Troublesome Topic: WATCH OUT FOR MAGNETS!

If you decide to seek true victory over lust, you will find that there is a big problem involving magnets. What I mean is that my eyes have magnets in them, and certain parts of the female body have magnets in them, and the poles of these magnets are located so that these magnets attract each other powerfully. If I allow those parts of a woman’s body to get close to the center of my sight where my vision is clearest, my eyes will snap to the magnets even if I am saying to myself, “Don’t look, don’t look!” The only way I have found to not ever glance at a woman’s sexually stimulating body parts is to not allow those part of her body to get even close to the center of my vision.

The area of my vision where things are truly in focus is very small; this requires that my eyes must move in order to focus on something different even if it is close to the first thing focused on. Try it with words on this screen. Can you truly focus on more than one word at a time? Usually you cannot. You see and understand more than one word, but usually one word at a time makes up the area of your clearest vision. That is how small or tight that area of true focus is. This means that when I am talking to someone and I look from their eyes to their nose, my eyes will shift just a bit, but it will be noticeable. Or, more to the point, if my eyes adjust from focusing on a woman’s necklace to her cleavage, my eyes will have to move and the change, though small, will be noticed by her unless she is not looking at my eyes.

I have found that the area which presents a danger of the magnets snapping together is much larger than the area of clear focus at the center of my vision. In other words, I can’t allow certain female body parts to get even close to my center of vision. So I now find myself walking through the store, or walking around at work with my eyes on the floor. If I am at work and my head is up and I see someone coming in the peripheral areas of my vision, I have learned to quickly guess if it is a man or a woman. For instance, I have learned that usually men take longer steps than women do, so if I just see someone’s head bobbing over my computer monitor as they come my way, I can guess if it is a man or a woman by the length of stride. This is important because if my eyes are on the left side of my computer monitor, and someone comes from behind that monitor, they will end up on the left side of my screen and my eyes are liable to be about level with the person’s chest. Then the magnets will do their thing – if I don’t move them from the left side of my screen, my eyes will snap from my screen to the person who just came into full view to the left of my screen, and the focal point of my vision will be chest high on that person walking by.

So I use the peripheral vision to anticipate a problem and I have now (finally) trained my mind to shout “Danger, Danger” (I say these to myself with an Australian accent just because it’s cool). Therefore I turn my eyes away from where the female magnets are likely to soon be. I know that if I don’t avert my eyes early, they will likely snap to the magnets when they come into view. I am not always successful at doing this, but I am learning to anticipate the approach of magnets and take action before it is a problem Such anticipation is achievable in relatively predictable settings, such as where I work.

Another technique I am training myself to employ is helpful in unpredictable places such as almost any public place where people are free to move any direction at any time. This technique is simply to not look at where people are located unless it is necessary. Some readers, even some men, will say this is overkill, however, for those of us who have struggled unsuccessfully against lust for many years and now want to change our bad habits, extreme measures are required. I have found that most of the times when my eyes have inadvertently come too close to some magnets and snapped to them for an instant have been situations in which I did not need to be looking that direction anyway. On the other hand, if I need to greet someone or carry on a conversation with someone, I can look them in the eye and speak to them. This is a purposeful exception to the rule I apply to myself which says, “Avoid snapping to magnets by not looking in their direction.” Because of the purposeful nature of looking at someone in order to converse with them, I am able to control my eyes during that time. I was not previously able to do this successfully, but with God’s help I can now look at a woman’s eyes to carry on a conversation.

Why is snapping to magnets a bad thing?

Even though the snapping of my eyes to the magnets and then averting my eyes immediately is not sin, and even though the magnets are not in my sight long enough to get a good look, this can still weaken me. There is enough of a glimpse that my imagination can fill in the gaps if I want to go there. I thank God that I no longer want to go there, but if I suffered many such unintentional glimpses in a day, it could negatively affect my mind and get me started thinking sexual thoughts which could lead to wanting to recreate those images. It is safest to simply avoid all “danger” and thus prevent any of those types of negative influences and the weakness they cause.

The next lesson is: What Jesus Said about Magnets