to kill or at least significantly maim someone” cry, the groom’s “my bride is coming down the aisle” cry, the “kid whose feelings have been hurt” cry. There’s the “car accident I could have died in but didn’t” cry. There’s even the “I just hit my thumb with the hammer and it hurts so much but I’m not going to cry, so little tears are forming in the corners of my eyes” cry. But her cry on that day was a kind of crying I have seen many times. It’s