Sex With Purpose

 The title of this blog is "washed whiter than snow"- because that's what God's forgiveness is like. He has redeemed and made me whole. (You Have Won Me, Bethel Music) God is making me new. My past has messed up my mindset, but God is restoring me. How I was isn't how I have to be. I have hope. I have a future. God makes all things work together for my good. Even my wrong choices God will use for good. God is making me stronger.

SELFLESS PURPOSE

The other day I started going through my purity class again.  One of the lessons teaches about the purpose of sex. That a purpose for sex is oneness between the husband and wife. Any sex that does not fulfill that purpose is sex used improperly. Pleasure is good and created by God, but pleasure is a benefit of sex not the purpose. Pleasure is like a bonus. People shouldn't use sex to get pleasure. Because sex wasn't designed for a person to be selfish. I would say that another purpose of sex is to give love to your spouse. The lesson teaches that sex doesn't "make love," but it expresses it. I agree. A person doesn't create love by having sex. A (married) person decides to love someone and decides to express that love. Sex can be a way to show love by giving pleasure, but shouldn't be a way to take and get pleasure. 

I realize that I have made a lot of selfish choices when it comes to sexual things. These past few days of not letting my sexuality rule me has been very torturous. I previously had given in to every temptation that popped into my head. Now,  I have had to choose that I won't give myself whatever I want. My sexuality wasn't created for me to selfishly take and satisfy my every desire. Even when I am married, I won't necessarily have my every desire met. That's because my whole life can't revolve around me. I would be selfish and spoiled literally rotten if I got everything I wanted. It's good that we're figuring this out now because our marriage would be filled with a lot of hurt if I acted with as much greed as I have been. 

I really want to change my mindset about sex and not let my desires rule me. I'm scared of how long I can stay self controlled. I know that it is important for me to tame my desires and to not let a hint of compromise in. I need to stay out of trouble. I need to be stronger. 

Prayer: God, give me strength the overcome. Help me be who you have made me to be. Help me experience the fullness of your gift. Help me to be one who gives instead of take. Create in me a selfless heart. Help me to deny my desires to do what is right. Help me fight temptation. Help me to make wise choices. Help me to build a better future. Protect my marriage. Help me to only put good things into it. 

Eve and the Fruit

Eve ate the forbidden fruit. She saw that the fruit was good to eat. Eve thought that the fruit tasted good, even though eating the fruit brought death.

That's the was it is with sin. Sometimes sin can feel good, even when it's not good for you.

I was just thinking about sometimes I enjoy sin. It feels good to do wrong things, but sin brings along with it things that bring death.

Like Eve, we all have a tree. The tree was beautiful.

We only get tempting- if it is tempting(attractive/ appealing.)

Prayer:
God, I need your wisdom to think more of what I need than what feels good. Help me make choices that are good for me and for my future husband. I trust that what you have planned for me is better than anything I could get on my own. Sometimes I have fun sinning, but it's sad that those fun times are tainted by the fact that they were evil. God I wish all of my memories of being sexual were memories that I could celebrate. Help me to not make selfish choices.

Reward System

My fiance and I decided to put a star sticker on the calendar for everyday that we make good choices, or as we call it "stay out of trouble." We started this system a week ago and so far had a sticker for every day- until today. It may seem childish, but the idea behind it was to celebrate success one day at a time. It helps give us a visual to our accomplishments. It motivates us because we don't want to have any days without stickers. We want the proof that we have been successful.

Moving Past Failure

I really don't know how to respond to failure.
It seems like the choices are acceptance and moving on or living in defeat from the past.
Of course repentance needs to accompany the acceptance(if sin is involved). I'm wondering what healthy acceptance looks like.

Today my fiance and I made a bad choice and we sinned. We did sexual things outside of marriage. We acted selfishly, and we hurt each-other and ourselves.

In response I was remorseful, and asked for forgiveness. Now I'm done crying about it. My thoughts are: "it happened, it was wrong, let's move on." But now I feel like I'm doing something wrong.

When I think of the scenario that played out, I think it was kind of fun and exciting. I wish I could have more.

What we did was wrong, but fun.
It was hurtful and selfish.

Prayer:
God I pray that you will help me to love my fiance better. I ask you to help me learn from this situation. Help me respond correctly. Help me honor you in all that I do. Help me keep my mind pure. Help me overcome the sexual desires I have fed. 

New Years

This time last year I remember being super frustrated. The one thing that I wanted to change about the new year was that I wanted to be free from sexual temptation. I wanted to have a pure mind and not feel trapped. I felt frustrated because I thought this goal was not possible. This had been a problem I had faced for years and I thought it was never going away. I thought that I could never change. I felt squashed by my past.

I still wish that some things from my past weren't there. A lot of things actually. Some of them seem too terrible for me to speak of. I wonder if things from my past will ever come back to haunt me. I'm scared. I pray that God will protect me and that He will use all things for good. Even if that past comes back and is used against me, God can make that work for good. It may hurt, but God will be by my side. I pray that He gives me peace to not be defeated by possibility of future calamity. I pray that God will give me peace in the event that something does come up.

Bachelorette Party

A close friend of mine is getting married next weekend. To celebrate with her some friends threw her a bachelorette party. The party was being hosted by church people and they assured the guests that they were going to keep things classy. I had been to a couple of other bachelorette parties previously and was confident that it would not be more than I could handle. The party was on the clean side and nothing offensively vulgar. The part that caused me trouble was the opening of gifts. The bride received gifts for her honeymoon, and speculated about what that would be like.

After the party was over, I couldn't help but wish that I been receiving those gifts and wish that I would be enjoying those parts of marriage soon. For the next few days, I had sex on the brain and couldn't seem to get it out. I kept imagining and wondering about my honeymoon, and feeling very impatient.

Prayer: God, I pray that you will help me control my thoughts. Help me to have patience to save for marriage everything that is designed for marriage. Help me to make no compromises. Help me to pursue purity. Help me overcome temptation. 

Engaged Life

Okay, so that's news! I've been engaged for a month now! :) It's a very exciting thing.

It's been too long since I've posted an update of my journey.

First of all, it seems like I've stopped being an "I" and more of a "we" lately. The "we" I refer to will be my fiance and me.

A while back we made a list of physical boundaries that we intended to maintain. Our goal was that we wanted to be in right relationship with God by not participating in sinful behavior. The other goal was to strengthen our relationship by not distracting ourselves from emotional growth by focusing on physical intimacy. Before becoming engaged we were fairly rigid in adhering to these boundaries except for 1 incident, which crossed some of the rules but not a great number of them.

After becoming engaged we spent so much of our time talking about what our future would be like, that it was hard to not just want to start those things now. It was confusing trying to mentally keep the physical intimacy in future. We recognized that we were getting too comfortable physically and had made small compromises. We decided that any compromise could lead to trouble and that we wanted to avoid trouble.

There was another time that my fiance and I spent all day planning our wedding and were getting very excited about the wedding. We gave in to our passions and broke our boundaries again.

In recent news, preparing for marriage got real. My fiance and I began to talk about differing lifestyle choices and how to work together in harmony. These conversations were more difficult than either of us had expected. We didn't seem to be reaching an agreement and it was frustrating. This situations caused a lot of fear for me. I was feeling afraid of not being able to work through these situations. Because of the fear and the difficulty in our relationship, I wanted to avoid the challenge and do something easy- like kissing. This happened two days in a row. After the first day we decided that we wanted to avoid temptation to stay out of trouble and not create bad habits. But then the second day came and we discussed more difficult topics. Wanting to have an enjoyable ending to a rough conversation we decided again to turn to kissing. This time we realized that we were using the physical aspect as a replacement for connection, which in-turn builds distance. We don't want to go back to how our relationship was before when it was full of fear and no real connection- just avoiding the truth.

Even though this seems like a lot of failure in the past month or so, we are learning a lot. With each failure causes us to learn why we want to choose differently next time. We are not creating bad habits. We have not fallen even close to where we were before we made our list of boundaries. We need to make sure that it stays that way.