We are all broken people, all a little lacking in perfect balance and grace, flawed to no end with inconsistancies. We are all, in a way, fallen. Some attribute being "broken" as being unuseable, like a remote control or a calculator, where once something goes wrong, the whole function of a thing is wasted. But for humans, admitting that you are broken is often the only was to become whole.

Most of us have had sex, and we all have differing opinions on what the act means, or should mean, ideally. We use it and are used by it to attain a sort of release, or connection with another human. Despite what Christian thought would have society believe, sex is something ordained by God as a good thing, but in the Bible, at least from my perusal of it, there are few guidelines of what is right and wrong. Religion, not spirituality, often steps in to map the guidelines for us, but they seldom fit what we see as acceptable. It is something that two people share in love, or that's what I think we would prefer it to mean, aside from the release it provides.

Sexual brokenness, for me, is a personal issue you deal with when you've had less than a positive experience with sex over the course of your life. It is used somehow, wrongly, either because you are viewing it negatively or have housed guilt about it. I have been told that my sexual history is indicative of this, that I have been hurt by men in relationships or was often treated as an object, mainly due to my low self opinion. In retalitaion in the years that followed, I used sex as a way to keep men away from me, assuming that sex was all they wanted anyway because that was the impression I had gotten from my relationships. So now I have this stockpile of sexual experience but no real positive memories to derive from it.

It is not so much the issue of sex before marriage, which is the majority of the sex going on, as being bad that I want to focus on, but how those who do not see it as wrong have still harbored this type of brokenness. When two people believe that what they're doing is wrong and they do it anyway, the outcome may vary but we can all guess where it leads. That's no surprise.

If you have had misconceptions presented to you about sex, wouldn't that filter into a lot of areas of your life not sexually oriented? Could it not pervert or frustrate your interaction with the opposite sex? If sex turned out to be far less than what you expected, where did your expectations stem from? I don't doubt that some of you would contend that your view of sex and how it's manifested in your life has been no burden for you, that you have a healthy sex life. I only wish I could say the same.

So the real question is how to rectify sexual brokenness, how to allow it to be the thing it was originally intended to be. How to stop bad habits. It is easier to draw a line between yourself and a lot of other behaviors and find closure, but that's not always the same with sex. I've kicked pot, cocaine, cigarettes, kleptomania, low self image (well, I'm still working on that), but I can't seem to find peace with my sexual past. Not yet. It's a long road.