Purpose

There are few things that cause my heart to break than when I feel like I am watching "man's purpose" distorted or even missed completely.

The other night at a basketball game I watched an interesting dicotomy. During halftime, a group of young girls (ages 6-10 would be my guess) dressed up like the college cheerleaders and did a dance routine. This was extremely cute, and the audience gave an appropriately enthusiastic applause. And then at the side of the court I saw the college cheerleaders, and the first one to flash through my mind was that of a man sitting near me in one football game who had binoculars for the express purpose of... carefully examining the cheerleaders.

Stereotypes of cheerleaders come into place in my mind during high school, where she is placed at the pinacle of the "this is what a woman should be" temple as the football and basketball players are for men.

I believe Jesus when he says that a man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery. I believe adultery, and by extension sex outside of marriage is a sin. I believe this because I see it as a distortion, a perversion of what it was meant to be. I believe that it changes the ultimate expression of a couple becoming one person to a hormone driven quest for pleasure. I believe that promiscuous sex cheapens it. And thus, while I am quite lonely and could pursue other avenuse of having "my needs" met, I refrain.

This is where my sadness entered in as I watched this game. "How soon," I thought, "will these simple children grow up and lose the innocence that makes them so sweet." How soon will they be introduced to sacred things trampled under foot by rampant hedonism? How soon until they take their being, something of incredible and undescribable value and shrink, shrivel, and scar it pursuing in vain false ideals thrust at them from all sides?

Evil is a parasite, offering nothing new or original, only twisting or destroying the good things; turning noble to ignoble or seeking to destroy it. But this is accomplished in many diverse ways. Evil at once twists well-meaning zealots to hatred and denies that the object of their zeal exists. It claims to exalt and liberate sexuality by stripping it of any great value.

Why do we exist?

Surely not this. Surely more than this.