Into the Fire

Okay. The title and picture are meant to titillate your interest. Make you feel compelled to read the article. How does it feel to be manipulated by sensationalism? Even though this is a legitimate question, let me quote a verse from the bible. For some readers, they're already rolling their eyes. "OMG, not the bible!" Yet, the OMG stands for Oh My God so why don't we hear what the Creator of sex has to say about it.

     For this reason [Genesis 2:23] a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh.

     The man and the woman were both naked, and they felt no shame. (Genesis 2:24-25 NIV)

     Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. (1 Corinthians 6:18 NIV)

Writing fiction requires authors to make critical decisions about interpersonal relationships in all genres. It doesn't have to be a romance – historical, suspense, or otherwise – for those decisions to contemplate a sexual agenda. How much if at all should sex play a part in the story, in the characters' relationships? Not much in most of Christian Fiction. Of course not graphic/explicit sex but even mentioning serious sexual attraction is often taboo at some publishing houses. In secular, or as the publishing world likes to call it: general market fiction, it's no holds barred resulting in written pornography by some authors. Do secular readers gloss over it, skip those passages, enjoy it?

If the success of the 50 Shades of Grey Series is any indicator, there are an enormous amount of women who enjoy reading about sex and even perversions of what the original act was meant to be. I have no reasonable explanation for this. 

What sex was meant to be and what it's become in this world are as estranged as good and evil. This act was meant to be a merging of bodies, souls, and spirits in the purest form of a triad union. Pleasurable, beautiful, pure, and holy. Even Christians fail to remember the holiness factor where sex is concerned. God is not absent from the sexual union. But to see the utter pollution of this dynamic, explosive, and intimate act of two individuals becoming one physically, emotionally, and spiritually is of course a direct consequence of our sinful natures mixed with the destructive influences of the enemy of God's people: the devil himself.  

As a Christian reader who spent 30 years in the world before meeting Jesus, I know the ugliness of sexual impurity. I also know the beauty of God's forgiveness. As a writer, I know sexual relationships can't be ignored in authentic fiction, but the portrayals of both kinds of relationships can be done tastefully without acting as if sexual tension or attraction doesn't exist. To write without that evident tension where it would normally appear is basically dishonest, but those stories definitely have their audience.

Preliminary musings . . .

Father, help us all to personally combat the corruption of this holy act of love, to honor, enjoy, and respect what you gave to us. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.     

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