Last night I spoke to a group of 450 women at a major church in Southern California, just south of Los Angeles. I got up really in the morning and flew to LA, and had a couple of hours before the event. I had a really fun time with the women, who were packed in to this neat facility that mariners call the tent, which sort of looks like a giant tent.
They had 250 women sign up ahead of this time and probably close to that same number show up at the door. The facility always has a lot of energy when every seat is filled and people are standing in the back and sitting around the side. These women came ready and willing to listen.
I was thinking about something that I have heard several times in the last few events, including this event and the one last weekend. I had women come up to me, very troubled by my findings about how men are visual and what that means. I realized that so many of us women are really engaged in wishful thinking. We don’t like something about the way God has wired men and we wish it weren’t true and the temptation is for us to shoot the messenger. I was looking at my reader reviews on Amazon recently and I saw a review that had a reader saying she loves everything from the book, but she threw the book away because she was felt sad by what I saying about visual nature of men.
She misunderstood me because she was saying that I was excusing sin, which obviously, or I at least I hope that, I would never do. I told the women who approached me both last weekend at the Phoenix event and last night at the Mariners event the same thing. When they ask why men of God mislaid it and how do they think about something so troubling, I always say it was the first fall. I don’t know why, I can’t answer that question. What I do know for sure is that God did not intend men to have level of temptation that they do in this culture. Men were not supposed to be assaulted by all these images of other women dressed in such revealing way. It’s a very troubling thing for women to think that men have all these images of other women in their head.
What we have to realize is that God was not intending women to dress this way. God was not intending to have these images on television and movies that jump out and assault our men. The only images that God intended for men to have in their mind were of their wives. I realized last night at Mariners and last weekend at Phoenix, how incredibly important it is for us women to realize what the original intent was; for the good way that God has created men. We should be willing to give them patience about difficulty of living in the culture and to be supportive instead of condemning.