table for one?

Christian writers talk of the hole in our hearts that only God can fill. I agree with the thought behind that, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today.

I believe there is also, somewhere in the seat of our emotion and thoughts, a seat that is reserved for one other human being. It is a place that is reserved for the relationship that will come as close as I will ever see to heaven here on earth. It is the seat reserved for my wife.

When I was single, I let a lot of people try out that seat. I let too many try out that seat, and I forgot (or never realized) what that seat was about. As a result, it became easy to move people in and out of that position. The seat became a little less important as I pushed people into the seat, then unceremoniously pulled it out from beneath them when it suited me.

In my addiction, I let people who were never even prospects rest in that spot, at least temporarily.

• A dancer at a “gentlemen’s club” (there’s a misnomer if ever there was one) in Memphis held the seat for about three hours
• Women in movies I saw at an “adult” theater (major misnomer #2) sat there for five or ten minute intervals
• I seated strangers who wanted anonymous encounters for short periods of time

Rather than that seat being a place of privilege, I turned it into the seat by the door others used while waiting for a better table.

Eventually, I began to recognize that I was cheapening something that should have been very special. Eventually, my heart was so tired of the endless flow of other broken souls that it cried, “enough!”

The sad thing is, somewhere in that flow I met the proper occupant for that seat. She is my wife, and is the one for whom that spot was reserved, long before I knew the seat existed. The problem is that I still hadn’t figured out that the chair wasn’t big enough for two or three, so I kept pushing her out to make room for others. Since I was married, I had to be more discreet. I had to make my seating arrangements a secret. I couldn’t let anyone know that the seat was still in play. This led to more dishonesty, and the secrecy joined with a growing desire for more and wilder experiences.

That was a recipe for disaster.

I can easily enough write about how God spoke to me in that time, how He brought me to a place where I could begin to see what I was doing for what it was. I can tell you how He brought some key people into my life who would show me grace, but not be enablers.

But I want to focus for a second on how occupancy of that seat is still challenged.

• The mall is not a good place for me. There are the obvious things – the lingerie shops and others with tantalizing pictures that invite mental undressing, the sea of women dressed in clothes that (20 years ago) would have been worn by “professionals” plying their trade (street girls, if that wasn’t clear enough) – and there are the not-so-obvious things. Noise and crowds get to me. Maybe it’s because I am actively blocking so much of what is around me that it wears me down. It is at least in part a paranoia because I like to have a good picture of what’s going on around me, but I also know that I can’t start looking without seeing something that will kick off a painful cycle within me.
• Church can be a problem. I’m glad that I go to a church where no one expects me to wear a suit and tie, but there are Sundays (usually spring and summer) when I can’t look around without seeing more shoulder, or even an occasional tight belly, that distracts me from the focus of the service.

I recognize that the problem still lies in me. I doubt one of the women at the church got dressed that morning thinking, “Wonder how many guys will get turned on by this number?” I suspect that might be exactly the thought of some of the women at the mall, but that may be projection on my part.

Wherever I go there I am.

I have to be very wary about where I focus my eyes. I have to remember that God is about my heart, not my hands. If I go the rest of my life without acting out physically, that’s great – but Jesus says that if I lust after somone, I’ve committed adultery in my heart. That’s harsh, but I believe it.

Surely you don’t think it is the same thing to look a little as it is to take actioin on it?!?

Not my call – I just kinda go with what Jesus said.

And when I feel my heart starting to tip the chair, pulling it out from under the rightful occupant, I have a decision to make; is the little adrenaline rush of what is unknown, forbidden, considered in secret worth the cost to my relationship with my wife? As I get to know her better and better, the answer comes more easily as “No.” That isn’t to say there aren’t challenges – they come often, and they threaten the place I have given her; but for me, the choice has to be to keep that seat a sacred place. I want her to be in that seat, until the day one of us isn’t sitting anymore.