Faithfulness (6 of 9)
Series: 10 Rules
Jason Dees
Exodus 20:14
Our Scripture Reading for Today Comes from Exodus 20:14
14 ''You shall not commit adultery.''
The Word of the Lord
It's interesting to me how direct some of these commands are. These are so simple but so packed with implications. There was an essay written in the New York Times that came out about 10 years ago that has always stayed with me. It was written by a woman named Wendy Plump who has both had an affair and was the victim of an affair, and I liked the article so much because she was so honest about the experience. She says in the introduction, ''I have had an affair, and I have been the victim of one. When you unfurl these two experiences in the sunlight for comparison, and measure their worth and pain, the former is only marginally better than the latter. And both, frankly, are awful.''
The article is called ''A Roomful of Yearning and Regret'', and she spends most the article recounting the pain of what these experiences are like. At the end she says, ''I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven't marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it. If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery? From where I stand now, it all just looks like a cheap hotel room, whether you're in that room to have an affair or to escape from the discovery of one. And despite the sex and the excitement, or the drama and the fix of everyone's empathetic attention, there is no view from this room that is worth having.''
Why is this adultery so unsat ...
Series: 10 Rules
Jason Dees
Exodus 20:14
Our Scripture Reading for Today Comes from Exodus 20:14
14 ''You shall not commit adultery.''
The Word of the Lord
It's interesting to me how direct some of these commands are. These are so simple but so packed with implications. There was an essay written in the New York Times that came out about 10 years ago that has always stayed with me. It was written by a woman named Wendy Plump who has both had an affair and was the victim of an affair, and I liked the article so much because she was so honest about the experience. She says in the introduction, ''I have had an affair, and I have been the victim of one. When you unfurl these two experiences in the sunlight for comparison, and measure their worth and pain, the former is only marginally better than the latter. And both, frankly, are awful.''
The article is called ''A Roomful of Yearning and Regret'', and she spends most the article recounting the pain of what these experiences are like. At the end she says, ''I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven't marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it. If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery? From where I stand now, it all just looks like a cheap hotel room, whether you're in that room to have an affair or to escape from the discovery of one. And despite the sex and the excitement, or the drama and the fix of everyone's empathetic attention, there is no view from this room that is worth having.''
Why is this adultery so unsat ...
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