Out of balance

A couple months ago, I decided that with all the changes going on with me right now, my emotional and spiritual well-being needed to take precedence over school.

There’s been so much to sort through, though.  I’ve given a lot of time to exploring the desires that I repressed for years.  And I’ve spent time envisioning what it might be like to be in a BDSM relationship.  And I’ve also been reevaluating my past in the newly recognized context of power-sensitivity.

Besides working through BDSM-related things, I’ve also been trying to join in the culture around me, which I’ve always tried to avoid; I’m trying to trust God with the control I’ve exercised over what influences me.  I think it’s important to be able to relate to the people around me.

Unfortunately, all this has made more of an impact on my schoolwork than I expected, and it caught up with me yesterday.  I managed to not notice the registration date for next quarter, and when I finally did register, two of the three classes I needed were totally full.  And I got a paper back that I thought was well done, but got less than a 50%.  That’s unusual for me.  I usually do pretty well with school.

I was already getting burned out on school before accepting my sexuality, but this is too much.  I can’t get this disconnected from school and still finish.  I need to find a way to balance all the new things in my life with the old (and still important) ones.

On that note, I need to go finish (and start) a couple of neglected assignments that are due tomorrow.  Ugh.

BDSM and My Relationship with God

I haven’t known anyone else who experiences their relationship with God like I do.

Growing up, I latched on to the parts of Christian scriptures and songs that dealt with submission, trust, and suffering for God. I’ve had (nearly) romantic fantasies of giving up everything, living on the street, and trusting God to provide for my every need. I’ve prayed fervently, many times, for God to do anything to me or let anything happen to me that would cause me to be closer to Him.

I felt that it was a common and easy thing to love God because he does stuff for you. That’s what most people seem to do. But love, it seems to me, can most truly be shown when it causes some sort of suffering to do so.

I wanted so much to have the opportunity to show my love for God in this way. I wanted to live in a country where Christians are persecuted because I could rely on God more and be closer to Him. I felt that those Christians were more blessed because they could have that closer relationship with God. And that idea seemed supported by Bible verses that talk about the least being blessed and all. I wanted to be the least.

When people would ask for me to pray for something or for someone to get better, I wouldn’t pray for that. I would pray (in my head) that whichever outcome would allow them to get closest to God would happen. Being close to God was the ultimate good; the things people wanted prayers for were secondary to that.

This is the sort of relationship I have with God. It is the most important thing to me, the most important part of me. I could say so much more about it, but I’m trying to be brief.

When my masochistic desires flared up stronger than ever in college, I began to act on them and read stories about them. However, I felt that they couldn’t be right and it must be sinful to act on them. And because I kept choosing to sin even though I wanted to be close to God, I must be choosing those desires over God and injuring my relationship with Him. I felt awful about it.

Toward the end of the five years I struggled with that, I was at a point where I felt like my relationship with God wasn’t as good as it had been, and that left spiritual needs unfulfilled. I felt like when I acted on my desires, I must be trying to fill those needs that God should be filling. I felt that acting on my desires was a perversion of my relationship with God. I felt that a perversion of my relationship with God was the worst sort of insult I could give Him.

I really wanted to talk to someone, so they could help me stop acting on my desires, but I couldn’t think of anyone appropriate to talk to. However, I recently remembered meeting a Christian sex educator, and I re-connected with her on Facebook. I sent her a long message detailing the desires I’d had as a child and how they developed in adulthood.

I had started to suspect that some of the things I was feeling might be okay; there were other people who had these desires, after all. However, I was shocked when she replied and said that everything I’d been feeling was okay. Everything was okay? Yes, everything, she confirmed. I wasn’t harming anyone, so it was okay.

When I started thinking of my desires as okay, it didn’t take me long to see that they weren’t a perversion of my relationship with God at all; they were a reflection of it. And I think that a marriage is a reflection of relationship with God, so then it would be okay if these desires were present in a marriage. No, not just okay: beautiful! Oh so beautiful, because that sort of marriage could reflect my specific and unique relationship with God, which was already based on BDSM-style intimacy.

The most important thing in my life finally fit with my sexuality, and I didn’t have to condemn myself for my desires anymore. It was so liberating and stunning and beautiful. The time spent with God that night was intimate for sure.