sex is broken

in all my prep for the upcoming series at the winds (eat your heart out: sexuality and spirituality) there is one simple, recurring thought i've had:

sex is broken.

now, i don't mean that sexual technique is broken
or that people don't enjoy sex
or that sex no longer satisfies like it once did, etc.

i mean simply that sex isn't what it used to be

everything good we now experience in sex
was part of god's design for it
and yet we're missing much of the rest of his design.

for example: how come sexual desire and love are predominantly at odds in our world?
how come people rarely use the same words to describe their fantasy as their spouse?
how come people laugh about lusty weekend getaways, but laugh at the prospect of 'til death do us part?'

because sex is broken

and we are broken because we have been made to have sex
not exclusively, mind you
but it is often overlooked that we are - undeniably - sexual creatures with sexual features given to us by a god who wants us (some would even say requires us) to use them in order to fully explore our humanity, our dignity, and our worth as spiritual people.

of course,
when you start talking this way people typically label you as either a pervert or a chauvinist.

but it's not perverted to find your wife incredibly sexy,
nor to fantasize about being with her (or vise versa).

in fact, it's fantastically (and i do mean fantastically) healthy.

men, after all, fantasize.

all men.

and we're supposed to fantasize about our wives.

so...i'm not perverted.

but others may accuse me of being chauvinistic. but i'm not that either! i don't think my wife exists to serve me sexually, or that all women should be slaves to their husbands or anything weird like that.

quite the opposite.

as a husband i take the call to sacrifice myself for my wife very seriously. i may not always score perfectly in that category; but i'm confident that carmel knows (because i've always done my best to demonstrate to her) that she is my top priority in this world and i want to make her happy.

that's not chauvinism!

so you see...when i say that sex is broken, i mean it. in fact, it's very difficult these days to talk about sexuality without someone labelling you with a kind of brokenness in advance, as if calling into question our societal norms is somehow deviant.

all this to say:

as we get ready to dive into this series i feel a great burden. there is a lot of hurt in our world due to sexual malfunction, and i want to help heal a few of those hurts. i know we won't fix everything for anybody, or even begin to heal anything for everybody, but it's worth trying.

it's worth doing triage for the most profound part of our humanity.

so...get ready for november 'cause we're bringing sexy back in a way that'll make justin blush and janet cover up.