5Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.
Passion can take on a life of its own. It can become a driving force that just seems to take one over, compelling it to act. In those moments we can choose to yield to its power, or we can resist. This wife is caught by its power. She has been waiting for her husband to return home. She longs for his embrace, for his company, presence. He holds a special place in her heart, and that place can feel an emptiness that can be filled only with one person. Many today do not have this type of experience with their spouse because intimacy was trivialized during dating. When sexual intimacy is downplayed by a culture, and it certainly is in ours, then what was designed to be the pinnacle of connectedness becomes the exchange of bodily fluids. It is comparable to someone who loves using a high-end MAC computer being forced to go back to a DOS based, 5 ¼” floppy system. When sex gets trivialized, then the pleasure system gets downgraded; all the upgrades that the LORD designed are rolled back. Instead of sex being the culmination of desire, it becomes the means and the end. Or it becomes a glorified kiss, lacking any depth of meaning. It is just something people “do” with each other. That is why getting the sexual desire engines warming up too soon in a relationship can lead to what can seem like unstoppable urges. And when we give in to those urges, we begin the downgrade process. If we resist, and wait until the honeymoon, we set ourselves up for the possibility of an ever-increasing intimacy that can last a lifetime. We start with DOS and move up to MAC Lion. If we don’t wait, the best we can hope for is Windows 97. The choice is ours.
The Arnold Journey 