It's not baseball

 During the October month, many sports teams commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness month and during an October gathering of ladies, one woman in particular caught my attention with the tee shirt she was wearing which in big block letters said:

"SAVE SECOND BASE!"

Well, that's a for-sure way to make your point with every male over the age of about 14. I'm an ardent supporter of saving as much of second base as we can.  It's a humorous way to deal with a serious topic for far too many of our women but one that clearly got my attention.

Up until about a few weeks ago (time flies so fast, I can't rightly remember the day or even how I found myself at the point of having to grapple with this question:

Is getting to "second base" a sin?

And my first reaction was no.  To me, God has some explicit rules about sex.  Outside marriage?  NO!  But to me you could still be in that NO! and safely get to "second base",  Until I felt the Holy Spirit really tugging at me about this so I decided to give the matter some additional thought.  I came to a choice with a lot of help from God to get there, but before I share that with you, I would like to share two stories:

The first is about a woman I dated for like a second back in there when Wendi and I were almost, but not quite divorced and after the NO! of my own.  She invited me to her apartment for a swim and then she made me dinner.  I was on my best behavior because she told me that she'd dated this guy and invited him over to her house and he thought things were gonna go a lot farther than she did, to the point where she was in fear of being assaulted. 

We kinda cuddled on the couch for a while and watched tv.  I finally said that I should go and as I got to the door, she asked me something like "What, no kiss or nothing?"  

I explained that I would in fact, like to kiss her but was worried about what she'd told me about the other guy.  She'd made up her mind that I wasn't gonna do that I guess and assured me that in fact, she would like to kiss me too.  So we did.  For a couple of hours.

She finally told me, "We gotta stop."  I said another goodbye, and as I hit the door for the second time that evening she asked me a question that stopped me dead in my tracks:

"How much can you do?"

I'd told her I was a believer so I replied that "that's pretty much it".  When she called the next day, I told her that we shouldn't see each other anymore because I wasn't in a place to be even able to think about "how much can you do?"  That's not a question you ask if you'e not entertaining a move past first base.

I learned a lesson from that, and it's one of the first tests of my faith that I actually passed on the first try.

Fast forward to another lady I dated.  We were kissing one night and a couple of days later, she kinda told me that we can't kiss like we were.  She said maybe it's different for boys (boys?) but girls expect something more when you kiss them like that.  Well, shortly after that conversation, God stepped in and let me know that this was also not a relationship I was supposed to be in.  But I had to return to that conversation as I debated the matter with myself, and this is what I came up with:

It's not baseball, but to steal the term second base, yes, it is in fact a sin.  Because of what it leads to.

I was making an allowance for that in my life because I thought one way, God thought another.  When I'm in that situation, I am 100% wrong.  Another place I was 100% wrong was making excuses for disobeying God.

Seven years and change ago, I made a bad choice.  I sent someone out of my life when I shouldn't have and while I acknowledged that I had disobeyed God, I always tried to justify it with Him.  I had some counsel that told me it was probably a thing to do.  I had this.  She did that.  I didn't know.  Well, I should have known.  It was around the same time that God kind of led me to know that I had to also own that sin of disobedience (almost used the word mistake, but mistake in this case was just another drumming down of a sin of willful disobedience to what God had told me to do.)

I read a fascinating article today that talks about both of these topics.  We can't call it what it's not and expect God to go along with it.  Nor can we justify our reasons before God.  He already knows what we did and why, but then the blame game started in the Garden.  Adam blamed Eve.  Eve blamed the serpent.  

Take the time to click on the link (the word article which is differently colored) and read the article.  You won't be sorry you did, trust me.  It'll make this make more sense, but one of the positives from this little period of waiting is taking a look at what I'm allowing in my life.  I had to agree with God on the second base thing.  That didn't happen immediately.  I really struggled with that for a day or two before saying it and meaning it became the same thing.  That one was entrenched because if the situation ever presented itself again, I was limited to smoochin' and gonna have to let go of something in my own mind that was justifiably OK to me.

I had to own the bad choice, too.  I got a re-test on that choice last summer and I made every choice differently.  It didn't end like I thought it would, but for my part, I did what I was supposed to do the first time this time.  I didn't have to make excuses this time. But I think part of what's going to lead me forward was dealing with these two things.  

When it's about God, it's gotta be about what He says over what we want, or think.  And that's the whole idea about today's post.