Love of God in Community

 

From the time I was very young I knew that God loves me.  I could quote John 3:16 and sing "Jesus Loves Me" with the best of them.  As a child, I believed in God's love and felt it at many different points.  But then something happened as I journeyed into my teens and twenties, I became addicted to internet pornography.  As the acid addiction spread through my being, that sense that God loved me slowly dissolved.  The more involved I was with porn the colder my heart became.  Whatever love I had felt for God when I was younger gradually grew distant and dark.  I could still feel his love, but it was a shadow of what it once was.

In spite of the deadness of my feelings, I still believed in God's love.  My faith was built on the unchanging Word of God, and when it told me that God loves me, I believed it.  But my passion for the Lord was cooling, doused by the black water of pornography.  My religion was driven by duty and self-discipline.  I said and did the right things because I was supposed to, even while my heart was not really in it.

There is something here that is important for us to know about pornography addiction, and really any addiction.  We use these behaviors and substances in order to help us cope with the painful feelings we have.  If we feel angry, sad, lonely, frustrated, bored, or any other uncomfortable emotion, then we turn to porn to cope with that pain.  Our unconscious goal is to erase the sorrow we feel, but what inevitably happens is that we end up numbing out all of our emotions, good and bad.  We use porn to find relief from the fear, anger and sadness we feel, but then it strangles our capacity to feel love and joy as well.  We can't numb out our negative feelings without numbing out the positive feelings as well.

In the best of circumstances it can be challenging to feel the love of God, but if we are acting out in an addiction, it makes it next to impossible.

I had a profound experience as I became involved in Twelve Step groups.  In these groups we are encouraged to share all of the shameful, destructive, addictive behaviors we have been participating in.  I learned this by example, as I sat in the rooms, I heard men tell painful, tragic stories of how sex addiction had devastated their lives.  There was certainly plenty of porn addiction represented, but I also heard stories of serial infidelity, prostitution, anonymous encounters, exhibitionism and worse.  These men opened up and showed me the raw flesh and bone of their wounded souls and as they did, it gave me the courage to begin to expose my own injured heart.

This happened simply at first, with the admission that I was addicted to porn and needed help.  I followed the lead of the other men in the group and learned to share my guilt, shame, insecurities and inadequacies.  Behaviors I was ashamed to tell anyone about, I told them about.  I began to share about the troubles from my childhood that led me to become addicted in the first place.  The more I heard other men share, the more I felt inspired me to share.  The more I shared, and the more I heard from them, the more I felt a deepening connection with them.  No matter what I shared, no matter how often I slipped back into porn, their responses were always ones of respect, affirmation and affection.  My iniquities laid heavily on me, but as I shared them with those men they became so much lighter.  In spite of all my flaws and failures, these men loved me.  Not because I did anything for them, but simply for who I was as a person.  Not because they had to, but because they truly wanted to.

Through those groups I found healing for many of the broken parts of my soul.  That part of me that had not been able to feel the love of God, began to be restored and I began to feel his love illuminate my soul once more.

I am a firm believer in spending quiet time alone with God, and I have felt great consolation during those times.  But this was different, the love I would feel in my devotions was a sitting by the fire when it is cold outside, these meetings were like a sunrise after a long night.

Part of it stemmed from the fact that while I was acting out, I felt deep shame and inadequacy.  I did not have any sense of love for myself, if anything, I hated myself.  When I became connected to the group, I found men who loved me and respected me unconditionally, and this allowed me to begin to love and respect myself in spite of my failures.  As those two parts fell in place it allowed me to more freely experience the love of God.  It was like I didn't really know the love of God until I saw it reflected in the faces of those men.

We can certainly know the love of God as we gaze into the Scriptures and find his tender care written across those pages.  And as we commune with him in prayer his sweet, Holy Spirit comforts us and encourages us.  But there is a depth and intensity of love that we can only find as we open up our hearts and allow ourselves to be exposed in the most intimate way.  And when we feel acceptance and compassion in that most vulnerable state we will know a whole new level of love we have never known before.

Jesus said this, "But this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." (John 13:35)  God is calling us to love each other.  This is not a superficial, patina of love, no, this is a love that should extend from the center of our being and pierce into the deepest core of the people God brings into our lives.  But for many of us, we never let anyone truly love us, because we have never let anyone truly know us.  Our armor is on, protecting our hearts from being hurt.  We are afraid to reveal our true selves because we may be disrespected or abandoned.  But the only way we can live out this love Jesus describes is if we open up our own hearts, reveal the wounds that are there and let our brothers and sisters love those wounds into healing.  Then we, in turn, can pour that love back out into the hearts of other hurting people.  This is the light that God is calling us to shine into this dark world.  Other people are the conduit that God uses to fill our hearts with his love, but we must be willing to open our hearts and receive that love.