Two Hearts as One

-Reflecting on what I write

This article is in reference to this

One of my favorite things to do is write, to dream of other worlds and create scenes, imagining scenarios and watch how it unfolds. Often times this means the story has a mind of its own and goes off to places unexpected.

As a Christian who writes where my imagination takes me, in the past it made me constantly pause and ask if where I was going was ok with other people. I always had this insecurity where I had to never offend people. They came first, especially Christians. And as a result, my writing became a drudge, a hateful thing even though I kept writing because it is part of who I am.

Several years ago, I discovered a group on Facebook specifically geared towards Christian fantasy writers. Within this group, I discovered something I didn't expect. It was a freedom to express who I was. They allowed me to be myself and ask hard and very personal questions regarding the heart and the challenges of balancing imagination and loyalty to God.

When I began digging deep into theology and scholarly material, my world was rocked to its core. What I thought I knew and understood from church shattered the more I studied, the more I prayed God give me wisdom because everything I was seeing was breaking the paradigm I had grown up in. Those first few months were earth shaking, my heart asking some very deep and intimate questions of what I believed. It was painful, somewhat feeling of betrayal by the church.

On this other side of that shaky time, I realize a truth I wish others knew. The more you understand and dig into who God is, the more freeing your life becomes, the deeper your relationship is, no matter what pastors say or disagree on. On this side, I have a firmer grip on what I believe than at any other time in my life. It has changed me for the better.

I titled this article with a purpose. "Two Hearts as One" is the title of "The Ansville Gatehouse - Chapter 10." I published it on Substack a day ago after some editing and a very real hesitancy. It is my favorite chapter and also one I can see will get people mad over. The reason is simple and yet...it's not. It's not overly graphic but it deals heavily with abuse and sex. I tried to keep it tame but knew to do this justice, there had to be an element of realness.

I had many discussions within the writer's group on this subject. Many of the women who write have said they were victims of such evil. The thing that shocked me however was what they longed for most - that more men would write on this subject, to showcase the male perspective and how there can be healing in the right relationships. And then another shocking request was that we not shy away from being graphic, to show the real nature of the ugliness and the real beauty of how love can truly heal. These were requests by Christian women who felt their stories were never truly heard in Christian settings. Books written by Christian authors never really tell their stories. They are sheltered, hidden away by carefully worded sentences much like an everyday Sunday sermon that never goes into the darker side of what the Bible portrays.

When I set out to write many years ago, my motto was that if there's darkness, to let it be seen in its absolute blackest so that when the light shines, it's so bright that it shatters the night. But in order to do this, one has to step out of the comfort of traditional Christian views. Most books you see in Christian bookstores or just Christian books in general is a carefully sanitized view of the world, never allowed to be as real as what we see everyday. And, at least in the group I'm in with several thousand people, half being authors, there's this agreement that the church has done a very egregious service to the world. It has sanitized the evil while it now praises that evil.

In a world saturated with sex as an idol to be worshipped, the church has been quiet as though it's a taboo subject not meant to be talked about in our Christian circles. The problem is that this very thing is a prominent theme throughout the Bible. From the very beginning, we are shown sex as a tool that shapes the world in good and bad, sometimes fueling evil designs. Both Peter and Jude, in their letters, tell us the angels are chained in gloomy darkness for these very acts that had lasting effects on humanity. Most of the Old Testament talks about other nations where sex is a staple of their worship, diabolical evil done in the names of their gods.

This is the worldview the Bible is written in, where a chosen people are set aside in hopes to guide humanity out of this darkness that is across the world. And sex is a major component of this. In Ezekiel 16 and 23, the prophet quotes God as He describes Israel in terms that are some of the most graphic language in the entire Bible. It borderlines pornographic language as He lashes out in severity, comparing Israel to a whore. But his descriptions are over the top, shockingly visual.

Below is an excerpt from Dr. Michael Heiser on Ezekiel 16.

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Ezekiel 16:30 “How sick is your heart, declares the Lord GOD, because you did all these things, the deeds of a brazen prostitute, 31building your vaulted chamber at the head of every street, and making your lofty place in every square. [MH: Again, set up the set for the next porno film—every street corner so people can watch.] Yet you were not like a prostitute, because you scorned payment. 32Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband! 33Men give gifts to all prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from every side with your whorings. 34 So you were different from other women in your whorings. No one solicited you to play the whore [MH: No one had to coax you to do this with payment—you were there! You not only volunteered, but you paid them!], and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; therefore you were different.* 

This is a reference (and this isn't just me, this is standard scholarship here)... We need to be reminded again that part of Israel's apostasy was political—these alignments. Swapping Yahweh as her protector for the protection of other nations, other armies. Here, cast respectively as Yahweh was her proper husband and then you have these other lovers (or strangers) being chosen instead of the husband—not only for the sexual relationship, but also in the sense of protection. Loyalty. Protection. Israel not only gives the foreigners sexual favors (referring to worshiping them instead of Yahweh), but instead of receiving payment, pays them—which is a likely historical reference to Jerusalem paying tribute money to these foreign powers in exchange for their protection. They were put under tribute by these other countries instead of trusting that God would take care of them militarily. There's lots of examples of this in the Old Testament, so that should be pretty familiar. But Ezekiel uses the metaphor to describe that (paying tribute) as like a prostitute who pays other people instead of taking payment. "You're even worse than the normal prostitute!" 

Verse 35: “Therefore, O prostitute, hear the word of the LORD: 36 Thus says the Lord GOD, Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whorings with your lovers, and with all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, 37 therefore, behold…

We'll get to verse 37 in a moment here, but verse 35-36 again are delicately translated, and frankly, it obscures what you'd read literally in the text. The reference to whoring after idols here in verse 36 kind of reinforces the earlier thought about using idols of men (idols made to be male) and actually, again, referring to Israel pleasuring herself on or with these idols, using the sexual imagery. That's kind of reinforced here by the reference to committing whoredom with your lovers with all your abominable idols. So given that, we have a couple things in verse 36 that are very sexual, very graphic in nature, that the translation obscures. For instance, "your lust was poured out." This is an innocuous translation of something very explicit if you just read the literal text. Block has a short description of this. He says:

…your passion was poured out [MH: “your lust was poured out”] (hiššāpēk nĕḥuštēk). The meaning of this difficult expression is illuminated by the Akkadian cognate to nĕḥōšet, nah̆šātu, “abnormal female genital discharge,” from naḫāšu, “to overflow.” However, Ezekiel has changed a pathological expression [MH: an overflowing abnormal gental discharge for a woman] into an erotic image, referring to female genital fluid produced at sexual arousal.* 

Again, without being crude, "You get more aroused (you get ‘wetter’) than the normal relationship here. When you saw an idol, you didn't just want a normal religious relationship with it. You wanted it to the nth degree." And so Ezekiel actually uses the female fluid arousal and just goes off the charts with it in this verse. 

"Your passion was poured out" is how Block renders it, but it's a reference to that! And again, it's very graphic to make the point that you're craving... You're like a whore that has an abnormal craving to be a whore. Transferring it to the religious realm, "You can't wait. You're eager—you're beyond eager—to align yourself, to link yourself, to hook up with other gods." Second phrase: "your nakedness uncovered in your whorings." This is another reference to what we saw earlier about self-exposure. Literally, "You're exposing your genitals to everybody that you can see." "Hey, I'm over here!" It refers and takes us back to the spreading of the legs to every passerby. It’s over-the-top kind of language. Every person is an opportunity. "There she is!" This is how Jerusalem is being described. This insatiable nymphomaniacal whore

Dr. Michael S Heiser - "Ezekiel 16"

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Talk about over the top metaphorical description of Israel. And yet, as noted, some of this isn't far off from what really happened. The sexual perversion and child sacrifice is historic. This is what we find in the Bible. But get anyone to mention this much detail of what God Himself is saying.

In an age where sexual perversion is so rampant and unhinged with no regard to moral conscience, the church has been silent for far too long while the darkness of paganism grows in our backyard.

Not only this but I have a suspicion, more like a knowing in my heart, that abuse and trauma is a major part of this age. So many people who engage in this act have a history of deep sadness wrought in pain, in a childhood trauma that made them find love in dangerous places. They refuse to look in God's direction but to worldly appetites where carnal desire grows and thrives more and more.

It's a spiraling decay of goodness in a whirlpool of degenerate thinking, fueled by an unending loathing of self when God gives us a different picture, a view of humanity as beautiful because He is the creator who made us. Our identity is in Him, not ourselves. When we focus on our own designs, our own views, chaos takes shape in our hearts to crush us on the rocks of sorrow and hopelessness. But in God's hands, we are given an eternal identity that is upheld forever by God's own worth that transcends to us who place our trust and loyalty in Him.

Our entire lives are altered, given status of an eternal son and daughter of the King.

When I set out to write "The Ansville Gatehouse," I knew for certainty that it would be very different than what I was use to writing. It was going to be darker than I attempted to write in the past. Its themes were going to range from abuse and sex to an attempt to show a Genesis 6 view that ripples through the whole Bible. When Paul is addressing the Corinthians and women in particular, he gives an off handed comment after addressing the hair in connection to the medical understanding of the time in regards to sexual organs. His stipulations and guidance is "because of the angels." There is no context at all through the entire Bible except Genesis 6 for why he would mention this. When you consider that Peter and Jude also talk within this context, quoting Enoch more often than any pastor will admit, you start to understand the theme and what worldview they write within.

I asked myself before beginning this story, "Am I OK if I get hate for writing this?" Because first, it's NOT a children's story and not intended for them at all. It's for adults with very adult themes. I try not to be very graphic in things but there are parts that this can't be helped. And if God Himself is willing to talk about Israel in such graphic terms, why are we as Christians unwilling to address the subject when the world at large does in abandon? Where is the push back? Where is the cry to stop the abuse, to show another path but allowing the audience to know we aren't going to shy away from the sexual abuse that goes on? Too often, I think only a few women in church are willing to address this while men refuse to talk on it. I find this strange as men are almost always the ones abusing. Where is the push back by other men, to take a stand and say enough is enough?

The more I got into "The Ansville Gatehouse" story, the more I realized my secondary character, Alicia, was fast becoming someone that was going to take the story into very dark places because of her past. I didn't know if I was ready for this, for people to know it's something I do think about for personal reasons. I've had 18 years to ponder over this, to see how this affects those involved, not really leaving them. But there is healing to be had.

So I write my story in hopes that more than creating a world, there may be some truths to be seen. I won't apologize for what I write. I've lived that sheltered life for far too long, stifling my life in fear of what others think about me, of if Christians will look down on me if they knew what my passions were for, of the darker places my mind goes to in hopes of showcasing a brilliant light that is Jesus.

I've lived in the past in a very dark place I never wanted Christians to know of. I knew what they did to my mother years ago for her own sharing and their mocking of her. I sometimes wonder what would have changed if they had believed her. For my own story, I wonder what type of person I would have been if not for what went on in my mind, the torture of self and the listening to the darkness I attached myself to as a teenager. How does one share these things to a church who half the population has thrown aside for progressive ideas? I lived in that dark hell and when I hear the stories of women and children who have survived the evil of abuse and torture, my heart screams for them.

I won't apologize ever again for what I write. I know the darkness of this world and if I can shed a tiny light in this blackness, I will.