What To Do When You See Attractive People
Jan 20, 2020
Today, you'll learn a simple way to honor and love the women in your life, no matter how attractive they are.
If you've ever had the experience of being like, "Wow, that person's amazing," and not really knowing how to handle that because maybe later on, you're tempted to think about them, and maybe later on that leads to porn, don't worry.
Today, I'm giving you:
- My three part formula for how to handle those situations
- A simple prayer you can say every time you see someone who looks amazing.
I wish somebody else had given me this information when I was younger. Because when I was a teenager, I was so immature in the way I related to girls. On the one hand, there were the "attractive" ones who I worshiped and therefore was mortally afraid of and never talked to. On the other hand, there were the "unattractive" ones who I was really snobbish toward and who I shunned. So I never talked to them because I didn't care about them.
My parents never gave me a mature way to understand my sexuality or how to relate to girls.
The only thing that I got was a little book called Every Young Man's Battle, that showed up on my bookshelf unexpectedly. My mom didn't even tell me about it. She just put it on my shelf. And that book told me to do one thing: when I saw somebody who I was sexually tempted to lust after, it said, "Bounce your eyes." If you see them, just bounce your eyes right off of them.
First of all, this didn't work because my willpower wasn't strong enough. And second of all, it didn't teach me how to relate to girls. In this episode, I am going to teach you exactly how I've learned to relate to attractive people, and how I teach my clients too.
It starts with this simple three part framework: celebration, appreciation, and compassion.
And all of that is summed up in a little prayer that one of my clients came up with. He says this every single time he's walking to class and he sees beautiful women on the sidewalk:
"Lord, she is very beautiful. You created her. Please draw her to yourself."
That's the three part formula: Celebration, Appreciation, Compassion.
The prayer starts with celebration: “Lord, she is very beautiful.” This is acknowledging that sex is good. My sexuality is good. The fact that I can appreciate beauty comes from God, and her sexuality comes from God too. Even if you're looking at a man, his sexuality comes from God. This is liberating. So much of the failure of Christian sexual education has come from this purity culture that says “sex is bad” and we just need to avoid it. Celebration is the opposite of that. It's saying, “No, God created it. It's good.” It's to be enjoyed.
Some of you might be thinking, “Really? You're telling me to enjoy the beautiful person?”In a way, yes. If you go into a museum and you see a beautiful painting on the wall and you think, “Wow, that's a beautiful painting,” that's not a problem, is it? The problem is when you think, “I wonder how I could take that painting home with me. I wonder how I could capture it and use it for my own purposes.” That would be something similar to lust.
Love is the opposite of lust.
Actually appreciating somebody and seeing that they're beautiful is (in a little way) loving. At least it can be if you move from celebration to the next part of the prayer: gratitude.
“You created her.” This acknowledges the other person is a human being made in the image of God: worthy of dignity, honor and, acceptance. I’s like saying, “You know what? You're not an object to be used. You're not just a sexual object that I can lust after or bounce my eyes off of. Nobody wants to be treated that way. No, you're a person who's worthy of love and God created you. So I'm going to thank God for doing a really good job in creating your body and making it awesome.”
But it doesn't stop there because at this point, it's still just about us. We need to move from celebration to appreciation to compassion. That's why the last part of the prayer says: “Please draw her to yourself.”
God, not only did you create her, but you love her and you made her for yourself, so bring her back to you. What a powerful little prayer you can say for someone. This takes the focus off of you, off of your sexual purity, off of your moral superiority and says, “I want to bless this person. I want to love this person just a little bit in this moment. So God, would you help her? Would you love her? Would you draw her to yourself today?”
Lord, she's very beautiful. You created her. Please draw her to yourself. This little prayer rewires my brain with good theology, with good spiritual practices, and with healthy sexuality. It’s something that I say to myself all the time—sometimes over and over and over! 😅
It helps me relate to the other person. It helps me not live in fear of the other person. It helps me to appreciate them without lusting after them and following on that path towards sexual addiction and watching porn.
If you really loved that prayer and you want this all written out, I created a free prayer guide for you to take with you. You can download it here:
301069
