The road map to understanding both our sexuality and our spirituality is actually comprised of our deepest, most intimate personal sexual fantasies. So we’d be smart to examine such landmarks as:

• Who are the faces in our fantasies?
• What roles do they play?
• What roles do we play?
• What primary emotions do these fantasies elicit, and why?
• What event in our history created the need to experience such an emotion?
• How does this fantasy medicate emotional pain from my past or present?
• Why would humans (even Christians!) fantasize about things like:
  • viewing pornography or engaging in extramarital affairs
  • bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism (as glamorized in the Fifty Shades trilogy)
  • prostitution, seduction, or rape
  • same-sex trysts, threesomes, and orgies

And the most important question to consider is:

• Could there be an even deeper spiritual longing beneath our sexual longings?

I’ll pause a moment to let you gasp for air, loosen your tie, relax your jaw, take a drink of water, and regain your composure. You may or may not be comfortable with these topics, but we need to discuss them. We’ve needed to for a l-o-n-g time. As a society, as a church, as couples and single individuals, as men and women, as parents of boys and girls struggling to make sense of their own sexuality, we need to talk about this. Ignoring the elephant in all of our living rooms certainly won’t make it disappear. In fact, ignoring that elephant is causing it to mysteriously grow larger and larger.

Excerpted from The Fantasy Fallacy: Exposing the Deeper Meaning Behind Sexual Thoughts  by Shannon Ethridge. Copyright 2012.  All Rights Reserved. Published by Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, TN. Used by Permission. Not to be copied without Publisher’s prior written approval.