Vulnerability scared me. It often still does. The precipice of self-revelation can and has felt like the moments in an airplane right before I jump out of it or walk out onto a biplane wing for some aerobatics. “Well. Here goes nothing.”
An Old Testament prophet claimed that God wants to remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. He wants to make us more human, more in touch with how love and grace feel both to give and receive. He is revealing that intent and process at my counselor’s office. He is using hours in my sister’s passenger seat and at cafe tables to show me his heart—the prototype. He’s proving his adjacency on dusty trails, in cold streams, and in precipices overlooking summer lightning storms. And even in a tall station wagon parked next to mine outside a nondescript office building.
For a lot of guys I meet in church settings, though, sex has been all but taken off the table by their wives—some going months or even years between sexual encounters. That breaks my heart. It also makes me mad that Satan wins. He wants to thwart fulfilling, married sex so that spouses are tempted to look to other (unholy) places to get their needs met. Since God uses marriage as a picture of his relationship with us, evil wants rejected, dejected husbands and distant, unconnected wives.