Many books try to define, explain, or analyze relationships between men and women. In reading many of them, you would need a dictionary because they contain many clinical terms. In reading My Men, My Self, My God, I was impressed by the author’s candor and clarity in explaining this dynamic, which is still misunderstood by so many.
If you are a female, this book is must-read. As you go through it, I am sure that you will see yourself in some if not all of its pages. If you are a man, I recommend this book to you. It is filled with insights regarding the inner workings of the female mind, her emotions, and the part we play in either caring for or nurturing our significant other emotionally or tearing her down.
This work is a very thought-provoking one. You will not be able to read it straight through as you might some other books. As you look carefully at the contents and at yourself, you will pause many times along the journey to understanding some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in yourself and others. In reading this book, you will be challenged spiritually. Selected passages have been thoroughly examined in light of the title of this book. The explanations of these passages are rich and rewarding spiritually. This book will prove to be an ideal tool for spiritual growth and is destined to find its place in seminars and workshops.
In my reading of this work, I didn’t see an author who was distant from me. Many writers keep you at arm’s length. You are not going to get too close to them, and through the contents of their work, they maintain a safe distance from you. As you read this work, you will feel close to the author. You will think that you know her because she has shared more about herself than she had to.
While you read My Men, My Self, My God, you will find yourself on a journey. Only by revisiting our past can we define our present and develop future expectations from the opposite gender.
. This book is not only informational and challenging in terms of moving forward with a fresh perspective, but it is also a healing balm for the hurts of past disappointments and present frustrations. I loved and enjoyed this book, and I am sure that you will enjoy it also. The author has done a marvelous job in presenting a work that is personal, powerful, pungent, and right to the point. No matter what other authors you have read or are reading right now, this book is more vital. Ms. DuBois puts many things into proper perspective that we tend to take for granted. Not having and not reading this book is like going into combat without any weapon against a well-equipped enemy. You can change that.
Reverend Edwin M. DawkinsIs It Love or Lust
When I was 33 years old, I was involved with a man who was about 37. After a few months of involvement, I told him that I loved him. He did not say “I love you” back. What he did say was, “You don’t love me; you just love the way I make you feel.” This should have been the moment in my so-called relationship with him that I should have run far away—and fast. But I didn’t run. I stayed and turned a blind eye to all the signals that he was giving that said, “I don’t love you.” You see, I was sure about my feelings. I knew that I loved him (at least I thought I did). As far as I was concerned, I knew that he just had to love me, because why else would he make me feel the way I did at the time? It took heartbreak and a three-year road to recovery for me to agree that this man knew exactly what he was talking about. To be completely honest, he was more in tune with what I was feeling and why I was feeling it than I was.
There is a song that I grew up hearing my mother sing, by the spinners— “It takes a fool to learn that love don’t love nobody.” I never understood what that meant as I was growing up. It was not until adulthood that the song made sense. The funny thing about love is we think we know what it is. We try our best to define it; and every time we define love, we start off by saying that it involves feelings, passions, or emotions. We can support our description of love with any dictionary. Roget’s 21st Century dictionary defines love with words like sexual relations, caress, clasp, cuddle, fondle, lick, neck, press, stroke, take into one’s arms, adoration, adulation, emotion, fervor, worship, and weakness. The American Heritage Dictionary defines love as “a deep affection and strong desire for another, the emotion of sex and romance, or a sexual desire for another person”.
The interesting thing about the way dictionaries defines love is that this is the way most of us define love, or the way we have experienced love. Many of the definitions are faulty and flawed in their descriptions of love. What we are defining as love is dressed-up lust. Most of the words used to define love have a sexual overtone to them, and most of us already know that sex and
love really have nothing to do with one another. If we know this, then why as women do we give sex to get love?
One of the biggest concerns that women have is being alone without a man in their lives. The reality of being without a man can make a woman, bitter, hard, and pretentious, compiling a list of do’s and don’ts, wills, and won’t, Women, we have to agree we are a ball of emotions. We go through stages with ourselves concerning men. We will begin with the “I don’t need a man,” and move to “I don’t want a man,” to “I don’t have time for a man.” Eventually, this merry-go-round type of thinking leads us back to the truth that most women want a man, we were designed that way. However, what we are craving above all else is a relationship. If we put our wants into proper perspective, we could recognize that our wants translate into voids. The reason many of us are so obsessed with having a man in our lives is due to the lack of a relationship and intimacy we have with Christ. We try to supplement this void any way we can, and many times this leads us into compromising positions and situations.
Think about the times that you either fell in love with a man or told a man that you loved him. Was it before or after sexual involvement? If we are honest with ourselves, most of us said “I love you” to a man after we became sexually active with that man. In retrospect, I see now that the only time I told boys (when I was younger) or men (when I was older) that I loved them was after I gave myself away in every way. Sometimes we think this will make us more valuable in their eyes, but the opposite is true. Even cars depreciate in value when they are driven off the lot. It is unfortunate that we will sell or pimp ourselves sexually, emotionally, and even financially, to a man for the payment of love. Why is this? It is because our view and understanding of love is tainted, and we measure love by the world’s standards. This type of love leaves us empty and hurt, which can develop into bitterness, forming a 12-inch-thick concrete wall around our heart. This wall, believe it or not, affects our relationships, including our relationship with Christ.
Allow me to prove my point. When you enter into a relationship in order to get to know one another, one of the first things you do is let your defenses down to a certain degree.
Understand that there will always be a certain level of vulnerability in every relationship. In order to develop trust, you must willfully put yourself in a submissive— meaning, agreeable—position. Either with your actions or your words, you will communicate to this person that you are willing to get to know him on a deeper level. You cannot do that with 12-inch-thick walls around your heart.
Protection is the primary reason we have these walls. The post-pain experiences prevent us from embarking on a new relationship, even if that relationship is with Christ. What tends to happen at the onset of a new relationship is that everything that did not work or went poorly in the old relationship takes a front-row seat in our minds. Anything that an ex did or said that hurt you or however he disappointed you will resurface when a new relationship is on the horizon. Most times we make the new gentleman pay for all the mistakes made by the old gentleman. We never commit fully to this new relationship because of the reoccurring pain of the past.
What does all this have to do with Christ? Well, the first point should be evident. The reason we struggle with our relationship with Christ is because we are not willing to submit, nor are we willing to become vulnerable before Him; we cannot seem to get over the past. We still try to hide our mess-ups and flaws from Him, just like Adam and Eve did in the garden—as if God does not know that we have messed up and that we are messed up. The second issue we have in our relationship with Christ is accepting His love because we have spent all of our lives receiving the world’s definition of love, which I have already said is dressed-up lust. When God, who is love, shows us true love, we reject it. Why? Because we are naturally pleasure-seekers, and we prefer the physical attributes of love to the spiritual attributes of love, which is God. If you think this is untrue, just think of how many unmarried women in the church are in sexual relationships with men who are not their husbands or are with someone else’s husbands. Think of how many women compromise their abstinence or celibate lifestyle every day for love.
Love suffers long and is kind love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely,
does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13: 4–7)
For an understanding of love in its truest form, the Holy Spirit directed my attention toward 1 Corinthians 13:4–7. If you look at this definition of love in contrast with the world’s definition of love, the first thing you will notice is that Paul says nothing about sex, kissing, fondling, or groping. Instead, Paul outlines the conduct of love—that is, how love behaves in relationships toward other people. It is within this framework of love that Christians should operate. If we were to measure love and the motive of the person professing to love us, Paul’s definition would serve as the biblical and spiritual criteria on which we could evaluate the authenticity of love that someone else has or at least say they have for us.
If we truly understood the behavior of love, whenever relationships between men and women presented themselves, we would not be so quick to become intimate to show that we love them. We would instead show our love based on Paul’s description in this passage. If you really want something to meditate on, think about this—operating in love of this caliber confirms where you are spiritually as a Christian. If the only way you can show love or receive love is of a physical or sexual nature, then you have been polluted by the world’s definition, and you are not in line with the Word of God.
Now, for the theologically minded, I do realize that Paul’s description of love is given in the context of spiritual gifts and that the exercising of these gifts should be done in love. For the sake of understanding true love in contrast to the definition that most dictionaries render, we must look at Paul’s description of love from a relational standpoint between a man and a woman. As believers, it is imperative that we have a better understanding of what love does so that we can correctly identify what love does not do.
The Corinthian believers that Paul addressed in this epistle were impatient, full of self, envious, arrogant, unfeeling, uncaring,
and unconcerned with the interests and the betterment of others. The same sentiments can be found in us, the church today. Sadly, these emotions and feelings produce, in my opinion, the secular definition of love and cause us to act in ways that are contrary to what we have been taught according to the Word of God. It is the impatient person and the discontented individuals that will seek to satisfy and gratify their flesh—and call it love. And just for the record, ladies, I am not talking about men. I am primarily referring to us. Men are not totally at fault, because sexual pressure comes from both sides. What it boils down to is if you are acting out of true love, you will not put aggressive or subtle pressure on people to compromise their standing before the Lord. If they happen to be the weaker Christian, love should then spring into action. Love will not behave selfishly seeking its own, but love will put the need and the betterment of that person ahead of itself.
Now, remember at the beginning of this chapter I said that I was involved with a man and that I told him I loved him? Well, I now see that what I was acting on was not love (at least not according to Paul’s description). It was dressed-up lust. It is always after the fact that we see clearly. The hardest part of this lesson is to take responsibility for the unnecessary pain we bring into our lives when we insist on functioning in relationships that do not honor God. In addition to this, we bear the responsibility of not only causing ourselves to stumble, but we cause our brothers to stumble also.
At this point, you may feel like I am putting most of the responsibility of sexual relationships on women, because it takes two to tango. You are right, but it only takes one to decide to do the right thing. I remember as a young adult, before I would go out to the club with my friends, my mother would say two things to me: “Lisa, be careful, and remember the woman is always in control.” If we are honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that we have controlled the love, sex, and lust in a majority of our relationships with men. We choose to act out of lust, and we choose to relinquish selfcontrol. We act out of the intense craving of our flesh, allowing it to override us, and we give into our sinful desires. The will for our lives as single Christian women is not to engage in premarital sex with men as an interview process for a
lifetime mate. The will of God is your sanctification; that is, “that you should abstain from sexual immorality (fornication); that we should know how to possess our own vessel in sanctification and honor; not in passions of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.”
We already know what we should and should not be doing, but we continue to be disobedient, then we wonder why God has not given us the husband that we have been praying for, for years. If we are having trouble with submission and obedience to God— which is one of the ways we show God we love Him—what makes us think God is going to give us husbands to whom we are expected to love, obey, submit, and commit ourselves? If our relationship with God is not right, our relationship with our spouse will not be right either.
The truth of the matter is, if our relationship with God was right, many of us would not have allowed the physical aspect of male and female relationships to be the deciding factor in whom we choose for a lifetime mate. It is hard to spiritually discern someone whom we are sexually involved with prior to marriage, because our judgment is clouded. This is why some people are married to the wrong person. They did not obey God, and they did not wait for God. They just rushed into a serious commitment based on a physical feeling. For that reason, they are miserably married, and you can see it all over their faces. It was the passion of lust—dressed up like so-called love— that they fell in love with.
We defy God’s will and way for our lives by blaming our actions on the “I can’t help it” disease, or simply on love. I am not trying to imply that you do not love the one you are with if you happen to be in a relationship at the moment. I am trying to get you to see that the feelings and emotions that lead us to sex do not have as much to do with love as we think they do. The Christian man or woman does not show love to his or her significant other by acting sexually on those feelings before marriage. Actually, the opposite is true. As corny and as outdated as this may sound, true love will show itself by exercising restraint and patience. What I am saying, just in case you missed it, is this —true love will wait to have sex. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.
You might be wondering what Christ has to do with this worldly way we perceive and receive love. Well, that’s just it—He has nothing to do with it. That is what most of us fail to see. Christ is not going to fit into our understanding of love. As I said before, our understanding is flawed, and this is one of the reasons why our relationship with Christ will suffer. We try to love Jesus with that same superficial, non-sacrificing, self-serving, shallow type of “I’ve got to have it” or “give it to me now” love that we find in the world and in most of our relationships. Loving Jesus Christ is never deep when it’s done this way.
Think about it. Have you ever been in a relationship with someone you loved, but you knew that they didn’t quite feel the same way? Maybe you loved them, and they held back; it didn’t feel like they loved you as deeply as you loved them. You could tell that their love was just surface-type love. Now here is where it gets a little tough to swallow. I know that I have been talking about love on the physical side of things, but it is that understanding of love along with those same thoughts, beliefs, actions, and behavior patterns that we try to love Christ with. The reason why it doesn’t feel right between you and Christ is because the Lord wants more from you than some leftover, worldly, half-hearted affection.
The bottom line is that we cannot continue to pursue Jesus this way, nor can we continue to love Him the same way we have loved the many men in our lives. He is God—and we are to love the LORD our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength. “This is the first commandment.” We ought to love God deeper and more completely than any man we have ever loved or will ever love in this lifetime
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