Religious response to Sexual Stimulus

Without a doubt I have had the discussion of female problems associated with UTI’s, Bacterial vaginitis and yeast infections with over 400 women in the past two years.  The number one connection to symptoms manifesting is always guilt, shame and fear associated with sex.  The sex could be through an affair, a one night stand, ex-boyfriend, current boyfriend, husband, friend or consenting choice, but once a regretful thought enters the mind, the sex becomes the problem. 

How many friends have you heard say, “If only I said no, or waited until we got married, or I didn’t drink so much.”  Those thoughts don’t even scratch the surface at the next one hundred thoughts we compound because of feelings.  There is no such thing as a woman describing itching, burning, swelling, redness, discharge, inflammation or painful urination without a back story that led up to the day she started feeling miserable.  We don’t deserve to come down with a yeast infection after every period.  We don’t deserve to make ourselves sick with worry because we forgot to use a condom, and that’s exactly what we do when we worry, we get sick. We connect on an emotional level and we associate our pain with being avoidable had we made the right choice and taken the “responsible” precautions.  Unfortunately, that subjects us to the world’s top two systems of function: religion and medicine.  Religion says, “If you wouldn’t’ have had sex than you wouldn’t be suffering right now”, that may be partly true, but it’s founded on the law of religion that judges a behavior according to fault finding. Making sex a moral issue gives all the credit to the accuser who always says, “It is bad”.

Dare I say religion is founded in dissension, because it always divides?  The enemy is the voice in your head speaking, “I have a bacterial infection because I had sex.” Jesus would never say that to you, He would be concerned with why you say that to yourself and exchange it with hope for your future.  Jesus isn’t religious. Religion always swags the finger in your face and says, “I told you so, now look at what you did”.  Religion is also the pat on everyone else’s back which tells them, “I told you that you could help her because you don’t struggle with that “type” of sin”.  That religious spirit is nasty, always trumping works for grace and focusing on God as a punisher.  That’s why nobody changes when they are told that they did something wrong, religion condemns and heaps guilt, shame and fear.  Reminding someone of their mistake doesn’t love them or persuade change, it just reminds them of what they already know. 

Medicine says, “now that your suffering, there is nothing we can do to reverse the progress in motion, but we can offer a pill or strategy for you to best cope with this either temporarily or for the rest of your life.  After you trace back your steps to a weak choice or a moment where you let your guard down, you are reminded that the one in the white coat before you knows best how to help you with your life because obviously you can’t be trusted with it.  So the Doctor rides in on his white horse to rescue you temporarily because he doesn’t have time to hear of your emotional struggle unless you want to pay for two patient visits.  Yet, down the hatch does your pill go only to cause 10 extra side effects along the way.  But don’t give up just yet, because if you’re a good patient you will follow all of the protocols and take other pills to offset the reactions from the first pill, and if you don’t, well I guess the responsibility lands on how bad you really want to utilize all of your options.  Schedule another appointment for follow-up and try to relieve your stress level. Both religious and medical systems fuel the need for people to execute knowledge over other people who believe they lack that same knowledge, and that is codependency.

After you attempted all that the laws of religion and medicine have tried to lord over you with, your hope faded with their empty promises. Somewhere God illuminated lies which kept you bound to a legal right for pain, your desperation for relief morphed into trust for His cure, and empowerment set in.  No amount of textbook training or study will pinpoint your emotional gauge and suffering toward the source of affliction in your body better than you.  You have to decide to listen to what your body is speaking to you and stop praying for it just to pass. 

If your vagina is screaming and you have spent years routinely medicating it with pills or creams but avoided the emotional baggage of fear, shame or guilt that comes along for the ride, it is time to take authority over your own body.  To be your own best advocate you have to muster the strength from Christ to exert self-care to the best of your ability.  Girlfriend, that means feel what is going on in that heart of yours, those repetitious thoughts of “deserving” what you are suffering with.  No Doctor has a pill for a broken spirit.  It is in your brokenness where physical symptoms attack your spirit, soul and mind with the intention of stealing your time in a specialist’s waiting room and prescription lines, your money on exorbitant bills and meds, but most of all your peace.  That is NOT your lot in life.  Daddy God fashioned you in perfection with the intention of you living an abundant life protected from darts of negativity that the enemy would shoot at you.  Tap into your physical pain and command your body to reveal its source of strife, feel it and then hand it over to God.  Fixing it, wanting the Doctor to fix it, or hoping someone else’s prayer will fix it, will never bring you into the relationship where Jesus intended to cure it completely.  He is your rescue.  Seek His strategy as you invite Him into your problem.

God’s truth always opposes the accusation we hear from those afflicting us, lording over us or lies we tell ourselves.

I speak from experience no doubt.  If I had a theme to describe my life prior to deliverance I would have titled it “affliction”.  Even after my deliverance I have had to contend for my healing, but I can do it from a place of peace because I have felt pain many times over.  I always joke that I have a high tolerance for physical pain but nearly self-destruct under emotional pain.  In all seriousness, it is my experience with physical pain that can offer me insight and peace should I let it.  In fact, I was worse off when I allowed my gynecologist to be my diagnosis and treatment.  I became co-dependent on her to become the remedy that I needed while oftentimes handing over my right to ask questions because I didn’t trust myself.  I had landed in the stir-ups so often that I allowed her to usurp God’s power to heal me.  Anytime we allow another person to be the voice of reason and truth for us instead of being led by the Holy Spirit for cooperation with truth, we are usurped by that person.  My affliction was allowed its legal right to rule me because I allowed the medical system to be my God and voice of reason.  I let my thoughts of fear give way to seeking relief from pain instead of wholeness, a temporary anecdote instead of dealing with emotional entanglement.  I foresee this becoming a growing problem among Americans as they seek relief from pain more desperately than revelation of why it is even there.  Jesus said the truth shall set you free, isn’t it time we seek answers to emotional pain through love instead of condemnation?  Condemnation brings death and cannot guilt anyone into truth because it is temporary; any insight gained becomes the law again.

The importance of recognizing that our emotional well-being is inter-locked with physical healing is upon us.  I find it beneath God’s nature to make us so complex yet subject us to pill popping as a simple remedy.  Most of the time Doctors are coming up with more and more strains of contagious bacteria and illnesses because the whole earth is in acceleration.  As the darkness grows the light should be getting brighter, therefore I don’t sit under the authority of any system that is contrary to Daddy having the final answer.  In recent months I have had memories surface that remind my body of the emotional suffering it had endured when I was younger.  This theme of affliction hovers over “body memories” and can even cause symptoms to flare up during seasons of the year where trauma was experienced as a child.  Our body is a walking clue as to what we need.  Fundamentally, we need to exercise our needs by admitting what they are.  Some may need to start saying, “NO’.  Others may need to stop going to the Doctors.  Still others may need to stop seeking healing through denial.

For as many ways as the brain tries to cope, it was never designed just to get by and live in survival.  Too many women have bottled their pasts and are experiencing them in the present with no hope for their future.  When I saw the memories in my mind’s eye from childhood show me the pain that I have always carried associated to sex I realized my symptoms of pain can be spoken too.  “I am not that overpowered little girl anymore, I choose to be healed”. I can accelerate my healing today by declaring it in the atmosphere, “I am suffering from the effects of abuse but I am healing all the more!”  A nurse who was doing my annual gyno exam prior to my deliverance asked me if I had ever been touched as an infant.  I was shocked at her exact accuracy and asked why she would think that.  She commented that I had no symptoms of bacterial infection, only emotional manifestation of un-dealt trauma.  She got me in touch with a rape crisis center that started breaking down the aggression I had stored up in my body that created pseudo symptoms of vaginal infections.  Without a doubt I was normal in this respect because ailments associated with female dysfunction often are rooted in abuse and prolonged through belief; it is a growing problem that accelerates with each new generation.

For every unknown bacterial infection that went misdiagnosed by medical professions, the church was diagnosing it as a lack of faith if I wasn’t healed. Neither system was able to speak to my heart about what I believed or thought about myself.  To deny that I hold rejection, anger, injustice, unworthiness, shame, guilt or fear in my reproductive system is to deny my chance of wholeness.  The symptoms of any UTI, Bacterial infection or yeast infections always lead me back to the emotional pain I endured during childhood abuse.  They are clues that I have an area of hurt in my heart that reveal I am still remembering what happened to me.  I believe these clues are a direct response to barrenness, pms and hormonal dysfunction for many women.  Statistics only reveal that a growing concern of depression demands our attention, they don’t reveal the origin as abuse in childhood or being unwanted in the womb.  I am not an expert, just an overcoming survivor of circumstance who grows stronger in my faith for healing as I trust God to continually unveil connection between symptoms and thoughts.  It is not anyone’s fault that I still suffer in my body due to past memories. For every memory that comes to the surface I forgive and remember a new one.  This is the part of working out my salvation that brings me into deeper understanding of loving myself and those who have mistreated me.  I do not condone a blanket prayer of forgiveness over any subject that is multi-faceted through repeated sin; it is layers of revelation concerning the same subject that will often stretch us to forgive multiple times over, this is the path to inner healing.  I know that either on earth or once I reach heaven, I will be completely healed of the effects that this world brings.  What is my responsibility is to accept that people will let us down without trying to deny it. Denial keeps me focused on taking the pain away and moving onto what will make me feel better until a different circumstance in the present triggers that familiar spot.  Acceptance allows me to diagnose the problem, become my own best advocate and pray for direction toward peace.  Regardless of how I lived, do live or will live, Daddy is still big enough to heal my heart where the real pain resides.  Afterall, physical ailments seem a lot less overwhelming when my emotions gain relief.