The Hipster and The Hymn

Poop and fart, if you are anything like me those were the first two things you thought of when you read the title of this post.

But if you grew up in the conservative evangelical world that I did, something else might have come to mind as well.

LUST

I grew up thinking girls didn’t lust. The big L word that they couldn’t talk to guys enough about, I was led to believe that it wasn’t an issue for girls.

Sure they sinned, they weren’t perfect. But their sins were gossip and lying and a bad attitude.

My chief sin, purely because of my chemical make up, was lust.

The only time I ever heard any sort of youth leader or pastor talk to girls about lust was to talk to them about the things they did (or wore) that would trigger this vile sin in the hearts of their christian brothers.

I grew up with all kinds of misconceptions about what lust was and what I could do about it but the biggest was the lie that I was alone in it.

That somehow when Adam bit into that apple and God kicked him and Eve out of the garden that she was cursed with child labor and he was cursed with an uncontrollable sex drive, neither of them having to experience the others pain.

As I have grown into my twenties and the ability to have conversations about this topic, without being herded into separate rooms by our gender, has become more of an option I have learned that this, and most of the smaller tales associated with it, is a lie.

Girls do lust.

They lust just as much as guys. Lust is not a sexist organism that invades the hearts and minds of men but skip over any girls it comes across.

The even bigger problem in this mix of misinformation is that we as guys don’t know what to do about it.

We know that the visual triggers that guys experience in their battle against lust are not the same as the triggers for our sisters.

Although the things taught to teenage girls sitting in youth rooms all over our country about their bodies or the way the dressed had a lot of issues, at least the church attempted to address the issue.

“…so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.” has been taken to the extreme. So much that they teach girls what to do and not to do (however flawed) to prevent the lusting of their christian brothers but never have I heard anyone teach me, as a guy, how to prevent my sisters from stumbling into lust.

This is a conversation that needs to be had. No matter how awkward, sisters begin to have open dialogue with your christian brothers.

Sisters tell us those things that trigger lust in you so that we can come together as a community and build each other up. 

Forgive us for the things we do on a daily basis that make your battle against your sin nature even more difficult.

I’m praying that these conversation begin to happen, even today, so that the generation after us does not experience the same lie that I did. Let’s stand and engage in open dialogue about this issue of lust for guys and for girls, so that we live like the body of christ, building each other up.