September 2025

A challenge I’ve noticed recurring throughout this year is my tendency to offer myself in servitude—and then feel the agony of rejection when that offering isn’t received, or doesn’t unfold the way I’d hoped. I’ve been sitting with this contemplation: what could I do instead to fully redirect that desire to serve toward God? Because every time I emerge from the pain of rejection, I return to this freedom mindset I’ve been rooting into this year—the freedom of having bought myself out of all forms of servitude.

Over the past year, I’ve fully reined in my finances and my lust. I need not work for money again, at least according to the rules of the financial system I have been a part of. It’s quite odd to have had that input to my creative fire extinguished—because for so long, it was an input: the need to make money to support my life. The same goes for lust. It feels strange to have that drive extinguished too. At some level, it’s as if the plug to my life force has been pulled out—and yet, paradoxically, I feel so grounded and alive.

Fire and earth.

Previously, my fire was never rooted in the ground. It flapped around, licking at everything and nothing, searching for something to attach to—something to extinguish itself upon, to find momentary respite from its own heat.

In this season, my fire feels stoked by grounded patience. The pace of unfolding is very different from what I was used to when the need to make money or satiate lust drove me into the external world.

What is it that seems to enmesh these two needs? They do feel intertwined in my experience. My being freed from both felt like a single unravelling. The more I tightened my finances, the more my erotic channels became contained. Practically speaking, you can see evidence of this enmeshment everywhere: a man who hasn’t reined in his lust will splurge to win a woman over; the woman temporarily feels quenched in her desire to be provided for. But when the timing is off—when the man acts out of lack instead of the open abundance of his heart—his seed gets scattered instead of embedded in her womb. He may get her pregnant, but his spirit never penetrates her deeply enough to anchor them into marriage.

When the seed of a man embeds, it takes time to gestate. It may not even be visible for months. Lust skews perception so that you may mistake a momentary release for a sign of gestation—the dopamine hit of a woman’s moans for the slow sprouting of a seed in her heart. Lust, both sexual and monetary, tends to lead to extractiveness: What can I get for what I’m putting in?

There’s a transactional nature inherent to it. I flatter you with a compliment so you feel momentarily less unworthy and give me something in return. I repeat your name on a sales call to curry favor because the sound of it is sweet to you. But what happens when your self-worth is so rooted that the playbooks no longer work—when you just want to connect with me purely as another human? That can be terrifying to someone still caught up in extraction.

I remember that fear vividly.

7 years ago

I had seen her first lounging by a pond at an adult summer camp for connection, which I’d decided to attend for my birthday to escape the sadness of not having close friends to celebrate with. Back then, I couldn’t have admitted that sorrow—I felt ashamed of it. I still do sometimes. But praise the Lord for shielding me from shame!

There she was: the sun glistening off her body and her blonde hair. She fit the archetype of the classic small-town American girl from the 80s—gorgeous, demure—and yet there she was, lounging in her full God-given naked glory beside the pond.

Back in those days, in any group space, my mind would do a calculation—who is the hottest of them all?—and lock onto one or two answers. It felt primal, like it would have served me well 10,000 years ago on a hunt.

I pursued her. Among others, because I was “polyamorous” then. I felt “evolved” for keeping my lust love open to all.

And then—

I snagged her.

After a month of pursuit, I found myself one evening in an empty New York City room with her, having already crossed into physical intimacy. In that moment of pause—the fire within me flickered out. It’s a wild, disorienting feeling when the lust demons suddenly disappear out of satiety and you’re back in the driver’s seat of your life.

Having relieved all those parts of me that wanted something from her body, I looked at her nervously and asked, “What do you want from me?”—projecting my own extractive orientation onto her. I had taken what I wanted, and now I feared she would take what she wanted.

She said, “I just want to connect with you.”

I remember thinking, I think I know what that word means but not the way she seems to be using it.

I was still deeply enmeshed in a corporate culture where every “let’s connect” had an agenda, where meetings were failures if they lacked one. Having swung from being a porn-addicted, divorced virgin at 29 to a lust-driven boy chasing the hottest woman who’d let me sink my uncontrollable, agonizing arousals into her, I had no idea what it meant to connect.

And it was terrifying—terrifying to admit that I was worthy of connection on account of just being who I was. Worthy of life itself, free of the clutches of death. Worthy of God’s grace. Worthy of breath without striving. Worthy of fulfilling connection. Capable of simple joy.

That was the beginning of my journey into a world that embraced nudity and open sexuality as a way of tracking where shame was rooted in me. Shame of my own body, and shame of my desire for a gorgeous woman’s body. Because in the hidden places where that shame was rooted also hid the extractive, lustful tendencies.

The more I was able to embrace these hidden parts of myself—to sit comfortably with the varied instincts that moved through me, even the gnarly ones, but human all the same—the more my permission field, as Om Rupani calls it, expanded. And as my own permission grew, so did my permission field for others. It brought me to this place of deep curiosity—something I’ve always carried, but now more open than ever—toward really getting to know another human being and the journey that brought them to where they are.

There’s a vast expanse alive in every person, moment by moment. Each moment of connection becomes its own eternal exploration. And there are infinite such moments, passing through in the blink of an eye. There’s so much to explore once you’re freed from that narrow frame of what can I give or what can I take—and allowed instead to simply connect with another made in the image of God.