The Prostitute, My Sister

This is who we are. Together as a people we are sinful, we fall into the desires of our hearts, away from you father. Away from your mercy and compassion. we fall away from the only thing that can fulfill us. I can say I am so far from perfect, but if I really meant it, everything would change. I have this ability to overlook my weaknesses but I judge other people in their weakness. The truth is that the sin that swarms inside my heart is so much darker that I realize. 

Deep down I am a whore. I am a murderer. I am a rapist, and a prostitute. I am a reckless drunk driver barreling down the wrong side of the road.

Starting in kindergarten children are told Vice over virtue. They are told condoms over character. Our culture thrusts upon us an overwhelming sea of voices of what we ought to look like, how we should act, and why we should have sex. Our culture is a culture of the now. It tells us to look at women lustfully to satisfy desires. We encourage relationships with fairy-tale expectations. Culture tells us to find the perfect person who will satisfy our needs. Pornography tells the culture that sex can be perfect. Culture inhales the ideals in pornography. We learn to objectify, over expect, and make sex a lot more powerful than it is.

We live in a culture of tolerance and acceptance of pornography. Therefore it is harder to truly accept the possibility that lust in the culture of pornography leads to molestation, rape, sex trafficking, and murder. There are massive amounts of statistics and facts to support it, but that is not what is holding us back from eliminating it to save lives. There is a bigger underlying issue. The problem isn't the facts, but the deep underlying self righteousness in our hearts. we don't believe that the type of people who commit these crimes are normal people who messed up. We can only believe that they are monsters. We believe that only through the most horrible of circumstances a person becomes able to do such horrible things. If we believed the contrary we would put ourselves at their level. If we believed that they are regular people who are trapped in a horrible sin, we would have to believe that we could possibly fall that far ourselves. Instead we have a delusion that they are horrible monsters, nothing like ourselves. We tell ourselves they don't have a conscious. We tell ourselves there is no remorse in them, nor would they ever likely be. We even view prostitutes as less than ourselves. Our culture tells us that even the prostitutes are bad people. We devalue their opinion because we can't bear to be associated with them. We don't believe the words coming out of their mouths because we value them lower than scum. Their warnings about the immense destructive powerful nature of pornography that got them into their state of disarray falls on deaf ears.

Instead of consciously changing our views on pornography, we justify our positions so that we don't have to deal with the truth. We justify ourselves so we don't have to accept the possibility that in a culture that glorifies sex and pornography we could just as easily do the same thing they did. We don't believe a friend could ever rape anyone. We can't imagine a good friend molesting a child. We choose not to see the human person under the skin of a rapist. We don't look and see the sister forced to sell her body, scared for her life. Instead we segregate them off as a monster that is nothing like me, or anyone I know. When we do that, then we can be safe from the truth that we are not alright. We are able to shield ourselves from the realization that under different situations we are just as broken as they are. We can be safe from the effect that it would have on us at emotional level. What would happen if we understood that the rapists are human and have pain in their hearts? What would happen If we really saw traffickers and child molesters as broken people who made mistakes, instead of monsters who are evil in their core? What would happen if we stopped valuing ourselves higher than the murderers. Fundamentally, what would happen if we stop doing the same thing these sexually broken people do to justify themselves. What would happen if we took away our pride? If we took away our self righteousness, saw prostitutes as the victims, and understood the sexually broken are people.

It would change everything.

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This is an excerpt from a project I am working on. A project exposing the heart, and revealing salvation