|
|
|
|
It's so sunny out. It’s a Sunday and my wife and I decide to take the kids down to the park near the Lakeshore. I have three children now and my youngest daughter is just under a month old. Something happens to me in the Spring. Its like a conversion, an awakening of some kind. I begin to unfold and realize that life is so much bigger, brighter, and better than I first thought. Maybe it’s the shock of viewing the world outside of my fifteen inch computer screen. I’m sitting on a bench looking at the jungle gym in front of me and looking at four or five little black children having a ball. “Get your a** down from there!” Calls their mom next to me. I look over and she’s holding two little ones in her arms, only months old each of them. I want to say something and I can’t really bring out words so all I say is “what beautiful babies!” She looks over at me and smiles, “Thank you.” Then she turns back to her little ones and breaks up another fight. I look for my own children. My daughter wants to get on the swing. My son wants to climb a tree. Not in turn but simultaneously, and the tree is about 100 feet from the swing. I choose to help my daughter first. I put her in the small infant bucket swing and she smiles. Meanwhile in the corner of my eye my son has taken to chopping down the tree because he can’t climb it. He gives up and I turn around to find him over at the jungle gym. “Why aren’t you climbing the tree?” “I couldn’t climb it so I was chopping it down.” “With a stick?” “Yeh.” “How about if I help you get up in it?” “OK.” We get over to the tree and he’s having second thoughts. It looks too high now. I look around and see my daughter still sitting in the swing quietly. Strange and Wonderful I forgot to push her but somehow she’s still happy. I walk over and begin pushing her. She’s the happiest I’ve seen her in a long while. And so am I. I look down and see a little worm wriggling in the sunlight under her swing. I say “Hey! Look at this” and I stop the swing. I bend down to pick it up and realize, “Wait you don’t show worms to little girls.” It's common for little boys to scare little girls with worms. That’s the way of things. Well my little girl being three, probably hasn’t viewed many earth worms. I give it a shot. This little worm is very active. “Honey, look at this.” She watches it wriggle and is shy and excited at the same time. She doesn’t want to hold it but she likes looking at it. It crawls from one hand to the other. My hands are getting dirty and I don’t care. I’m outside and it's spring. Ladybugs are out and several land on me, in my eyes and neck and hair. Its strange but wonderful. I’m pushing my daughter on the swing and I look over and realize the Hispanic man next to me is pushing his little girl much higher. I feel more confident to push my daughter higher. She’s not scared this year like last summer. She’s delighted. I think about my feelings and consider that I’m intoxicated by her beauty. My little three year old girl has stolen my heart, and I don’t deserve her. I consider that it’s a small miracle for me to really see beauty and appreciate it as such. Over the winter I’ve become so used to beauty by way of the small screen, by way of the large billboard on the roadside, or on the glossy printed page in the waiting room. Now that its Spring I consider that all this time I haven’t known real beauty at all. Beauty and Lust I’m what I would call a beauty addict. I look for it everywhere. Beauty is such a nice and subjective term. Deciding what is truly beautiful and how to appropriate it has perhaps been part of my life’s work. On the one hand my Christian faith and love for Christ informs my eye for beauty, leading me to an understanding of true beauty in my Lord, my wife, my children, and in God’s creation around me. On the other hand, since young adolescence I have had both a fixation and revulsion for beauty as it was taught me by my siblings in the boy’s locker room and by the media. One friend in high school offered me his personal antidote for hard times. He said that when he was hurting inside he would think of the most beautiful supermodel he could remember and fixate on her. With his sexual arousal piqued by her image he forgot about whatever was wrong. I told him that I couldn’t do that because I was a Christian and it was wrong to lust. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d already been doing that for years. To say that a supermodel is not really beautiful, and that her beauty has no effect on me would be self-deceiving. But empowering her image as the Beauty I embrace to transport me above my reality is something I can and do control. My wife’s beauty in real physical, tangible form that I can embrace and nurture is the Beauty I can say I will choose. There is also the real issue of male visual deception. I understand that as a man I have a visual weakness. God gave me the sexual gift of being stimulated by my visual senses. That gift is intended for development and use with my wife, within marriage. The obvious trouble is that as a man I have been duped since childhood by my fixation into an ideal form of woman that doesn’t fit what God intended. I can’t blame all of that on society. I have helped bring about the acculturation, feeding my senses with arousing visual stimulus. With Darkened Eyes There’s been too many times when I’ve looked at true Beauty with darkened eyes. I couldn’t take in the full impact of the beauty of my smiling wife and children, my many friends and Christian upbringing, because I had robbed the value they deserved and gave it freely to some supermodel I’ve never met, who could never return my affection. Today as I feel the intoxication of a beautiful reality spent with my wife and kids on a sunny Sunday afternoon it makes me never want to return to the old guilt and shame I used to know after sexually acting out those other values. I don’t want to rob the real Beauty in my life of its value any more. More than that, this Beauty has a power I haven’t truly tapped. A power that includes me. When I give in to lust I step outside of the picture. I look on my wife and kids and friends as a separate reality. I look in the mirror ashamed of what I am. I don’t see a family man, a Christian, a writer. I see a pervert, a liar, a pornographer. Along with the sin comes the fear of being something else. I’ve been down that road to the degree that I thought all I could do was run from the Beauty in my life because it no longer included me. Purely Beautiful To my amazement, Christ has taken me beyond that unreality and assigned me another place in Him. He puts me back in the frame and tells me who I really am. I am more than just a Christian and a family man. I am part of the Beauty that he has designed. I want that reality. I want my wife and my children, and the cost of taking on those old visual values is too high. Back at the park, my wife has taken my son up a hillside in the distance and I’ve stayed back to watch my daughters, the baby sleeping and the lively three year old now wanting to run as far as her eyes can see. I convince her to sit and wait with me by the baby carriage for mom to return by playing one of her favorite games. She plays a game where she is feeding me or giving me money. “Here’s some money for you daddy,” or “Here drink this tea.” She doesn’t realize how much she really gives me. How, with Christ, she is healing my mind and senses and bringing me back to reality. All
content © 2002 Cornerstone Communications; |
|
