Skip to main content

We are not as strong as we think we are

I came across this touching story of Nate Larkin in the book I am Second : Real Stories, Changing Lives which vividly demonstrates human frailty :
Nate Larkin went to seminary, where he trained to be a pastor, but he also learned an unexpected lesson. His class took a seminary-sponsored field trip to New York City. They journeyed to the red light districts to witness firsthand the exploitation of women by the sex industry.

They walked into the porn shops and saw the graphic reality of the forbidden fruit. “I was shocked by what I saw, disgusted by it,” he said. His face twinged and his eyes closed, forcing those first gritty pictures out of his mind. “But I was also fascinated by what I saw. It hooked me deep. I didn’t just like porn, I became obsessed with it.”

Within days, Nate found himself slipping away from seminary and seeking out a source for this new drug. The claws of addiction sank deeper into his flesh. Each day and every week, the grip got tighter. But it never satisfied. It was never enough. He needed a bigger fix, a stronger drug. The obsession became addiction. Control seemed lost. The addiction sapped his marriage and drowned his will. He never meant for it to get to this, but it did.

Nate told himself, “I’ll stop next week. I’ll stop when I graduate seminary. I’ll stop when I get a job as a pastor. I’ll stop next year.” There was always a reason, always a deadline, always a fresh resolution, but the hook set too deep. He couldn’t stop. Porn took Nate to places he never intended to go. “So before I know it, I’m a pastor, married, three kids, and I’m picking up my first hooker on my way to lead a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. I lost any hope that I could stop what I was doing.

(Source: I am Second)
The more I read this story the more I am filled with a mixture of sadness and fear! Sadness because one can only imagine the pain that this sharp turn of events brought on his life and those around. Fear because I realise that we are all Nate Larkin. We all just as vulnerable. In the words of Rich Mullins, “we are not as strong as we think we are”. To think that a person can be ushered on a destructive path from a seminary-sponsored trip. Rich Mullin’s song has the following important refrain that expresses our predicament:
We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made / forged in the fires of human passion / choking on the fumes of selfish rage / and with these our hells and our heavens, so few inches apart / we must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are.
The last two lines really vividly capture our predicament. Our hells and heavens are truly a few inches apart. One minute your relationship with God can be on a high and the next minute you are wallowing in the same sins that you thought God had long conquered in you. Sometimes I look at my own sins and ask - are you really God’s child? I am always thankful to the songwriters like Mullins because they don’t always just convey our predicament but also the solution. And here is how Mullins ends his song :
When you love you walk on the water / Just don't stumble on the waves / We all want to go there something awful / But to stand there it takes some grace / Because we are not as strong as we think we are / No, we are not as strong as we think we are.
It takes grace to stand mumbling and stumbling, with all our messiness. And thankfully grace is fully abundance. Here is the video clip that explains how God turned his life around.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →