Sexual Invocation – My Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness #3

When we invite God into our sex lives, we can find healing and wholeness—but it may not be in the way we expect.

I’ve written about the sexual brokenness that I carried into my marriage, leading to long-term avoidance of sex with my husband. I’ve shared about the season of focusing on my husband’s sexuality after God showed me how deeply my sexual avoidance had hurt my husband.

I want to give you the conclusion of my story here—but I know it won’t really be the conclusion. My story continues to unfold. I am not in a place of sexual perfection by any means. God continues to urge my growth in many ways, including in the marriage bed.

The most recent phase of my journey toward sexual wholeness isn’t something that can be laid out in nice linear fashion. Rather, it is more like the process of creating a tapestry, with many threads stitched together to create a picture on one side, while the back looks like something of a tangled mess.

With God in charge of the design, though, the picture that emerges is a beautiful one.

The thread of invitation

When I was a teen, I asked our youth group leader, “How can people have sex when they know that God sees?”

It was a good opportunity for a conversation about God’s design for sex and His presence throughout it all. Instead, I got an embarrassed mumble along the lines of, “When you’re having sex, you’re not really thinking about God.”

We often treat sex as something that is only physical, devoid of a spiritual component. We see it as a physical need, something God tolerates because He gave us the bodies, rather than something that helps us grow in intimacy and faith or something that He desires for us in our marriages.

During my years of yearning for God, of wanting to belong to Him, God was always there even though I wasn’t seeing Him.

I was the one who abandoned Him, believing that my sexual sin had created a permanent separation between us. The enemy used sex to drive me away from God—yet God never left. He was there with me, watching me and waiting for my return.

Several years ago, I wrote about the moment I shed the shame from my sexual baggage. The moment I did, I reached out to God. God had been sitting, waiting while He watched my heartache—but the moment I took a step toward Him, He stepped forward to engulf me in His arms.

His prodigal daughter had come home, and He ran out to greet me.

Without the sex-based barriers I’d erected between God and me, I was able to see something clearly for the first time: God is part of my sexuality and part of my marriage bed.

God is present in every aspect of my sexuality. He designed the way my body and my husband’s body function. He designed my sexual response. He is aware of all my sexual thoughts and frustrations. He is there when I am having sex, whether or not I want to think about Him.

Accepting God as part of my sex life was an important step toward healing—but I didn’t experience healing until I did more than just accept Him there.

It isn’t enough to show up at the pool and expect someone else to do all the work to make healing happen. We have to do actively seek the healing that God offers.

It wasn’t enough to accept God’s presence in my sexuality. I had to actively seek His presence.

I had to invite God.

An invocation is a prayerful request for God’s presence—even when it comes to sex.

This means that not only do I pray about my sex life, I often pray during sex. Even during the most intimate moments with my husband, I invite God’s presence there.

Invoking God’s presence into my sexuality made healing possible.

The thread of unbrokenness

I’ve often thought of healing as a restoration of what once was—an unblemished and untarnished original entity. From that perspective, I saw healing was a cancellation of the wounds.

But here’s the thing: not all wounds can be healed.

I have scars from some of my sexual baggage. Some wounds still ache from time to time.

I’m glad they do, because they remind me of the many pieces of my life story that have contributed to who I am and what I have to offer to God, to be used for His purposes.

Although my wounds sometimes ache, they are easily soothed when they do. They don’t invite new pain. It’s more that they occasionally remind me of the pain that is no longer a constant part of my life.

I will never be restored to who and what I was or might have been before I acquired my heart wounds and sexual baggage—yet I still think of myself as healed.

Sex was the thing that got in the way of my relationship with God—and God has used that same thing as the means to pull me back to Him.

The moment when I realized how much I’d hurt my husband, I began a sex-focused journey that led to the repair of so much more than sex. My journey mended the pieces of my heart that had longed to belong so many years ago.

I’m no longer broken. Instead, all the broken pieces have been put back together again, a la Humpty Dumpty.

The thread of golden repair

Healing has come not through the restoration of what was lost.

Healing has come through transformation into something new in God.

Sometimes known as “golden repair,” the Japanese art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery with material infused with gold dust.

The fractures and cracks are not hidden in the repair work; rather, they are made even more beautiful and precious than before. (You can see some pictures here.) They become the thing that adds the most beauty to the object.

Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Isaiah 64:8

God has transformed me through a holy kintsugi. He hasn’t erased my broken places. He made them more beautiful and precious than before.

God’s repair work in me has made me more beautiful. It has given me completeness and a sense of well-being.

The tapestry of His handiwork in me has given me peace.

Transformation through God has made me feel whole in all ways—including sexually.

Invocation

My journey goes on, and my story continues to unfold.

Sexual disintegrity showed me the many ways I was broken, sexually and otherwise. A season of sexual stewardship pulled me out of my self-centeredness. Looking outward toward my husband helped me learn to look upward to God. Inviting God into my brokenness, in a sexual invocation, was where the healing of transformation took place.

Your story may be quite different from mine, but I want to encourage you to have hope. Inviting God’s presence into your hurt and actively seeking healing can transform even the most broken vessel—including you—into something beautiful and whole.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

My Story of Sexual Healing and Wholeness

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