Pensees: Two Women and Desire

Two Women and Desire

Two women made the front pages last week. It’s real tabloid stuff, but tabloid stuff makes the front pages anymore. And so it is safe to assume that many Christian people have at least read about the demise of Captain Lisa Nouwak and the untimely death of Ana Nicole Smith. The question that always comes to my mind when I hear salacious, sensational stories like the story of Nouwak’s bizarre behavior and Smith’s wreck of a life is what are God’s people thinking right now? Because I think we should be thinking when we watch the evening news, not just ogling.

Here’s what I was thinking:

Smith was a bimbo and, as one journalist said,

“In the case of the unfortunate Smith, there was something almost touchingly retro about her wretched train wreck of a life. She wasn’t, in fact, celebrated just for being a celebrity, as is the current mode. She’d earned her notoriety the old-fashioned way: She took her clothes off for it, then married rich — though like so much else in her ambit, that apparently didn’t turn out very well.

Smith died prematurely as a drug addict.

Nouwak, on the other hand, was the poster-child of feminists everywhere for achieving glory in a man’s world. Few people can glory in the kind of career that Nouwak achieved before she was the age of fifty. She had the job that people only dream about. One blogger wraps it up well:

We’ve heard of alpha males. Well, Lisa Nowak was an Alpha Female, the leader of her pack. Intensely competitive, she was high school valedictorian and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She made her mark in a very macho field, as a gung-ho naval aviator who still managed to get a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, all while raising a young family. She became a test pilot and, by 1998, was a NASA astronaut. In July 2006, she was a member of the crew on the space shuttle Discovery and was lauded for her contributions to the flight. She was a role model, respected by her peers and idolized by those who believe that a woman can have it all: family, achievement, professional recognition. But as they say, everyone has a dark side. The intense stresses on her life and career brought this out in Ms. Nowak, in spades.

Nouwak’s dazzling career came to a screeching halt when she found herself in court being arraigned for pre-meditated attempted murder.

On the surface Smith and Nouwak could not be more different. But Smith and Nouwak were too much the same. Smith had body and Nouwak had brain, but neither beautiful body nor brilliant brain can withstand what all humans have in common: desire.

Desire. Even NASA cannot figure out the hellish power of desire. Psychologists, behavioral experts, and medical doctors are combining their powers to find an explanation for Nowak’s bizarre behavior. They want to find preventatives for future episodes. NASA does not want to be embarrassed again.

But what they don’t understand is that desire is the culprit and Captain Lisa Nouwak is an extreme illustration of the condition of every unsaved person in the world. She is remarkable only in that what she did is unusual, but her condition is universal. She, like Anna Nicole Smith, was enslaved to a desire that would ultimately ruin her. If only they could have been saved from their desires.

Any believer who has done the least amount of counseling has seen people do amazingly stupid things out of passion. (LaShawn Barber’s readers share stupid things they did “for love” here). The fact of that matter. however, is that ALL unbelievers are under the spell of their desires. Of course, they may not pack a BB gun and gray tape, travel from Houston to Orlando in a diaper, and pepper spray the lover of their paramour, but that is only because other desires trump stupidity for the moment. The pride of life may preclude the acting out of the lust of the flesh, but it is still desire. Sinful desire. And the final effect of that desire is just as damning, if not more delusive, as the desire to shack up in space. The desire to please men, keep one’s dignity, and be successful at NASA without doing something so stupid as to become the laughingstock of pundits and comedians is just as controlling and mind-numbing as a junior-high crush. Our desires are deadly, and our desires will ultimately make fools out of us. Unless, of course, we are saved from our desires.

And that is exactly what salvation does. It saves us from doing what we want to do. And it ultimately changes our “wanter.” I once read of a young woman who went to see a psychologist because she was so fatigued by incessant partying and drinking that she was getting very sick. When the psychologist asked her why she didn’t stop going to parties, she responded in shock, “You mean I don’t have to do what I want to do?”

Worldlings smile at the airheadedness of the sorority girl, condescendingly smirk at the bawdiness of the bimbo, and pity the spacey astronaut, but little do they realize that they too only do what they want to do. They cannot do anything else. No sooner then they begin to examine the root of everything that they are and do then they will realize that there is “none who does good, no, not one” (Romans 3:12). None, no, not one, desires to do good after the law of God in the inner man (Romans 7:22) except the persons in whom God has implanted His righteous law in their hearts (Hebrews 8:12). Humans desire all the wrong things.

If they are to get to heaven they need the power to answer desire with a strong no. And only grace can teach us that answer. The Apostle teaches us that it is grace, not will-power, that teaches us to “deny worldly desires” (Titus 2:11-12).

We are tempted when we are drawn away “of our own desires” (James 1:12). It is our own desires that would lure us away from safety into eternal death. It was desire, strong desire, that was responsible for the death of thousands of Israelites who had enjoyed the miraculous works of God in the desert. “All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted” (1 Corinthians 10:2-6). Desire killed them.

Salvation, then, is an escape from evil desires. To be transformed into the image of Christ and become partakers of the Divine nature is to be released from the power of passion and given the grace to say no to worldly desires (2 Peter 1:4).

The specialists, the experts, the psychoanalysts, and the doctors may never figure out the mystery of the power of desire. They will never find out what Captain Nowak really needs. They don’t want to.

The pundits and the journalists who make their money gossiping about Anna Nicole Smith even after her tragic death do not realize that her appeal is that she is a larger-than-life replica of their own natures. She desired herself to death. They also are desiring to death. They don’t know what she needed. They don’t want to.

But I know what she needed, and I know what Nouwak needs. My heart breaks for her. She needs what I have been given: escape.

“[God’s] divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:3-4).

That escape is provided to us by a grace that teaches us progressively to live righteously and soberly in this present evil world, denying wrong desires (Titus 2:11-13).

Thank God we don’t have to do what we want to do.

Two women made the news this past week. They were both the victims of their own desires. In the end, I guess that really isn’t news after all. For that is the plight of all humans unless they find the escape that comes by the power of God through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Maybe their sad tales will provoke compassion in the hearts of God’s people and stir us all up to evangelize with greater fervency. Maybe it will make us plead, “Be reconciled to God.”

When you watch the news, don’t ogle. Weep.