Organic Farming and My Sex Life (3 of 3)

       

       The National Gardening Association reports that the average home garden in the United States yields $600 worth of produce per gardening family, with an investment of only $70. This converts into $21 billion not spent in U.S. supermarkets. This $21 billion pays little tax, no executive salaries, no transport or fuel cost, and no money leaves your home.1          
          What do you think a consumer based economy thinks of people choosing to produce that which they consume? Eating from your own garden is a threat to our present economy. Why? They need our money to keep the machine running. As a result of post WWII industrialism, family farms, which were at least in part subsistence communities, were forced to specialize. We were told to sell what we produce for paper money then go to town and buy from great big stores. Thus, American consumerism was born.
          Consumerism is aggressively targeting every aspect of your life. This is what we call advertising. The goal of advertising in our generation is to manufacturer discontent–to leave us wanting more. Producers want us to be dissatisfied with what we already have or could produce ourselves in order to entice us to buy their products. And spend we do. We buy clothes to portray an unauthentic image and eat food for entertainment alone, but they didn't stop there.
          Now my generation is being attacked by a wholly destructive industry–Pornography. 
          Each year the porn industry makes no less than 10 billion dollars off of Americans alone.2 There's big money to be made in the sale and consumption of porn and porn-related products, as well as, huge advertising profits in generating traffic to "free" porn sites.
          Can you imagine the threat healthy marriages are to this multi-billion dollar industry? The pleasure you produce and enjoy does not directly participate in a consumer based economy. It is produced locally and tax-free. No wonder my email receives a constant trickle of trash trying to seduce me into paying for my pleasure. 
     Porn is the bottled water of sex. I have a tap in my kitchen, which produces the water I drink, but I have to fill the glass; or not, for a small fee, bottled water comes pre-filled and ready for consumption. As consumers we prefer to exchange revenue for the goods we need. Growing a garden takes a lot of work, as a gardener I know. But our vegetables are sweeter and less contaminated than the supermarket's; and so is our bedroom.     
     The effect of our love moves beyond us. The love or lack of love we produce becomes the garden we raise our children in. It is the back drop of every other relationship in our lives. The love of a husband  only produces fulfillment when expressed to the wife it was designated for. 
     Poets, artist, and theologians have described the nature of love from every angle. Literature and music are filled with the reverberations of humans trying to cope with the love bursting within us all. But love is not homogeneous. The love inside my heart is made up of a spectrum of loves. The challenge of existence is knowing our loves to the point of knowing which direction they each point and then releasing our love in that direction. 
     Consumerism is not concerned with helping you understand your loves. They'd rather tell you which of their products you should love. So much heartache has been experienced by people tying to love the right object with the wrong love. My children-directed-love doesn't work on my wife and my God-directed-love doesn't work on anyone but God. Love comes with labels. Our loves are like Christmas gifts under a tree. We must take the time to read the name tags.
     Sadly, many people have given out the wrong gifts. The wrong gift to the right person creates frustration. My friends are not my wife and my wife is not my God. 
     If you don't declare your loves, consumerism will declare them for you. You will be tossed by fads and trends, not only in what you wear, but in the friends you pick and the values you affirm. Never has a culture touted itself as a comprehensive worldview with only empty promises and products due to be obsolete by next Christmas.  
     Pornography does not fulfill it entices. It is designed to always leave you wanting and wanting more. Love fulfills. It fills us up. That is what it's designed to do. Every true love draws us in a God-ward direction because every true love is loving God. Pornography thrives on our lust, not only for sex, but for what is next. It is a prison and misery makes the bars. Love is freedom. In marriage, we are given the canvas upon which we create our own masterpiece. In marriage, we are given the pages upon which we write our own love story. We are the artists. We, above all, value our art. It is ours, unique to us. May we never plagiarize.  
     Live in the garden of your love and love the garden you live in. It is yours. Your gift from God.                                                     

1 http://www.gardenresearch.com/files/2009-Impact-of-Gardening-in-America-White-Paper.pdf
2 http://www.covenanteyes.com/2012/06/01/how-big-is-the-pornography-industry-in-the-united-states/