Life Matters - July 5, 2023
No, I wasn’t looking for any such thing, but came across it in the news. I have much better things to do than to look at cold, dead pictures of women displaying skin who are, Biblically speaking (Proverbs 9:13-18), carnally motivated by desires to be accepted by carnal, spiritually cold men. The picture in question was a young woman turned toward a camera (or rather, the camera turned toward her) in an explicit and degrading pose for all to see. Her “boyfriend” Jeff, one of the richest men on earth (in worldly assets) seems to have taken the embarrassing picture, or at least consented to it, as it was taken on a cruise aboard his super-yacht.
So, as I embark on this subject that literally has me squirming in my seat, I am aware what those of us who care enough to speak up are up against. I’m sure I’m not aware of everything, but aware enough to know that we (as in America) have a sensual immorality problem that has been getting progressively worse since I was a boy. And as it gets progressively worse, so does the flaunting of it. I feel sorry for so many women who are increasingly being objectified and indeed many are subjecting themselves to it by objectifying themselves. There was a news article of one young woman (bless her) spending $30,000 to reverse “augmentation” she’d had done (however they do that) to augment certain parts of her anatomy. Another who had a botched lip augmentation to deal with. How did we even get here?
I think I’m beginning to understand, after 42 years of marriage, the God-given need in a woman to be assured by her husband that he finds her cute and desirable. I think I’m also beginning to understand how that desire is being flaunted by many outside of marriage and outside of God’s will. And how men feed that desire by giving in to carnal desires of their own. How men become desensitized to traits they once found lovable in their own wife. Perhaps women at times react and become what they never wanted to become: disrespectful to their own husband. Then, the husband reacts by loving his wife less ... and so on ... A man feels loved when he is respected, so a woman feels loved when ... well ... her love tank is full. Let’s face it, we all need our love tanks replenished, do we not?
It must’ve been quite a jolt to my senses as I still have a vivid memory-picture in my brain of the first time I saw girls in mini skirts. It was sometime in the late 1960s and “Dat” had taken me along to the city of Lancaster, probably to get me fitted with a new black felt hat. We arrived in the city by public transport and then walked from place to place on Lancaster city’s generously wide sidewalks. It seemed my single-digit age legs took two steps for every one of Dat’s but as I concentrated on keeping up, I was suddenly startled by drum beats across the way from us and I looked up just in time to see a band of girls in deep-sky-blue mini skirt uniforms come around the corner of a building and turn onto the sidewalk across the way from us, their bare legs flashing in the sun as they marched in unison to the rhythm of the drum beats I was hearing. I didn’t know what to make of it all, so I looked up at Dat who wasn’t saying anything, I mean not verbally, but the rest of him spoke volumes as his brown eyes stared straight ahead and he kept striding to the beat of his own rhythm.
Mini skirts were not a part of my vocabulary back then and neither were the mixed up feelings inside me; then battling for preeminence, but I did assume these girls’ parents didn’t care about the short skirts as it was unfathomable to me how they could get away with it otherwise.
However, I have, in years since, visited with enough dads who were raising teenage girls during that era of receding skirts to become persuaded that many (perhaps at times, reactionary) dads were engaged in a “battle of the skirts” in their own homes. A battle which many dads eventually lost to the designers, marketers, school boards, girls and men choosing carnal senses over purity, carnal “pleasures” over joy and looseness over love and respect. Purity, joy, love and respect, when lost, are usually lost by small increments. When guards are down. Let us take up the spiritual armor we’ve laid down. In some cases, take up what we’ve never had. And in some cases, keep it on. “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit ...” (Ephesians 6:18)
Life Matters!