Sex, Drugs, and Donuts

Hosts of slain, heaps of corpses . . . And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute, graceful and of deadly charms . . . Nahum 3:3-4

As a child, I watched a movie in which a young woman’s wicked step-sisters treated her so cruelly, that I felt horrible for this fictional character. How could anybody could be so evil? What’s wrong with them?

It wasn’t until later, that I began to understand how appealing destructive behaviors could be. As a teenager, I discovered the power of lust. I later came to understand the attraction of unhealthy food. Still later, I found the seductive call of drugs. I found that I too, was capable of hurtful behavior.

Those evil step-sisters didn’t consider themselves evil. They simply followed their nature. Like them, we all have seductive impulses which injure ourselves and others. When we realize those behaviors are hurtful, and we continue to do them anyway, that is addiction.

Nahum, in today’s passage, used the metaphor of illicit sex to describe how the people of Nineveh were lured by their own toxic appetites into disaster. Once, they followed God, but their hunger for money, power, and sex turned them from him, leading to spiritual and physical death.

We may not meet such a dramatic end today, and we won’t all have the same temptation list, but we all struggle with some caustic behavior which confounds those around us. Why would you continue to overeat when you’re already overweight? Why would you indulge in pornography when you know what it does to your family? Why would you spend your life at work instead of with your kids?

We do these things of course, because we want to. We eat donuts because they taste good. We explode in anger because we can’t not do it. We do it because it’s in our nature.

If it’s our nature, then what can we possibly do? If we don’t want to live enslaved to our own toxic behaviors, then daily, we must do whatever it takes to abandon our path for God’s. Some of us will need treatment. Some will need to get rid of internet access. All of us will need to surrender our will to the father. As we do, he transforms our appetites, remaking us into who we were meant to be.