burst the bubble

Had a couple of great conversations with two of our close female friends this weekend. One of them is a Navy wife whose husband used to be stationed here, transferred to Washington State and is packing up to move to Hawaii. She called my wife and I in tears because she was finding this latest move even more draining than the others. She misses us and a tragically small number of other good friends she's made in her years of doing the Navy Hop all around the country.
She was telling me about the difficulties she's had connecting with people at her church, and when she told me about their approach to ministry and relationships in general, I can understand why. And I don't know how she lasted as long as she has in that place.
She described an environment where "fellowship" is a mile wide and an inch deep, where trust is rare, where politics flavours relationships, where "concerned brothers/sisters" report possible lapses in others' Christian behaviour to the pastor, where it's all about image over substance, sin management instead of life transformation, and where tips and techniques and platitudes keep the naughty little sheep corraled neatly in a tiny corner of the Kingdom of God until He comes back to claim them.
That's only my impression of her description of this place, and shouldn't be construed as a judgment, because I'm in no place to make one. But I have personally been neck-deep in such a place, and the sad thing is that once it infects you, you bring it everywhere you go.
If what's coming up next shocks you, you probably need it. If you think I'm off base, or crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, by all means let me know, but please be prepared to defend your position with the Word and the Spirit. I have heard most if not all the arguments before.
The incident she described which left the greatest impression on me was one where a young sailor who was a shipmate of her husband's was on the floor in the front of the church, praying and weeping as he struggled with something obviously very painful and difficult. As she was a good friend of him and his wife, she went over and laid a hand on his shoulder while she prayed for him. Afterwards, when she was leaving, she was stopped by two women of the church who asked her how she knew the man. When she replied that he was a good friend, they told her that the church usually has male pastors pray for the men.
This reminded me in stark raving colour of how incalculably blessed I am by my friends here, and how ruined I am for what most in our culture call "church as usual." For Christ's good sake, what was dangerous or inappropriate about that? This was not some clandestine tryst, this was praying for someone IN CHURCH. Dear God, these people would have a stroke if they walked in on us and our friends at a cell group meeting.
I bought into this way of thinking long ago, that women and men had no business ministering to each other in any deep fashion unless they were married to each other, that appropriate boundaries between the sexes preclude almost any affection beyond the briefest and most perfunctory of hugs, that the only way men and women ought to need each other is in the context of marriage or blood relations.
Stuff that.
If every good and perfect gift comes from God, then what am I to make of the good works that have been done in my life through my friends - including my sisters in Christ? Who, if not Him, gets the glory for that? These convictions that I'd had were screaming at me when I first joined Grace and Peace Fellowship, when these incredible women were beckoning my wife and me farther and deeper into more and richer life in Him than I'd ever dreamed possible. I begged my wife and my brothers to tell me I was doing something horribly wrong. I would confess to them dreams and desires of (healthy) intimacy with my sisters and wait for the ax to fall. It never did.
What if intimacy really is okay? What would you say if I told you that once when I was facing a very painful time of healing, that it was a sister, one of my best friends and the wife of another of my best friends, who was walking me through it? What if I told you that at one point she wrapped her arms around me and held me? Held. Cuddled. Lingeringly embraced. Prolonged body contact. There. I said it. Are you scandalised? My wife was holding me too. Does that sanctify it, or make it a threesome? If you choose the latter then someone needs to bitch-slap you until your ears ring.
The whole time they were holding me I was begging God to forgive me. WHY?! I didn't initiate this; all I did was receive it. Blissfully. Do you really think there was anything sexual in it for me, her or my wife? There wasn't. So where's the problem? How sexual do you think I want to be with a friend like that? I am committed to her well-being and that of her husband and children. I love them far, far too much to cross that line.
Here's the kicker: I DON'T WANT TO. Not a bit. There is no desire in me to be immoral with these people I love so dearly. I love my God, my wife, and them too much for that consideration to be anything but repulsive. This was okay because they saw what God has been doing in me, and freely choose to partner with Him in it. Nothing has happened in a corner. My wife has been there through all of it. She trusts me and our friends. My sisters trust me. My brothers trust me with their wives and children. There is nothing I want badly enough to throw that away or even threaten it.
Don't get me wrong. I had good reasons for subscribing to those beliefs, such as deep-rooted problems with lust and a decades-long addiction to pornography. For a sizeable stretch of my walk with Christ those restrictions were healthy and necessary. My own personal observations - and experiences - have confirmed that there is indeed real risk of unhealthy attachments between genders. The enemy puts a great deal of his limited resources into destroying families. Even now, there are definitely some things I won't discuss with a woman other than my wife. I'm careful who I'm alone with, and for how long, and about what happens while I'm there.
My problem is less with those beliefs than with the depressingly prevalent attitude in the Western church that such strictures are the immutable and undisputable will of God for all people at all times. That attitude has no basis that I can find in Scripture. The more I follow Christ, the more I see the fear that is driving so much of our thinking in the Church today. Fear is really nothing more than misapplied faith. We put more faith in our own depravity and fallenness than in God's desire and ability to redeem and transform them into His glory and power and love. That is an insult to His sacrifice on the cross for us.
Any relationship includes risk if it's going to be deep enough to matter at all. There is real danger in using a stove. But that doesn't mean you never learn to cook; it just means you wait until you're mature enough to learn how without burning yourself.
I love and need my brothers, but God never intended them to be enough. I need my sisters. I need the balance their femininity brings to my hard-edged little world. I need them to keep inviting me farther into life and beauty, to awaken that which God made me to be. Their touch, the scent of their hair, the gentle, firm press of their embraces, their trust in and acceptance of me when I dare, ever so tremulously, to burst the bubble, arouses in me something so pure and priceless, so worth fighting for, that the lust that so used to define me cowers and slinks into oblivion. Nothing else in my life has given me such power over those base appetites, nothing else has helped me become truer to my own wife like their love. Many will flatly refuse to believe what I just wrote, but I am no liar. And those things are the design of no one but God. The Church needs to be a place where such intimacy can be nurtured and practiced, because it will destroy by contrast the bondage of sexual and emotional vampirism that the enemy has been weaving between man and woman since the Fall.