Ladies May Want To Skip This Posting

Friday morning rain and wind kept me from my usual outdoor chores so I settled in at the computer for a solid day of formatting my Glog manuscript.

Got up to page 178.

Would have gone further but I bogged down browsing internet photos of naked women instead of working.

When I was a kid back in the early 1950s, fellow Boy Scouts clued me in to the fact that library copies of Esquire magazine featured paintings of pinup girls by the artist Vargas. I carried a razor blade to the library and sliced out pages of these pictures to sneak home to my room.

A reporter once asked Vargas why he only painted pictures of unclad women; he replied, “Show me something more beautiful than a naked woman and I’ll paint it”.

Don’t need a razor blade any more.

The internet can flash a whole harem full of naked beauties onto my desktop with a single click. Hundreds of thousands of naked women display themselves in poses ranging from tasteful Grecian classic Venus de Milo stances to postures reminding me of the old joke:

Q: What does Lulu put behind her ears to make herself more attractive to men?
A: Her ankles.

Saint Paul said that when he was a boy, he spoke as a boy, he understood as a boy, he thought as a boy, “But when I became a man, I put away childish things”.

Good for him.

That’s beyond my experience.

At heart I’m still a sneaky twerp lurking in library stacks to peek at pinup girls.

Then there’s that teaching of Jesus: “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out…”.

But I’m not lusting; I’m just curious.

Ha!

How can I, a Christian, and not only a Christian but a writer who, on some low level, seeks to honor God in my work, how can I be so perverse as to linger over pictures of naked women in the internet when I should be working?

Maybe it’s because I’m human.

I do what I do because I am what I am.

Or is this just a guy thing?

Once a bunch of guy friends and I were talking about looking at women. Included in the group was Sam, who was born blind. We teased him about never having this particular temptation.

“Bull,” he said. “You guys have it lucky. You can see if a woman is a dog. With me, every time I hear a woman’s footsteps or her voice, I get this image of a lascivious beautiful babe. To me all women are gorgeous. I see them all that way”.

So maybe this is just part of being human; maybe it’s just natural…

The thing is, Jesus calls us to a supernatural life, an eternal life. He calls us to be a bit more than human, to be godly.

I wish He wouldn’t do that!