Hungry Man: Woman Hunger

This week, as part of our “Hungry Man” series, we have a GUEST BLOG by Jason Reid, founding Board Member of Restoration Project. Enjoy!!

Whether a man is single, married, happily married, unhappily married, having good sex, having bad sex, not having sex…regardless of his circumstance, he is drawn to the woman.

At the core of a man’s heart is a deep hunger for the woman. Watch a man’s head as he drives down the road past a woman jogging, or sitting in church as a beautiful woman walks by, or at the checkout counter walking past the magazine rack with the latest 50 sex tips. We are drawn, we long, we ache, we desire the woman. It is a hunger. And, it is not wrong. We are drawn to the beauty by design (check out Genesis 2:23-25 for Adam’s hungry response to his first glance at Eve). It is when we look to the woman for our own validation as men that our soul-design becomes bent and we lose ourselves.

Last spring a friend of mine helped me look at my brokenness and my misplaced attempts to find wholeness in a new light. He encouraged me to not immediately label my thoughts and actions as right or wrong, immoral or moral, but rather to sit in them and ask the question,

“What am I looking for?”

And while we may misdirect our desires or attempt to satiate them in some ways, we are all looking for something. Under every action is a desire.

Christ provides His followers an extremely generous freedom to relax – to live without moment to moment introspection or immediate judgment. This leads to either bloated self-righteousness and or extreme self-condemnation. And along my journey of faith, embracing this freedom is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. Constant introspection and fear of condemnation results in burnout, faking/posing, and deeper isolation and addiction. Jesus invites us to a more abundant way of living. So, I ask, what am I looking for in the woman? I think it goes much deeper than just sex.

In our culture sex is easy and cheap, making it almost effortless to search for wholeness in sex. However, as a Christian, how do I/you feel after I/you have used pornography? Whole or empty? Powerful or weak? For some, how did you feel after that adulterous affair? Scared, empty, afraid your wife and kids will find out? Sexuality expressed in the wrong context leads to brokenness, not wholeness. For those of us that have gone to woman time after time looking for wholeness, we know the empty results all too well.

Simply put, I believe a deep sense of inadequacy is what drives us to the woman in our search for wholeness. One of the deepest questions of a man’s heart is “do I have what it takes?” If a man does not get this question answered by God, he will go to any length to answer it himself, and often looks to the woman for assurance. Un/Invalidated men must continually strive to remove the unbearable feeling of inadequacy in an effort to sooth a hurting soul, leaving a trail of brokenness in his wake. Our brokenness leads us on a daily quest for wholeness, a quest that many men turn to the woman to answer.

The man’s hunger for the woman is a gift from God. And yet, in his fallenness, the glory of the desire is often reduced, marred, and bent. The result is brokenness, not fulfillment. A woman is not a man’s answer. A woman is a man’s companion, a co-adventurer through this life. Let’s not lose sight of the glory of our desire, nor the glory of the woman.