“But why is it designed that way? It doesn’t make sense.” I said, with a super confused look on my face, standing in Ikea — a generally confusing, yet beautiful, wonderland to begin with.
Dear Ikea:
My friend inspected the confusing item… “I don’t know why they made it this way… but I think it’s a knife sharpener?”
“I just don’t know who would think that this design was a good idea. But fine, I’ll buy it.” I conceded.
It wasn’t until I was standing in my kitchen, holding the knife sharpener again that I realized I had been looking at it wrong and holding it wrong and I would have used it wrong too! But then, my eyes were opened, I was made new, I was like the lame that could walk, the blind that could see… it was the miracle on 34th street but I was in my kitchen on Inverness Avenue and the only miracle was that I snapped out of my stupidity. And I sharpened a knife.
And then I thought about sex.
And love. And bodies. And our hookup culture.
Because I’m a 20-something with nothing better to think about. NOT. (I could have been thinking about how to set up my best friend with Jason Mraz, if you have ideas, lemme know.)
Okay, back to sex. It makes babies. News flash.
We are free to ignore the fact that our creator designed our bodies to fit together for the purpose of unity and procreation. It’s excusable if you’ve never thought about it and put those facts together. But just look at the design of our bodies. Don’t Google it. But think about the design of the male and female bodies. We were made for each other! We complement one another! We’re like puzzle pieces, like the lyrics of the song “Such Great Heights,”
And I have to speculate
That God Himself did make
Us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay
Just like it was obvious to me when I understood the design of the knife sharpener how I was supposed to use it… you can’t see that the male and female bodies were made for one another and ignore the fact that sex is supposed to be about procreation as well as unity.
But so often we don’t see our bodies that way. We see sex as entertainment, or only an act of two people who want to express love. In that song by Tove Lo called “Talking Bodies,” she sings “baby-making bodies we just use for fun.”
Sex for fun is just a half truth and don’t you want the whole truth?
No one wants a star without the burst. Or a jelly sandwich without the peanut butter. Or a treehouse with no floor.
The whole truth is that having sex and purposefully and willfully removing the procreative aspect is degrading to the nature of sex and therefore to us as human beings because what we do that degrades our bodies, also degrades us as people – on a soul level.
It’s like holding the knife sharpener wrong and using it to peel the paper from a crayon. That’s not what it was made for. It can be so much better than that if we follow what the creator intended.
Sex is beautiful, glorious, marvelous, every-other-positive-adjective. But it is all those things within a one man and one woman marriage. Within that marriage the couple has vowed to remain together forever, to be exclusive, and to give their whole selves to one another, including their fertility and the potential to have children. This is what we deserve in a sexual relationship — a forever, exclusive, life-giving relationship.
This is what you deserve. And if that’s not “in the cards” for you… if you’re not called to marriage… then you need to know that sex is not the end all and the be all of love. There is a love bigger and better than sex and that love is a person and He died on a cross for you.
That’s what’s real. That kind of love is where it’s at. Don’t settle for a counterfeit.
