You’ll here about Boston soon enough. Patience, young grasshopper.
First of all, let me tell you something that nobody may have said to you before without having a sexual motive behind it. You’re as pretty as the best sunsets in the world’s most beautiful countries.
For reasons unknown, for the past half decade I have been programming my brain to impress those who don’t mirror my potential. In doing so, I have created multiple masks that have become semi-permanent. Now, when I am my real self, my face is stained by the residue of the paint that used to be there. The thoughts of what I had done to attain acceptance haunts not only my face, but, my habits. Now there is such holds that are so strongly embedded in my personality that all I can be is my naked self: seeking freedom from where I have originally stopped trying to receive it from. All because I’ve tried literally everything else.
Drugs accept you. I can’t blame people from using such things as utensils to stop the bleeding for they do that for a short period. They make you feel like you have that BMW you wanted, like you have that degree that is taking you a decade to attain, and it makes you feel like you have that marriage on TV with no issues. It makes you feel like you have your family back. Like you’re bills are being paid in full on time. Like your credit is 950. It’s like literal and metaphorical Tylenol, it numbs to help the healing. But it doesn’t heal. The healing process is much more painful. You have to revisit the issues that made you like you were! The issues that made you put on the masks of impression that left the residue of bad memories on your face.
One of my drugs of choice was men. It may still be. Who’s to say I’m not in the process of healing from this like one of you may be as well. Men. The world is full of them, there’s millions in the sea, yet, it only takes one to fill a void to create codependency on one just as unhealthy as you. If they decide that all that you’ve given them is enough and move on, you move on. And on. And on. Until you look back at the list you’ve moved on with and realize that it reached a number higher than you could have ever expected it to go. Now you have countless boxes of memories you’d rather burn in a mosh pit and a habit that tells you that it hurts more to try to stop this than to change. A lying devil that tells you that everyone has their own path/there are several paths to Jesus. A schemer that says “don’t rush the process of being whole” because “God forgave your sins at the cross” so “he doesn’t judge you for who you are as long as you’re honest with him.”
To a God where all things are possible, honesty ain’t enough. If God made you looking being just like Him, He is not okay with settling with your choice to live honest and broken before Him. When you are honest with God there is an exchange for your sins to His grace. And His grace makes the process enterable enough for you to embrace.
(Side note: I know plenty of honest alcoholics, a plethora of honest baseheads and more than a handful of honest pill poppers that would rather be honest with God and everybody else about their beloved addictions without a bone in their body to want to seek help. You don’t get delivered from what you love and you don’t get healed from what you don’t want to let go of. IF THE GOD WHO MADE YOU PERFECT DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU NOT REMAINING PERFECT THEN I’D QUESTION THE GODLIKE QUALIFICATIONS OF THAT GOD! One who made you in His image, who countlessly states to be like Him as He made you to be, who warns that not being like Him equals us not being near him anymore, who literally sent Himself in flesh to sacrifice Himself for our impurities so that our sins won’t cut us off from Him is not telling you it’s okay to live broken. He is telling you that it doesn’t matter what you did, or what you just finished doing (not period) because He can cleanse you from anything and make you pure again.
When I first saw Boston’s inner city at night I literally fell in love. It reminded me of a clean downtown Los Angeles I always wished existed. It reminded me of a Brooklyn without the shootings. The best of both costs in the coldest place on earth in the winter. I wanted to move almost immediately until I realized that goal wasn’t realistic and that I had to catch a flight home the very next day.
Boston reminded me of a couple of relationships I had been involved in. Boston may even remind you of a couple of relationships as well. Those type of relationships that feel like a perfect marriage for the first few months then you get a dose of reality from Hell for the remainder of the year. Those one night stands that made you feel like you were sleeping with your fiancé only to get left in a motel room on the other side of town. Those waisted times you spent talking to someone who you were highly attracted to yet realized they didn’t have anything in life at all and that source of everything became you and you began to consciously date a leach. Boston reminded me of the marriage I thought I’d have by 25. The house I thought I was gunna buy this time last year. The two children I thought I’d have by now. It reminded me of the wasted time I spent idolizing relationships, the idea of marriage and the attention from a husband-like figure that will completely make me whole instead of my purpose in Christ.
What can you be cleansed from if you don’t reveal it at the time of cleansing? If you get into the shower with a two piece bikini on, the only thing that is going to be cleansed is the skin directly open to the water. So, the areas that you really know you can’t clean without the water, you wash. The other areas that you think aren’t that necessary or that you think you can wipe off yourself simply stay dirty. Even if you wipe a dirty foot with a dry cloth, it will only get so much dirt removed until you put that foot in a bathtub, let it soak and scrub it off. The soaking of our formal selves is actually a large portion of the issue.
We want the finished product. We give ourselves to God and then fall back into the same strongholds and begin to idolize marriage and relationships all over again until we fall. We don’t take the time to process out of the habits that had us bound therefore we have taken our dirtiness that we can’t clean ourselves and began to say “okay, I’ve been soaking long enough. We pick up an average cloth and wipe what has been soaking and it looks clean-but it isn’t all the way purified. Then we step right back into those Stacy’s or stilettos to go run full speed in the mud again.
I was seeking from attention of men while rejecting the attention of God. Because of this, I just may have hoeish tendencies without hoeish actions. But, that’s okay. I can take my “attention whore” self to Jesus and He will take me from a mass winner of dates to a mass winner of souls (not just soul mates). So, the tendency isn’t the issue. The tendency is just the glue to the habit to act on it. The tendency can be changed by the newness of mindsets you put in front of it. Therefore, as ratchet and radical as you were in the clubs, passion parties, bars, hookah lounges, back seats, parks, beaches, stranger/friend/foe’s bedrooms, forever21/urban outfitters’, Victoria’s Secrets’ ect for the kingdom of Hell, you can and will become just as ratchet and radical for the kingdom of Heaven.
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. “ 2 Corinthians 5:17
Trust that God can transform your bad habits, fill all of your voids and renew every bondage in your mind that exhausts. There are certain strongholds that require the process and if you don’t embrace the process you will find yourself in what you think is a good relationship that bears the same fruit as all of your other ones. And it wouldn’t be your mate’s fault but yours and all of the bad habits and tendencies of brokenness that may result in you damaging someone. Hurting people hurt people. Broken people break people down.
It may seem as if you are just enjoying your life. Yeah, you pray for monetary blessings periodically. You avidly read a scripture pertaining to your upward sloping lifestyle regularly. You have a girlfriend that you feel is a blessing from Heaven. You have a decent car. A house of your own. You go out and get drunk and dance out of your socks. You even have a one night stand or two here and there at least once a week. You like to explore your options. You like to experience different men and women. You like to feed your appetite that makes you feel a temporary success. But, with all of this where is your discipline?
“For the lack of discipline they will die, led astray by their own great folly.”
-Proverbs 5:23
Example 1: Meet Tom
Tom’s boys call him Time2Party.
Tom has a job making $200k a year.
Tom takes holidays in the UK and vacations in Cancun resorts.
Tom has a college degree.
Tom has exceptional credit.
Tom is a nice, sweet talking gentlemen.
Tom got molested at the age of 9-14 by a Cousin just stair steps older than him who introduced him to pornography.
Tom is confused with his sexuality.
Tom’s best friend slept with the girl he fell in love with in college.
Tom looks at women now as objects that relieve physical stress. Nothing more and nothing less.
Tom worked hard in school and on his job because he never wanted to get betrayed or out of control again.
Tom keeps control of his own life and nobody can tell him how to live it anymore.
Tom does what he wants.
Tom is Tom’s own god.
Tom rejects “religion” or any form of relationship with God because being submitted to something larger than he will take the control of his life out of his hands.
Tom uses sex as a way to feel in control over his life.
Tom never had a stable relationship.
Tom is a nice guy tho.
Ladies love Tom because Tom has it together.
Tom wants to destroy the woman who cheated on him with his best friend in every woman he meets by belittling their worth to remain a false sense of control and have an excuse that since women aren’t shhh he will sleep with men on the side without anyone ever suspecting it.
(No, not Tom.
Tom isn’t gay.
Tom isn’t bisexual. Is he?)
Tom is broken.
And Tom lacks discipline.
Example 2: Meet Aly
Aly just likes to dance.
Aly loves her makeup from Sephora.
Aly got a college degree.
Aly played college sports.
Aly works a few different jobs.
Aly loves to make quick money moves.
Aly loved the Disney kind of fairy tail love.
Aly has pretty decent credit.
Aly is a talkative, life of the party type of girl.
Aly making money is HappyAly.
Aly is ambitious.
Aly feels the only thing she needs now is a man to complete her.
Aly watched her parent’s marriage crumble through countless affairs her father had.
Aly don’t trust men as it is but would deal with them.
Aly doesn’t know what’s keeping her from loving her past boyfriends.
Aly loves the camera.
Aly loves the attention she receives behind the camera.
Aly tried to get validation and attention from likes by showing off what broken men love to see.
Aly didn’t get enough validation from her disrespectful father therefore she allows every man she’s with to disrespect her because that’s the example she was given.
Aly was raped by her first boyfriend in freshman year.
Aly felt disgusted with men after that and only wanted to date girls.
Aly would rather give it up than have her control taken away again.
Aly would rather accept the fact that she would never see beyond men being dogs so she works on the side at a strip club.
Aly feels at least if she’s getting naked it won’t be for free.
Aly has a million fake friends who tells her her outfits are cute then goes to bed disgusted with herself every night.
Aly hides her disgust behind shopping, casual sexing, progressing towards more income in the professional world and by buying quality bundles and colored lace fronts.
Aly has a false love for herself.
Aly doesn’t know her worth.
Aly asks her father for money periodically, her crack dealing sugar dads for money and asks God for money periodically.
Aly believes she is successful because Aly made it happen-Not her parents, not God, only Aly.
God is only Aly’s personal genie just as Aly’s boyfriends are her own personal piggy banks.
Aly still is struggling with her sexuality.
Aly states to people that God is a Her-a mother figure-a seed bearer.
Aly believes the universe is in control of the good that happens in her life.
Aly tried to convince herself that there is no such thing as good and evil just lessons learned and money to be made.
(What in Hell is Aly?)
Aly is broke.
And Aly lacks discipline.
So, what happens when Tom meets Aly? A war that God gracefully minimized into fireworks.
I’m sure many of you were either Tom or Aly at one point in your lives. You may still be Tom and Aly currently. Please, make like a young one and embrace the process of healing. Processing correctly through your pain can lead to true wholeness and first going to the one who can only heal you (Jesus) and not the people that attempted to victimize you is the final step. Jesus indeed is the author of your beautiful testimony and the finisher of your process which builds the faith you need in your greatest future to move the mountains you never had the thought to move. Embrace a God who will withhold no good thing from you. A God who is a deliverer and a healer. A God who doesn’t condemn you for your mistakes just so you can embrace His greatness on your beautiful lives. Start to see God as who He really is, a life changer, and get a new perspective.
New Transparency- New Perspectives 