.: clarifying the compulsion :.

Obsession. The domination of all your thoughts and emotions by one single unrelenting idea. Being endlessly consumed by a certain image or desire. A longing that screams throughout your entire being. Anything that draws you away from what you were previously committed to. Call it a test of your manhood. Call it an examination of your determination. It sinks its roots deep within your heart and fills your mind with hopes of even the slightest satisfaction. It soon learns how to reason with you, breaking down your best defenses. It teaches you how to compromise and cooperate with its agenda. Though you try and try again, you so often find yourself moving closer and offering your life to it. It saps you of any kind of built-up strength. It will side with you as a friend, as well as oblige you as the tyrant that it is. It plays to your longings, only to later overwhelm your attempts to gain control.

You begin to form lesser addictions in the hopes that they will distract you from the one starring you in the face. Each moment at hand is far bigger to you than anyone else around. It costs you every time, though the price seemed strangely worth it at the time. You will suffer through incredible sadness in order to slowly present to others why it bears no threat. You have asked yourself time and again why you place your soul under its burden, yet the answer remains unsaid. Why can you not let this go? No one understands who has not been under its kind of influence. Even the most remote mention of its presence creates a halting silence between you and loved ones. You work to foster it even as friends and family strive to tear it down. You unthinkingly offer it the spare moments of your day, not knowing how it longs to master you. It works its way into your schedule. It plants itself into your beliefs, causing you to delicately word every spoken opinion. It conceals itself under the guise of entertainment, enterprise, or even duty. It causes you to become vigilant about condemning every other instance, providing you the chance to protect your own style of engagement. You pledge subtle rendezvous' once everyone around you grows suspicious. You parade the success it brings to those not yet sold, as if success was license for this inward deterioration. You say this will be the last outbreak. But trust me, you will find a new method, a fresh excuse, or some novel way of scratching the itch. You cannot be reasoned out of it. Reason has nothing to do with times of such enticement. If you were not attracted to it in the first place, you would not be working so hard to preserve it soon after. You foster it in isolation, all the while preaching its dangers to the public. It could be anything.

Too bad the church has given it only a handful of titles. We overlook its nature by giving it a specific shape and size. So many have built up walls against its manifestations, these same people fostering it in seemingly far less sinister forms. We all know the intimate pleasure of giving into it, though we would never expose it beyond any benefit it may subsequently propose to us. The reality is that we desperately need to see it for what it is: a competing threat to all that we already have in Christ. Rework the evidence to your heart's content; you will never get to have it both ways. You must choose for yourself, this day and every one to follow, which one you will strive to offer your whole being to. As you learn to hear the sounds of its disturbance within your spirit, take hold once again of the hope and joy that it thrives on stealing from you. Do not give it even another second's consideration! These moments do not come often, though they happen all the time.