The War Within Continues
Name Withheld
Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear … yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy.
Virtue, unlike innocence, has successfully passed a point of temptation.
Name Withheld I was sitting in an aisle seat on a cross-country flight when the passenger across the aisle, one row ahead, pulled out a magazine from his briefcase. I recognized something familiar in the furtive way he looked around, nervously adjusted his posture, and opened the magazine. He held the pages open just far enough to see inside, but from my angle I had a clear view of various women spreading their legs for the camera. It seemed incongruous, even bizarre, for a man dressed in a business suit to be studying some anonymous woman's private parts in the artificial setting of jammed-together airplane seats and plastic folding trays. But after the sense of the bizarre had passed, I felt another twinge, this one a mixture of pain and sadness. Five years ago, I was that man in the business suit, addicted to lust. I wrote about my struggle in the Fall 1982 edition of Leadership, in an article called "The War Within," which also is Chapter 1 in this book. After the sadness had passed, I felt an enormous sense of relief, for I realized that my initial sense of bizarreness was a sign of the healing God has accomplished so far. Not long after the airplane trip, an editor from Leadership asked if I would do another article, recounting what I had learned about lust in the five intervening years. At first, I didn't like the idea. It seemed an unnecessary probing of old wounds. The article had been for me a means of catharsis, a deliverance. ...
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