Hey! No Peeking: Or how I learned to stop worrying and start embracing unrequited love

By Mark Foster

Drug abuse has been around the United States for decades. But the current generation is in the middle of taking it to a whole new level. The National Institute of Drug Abuse tracks overdoses. From 2002 to 2015, the number of overdoses in the U.S. went from around 20,000 to 50,000. Heroin seems to be the choice lately, with deaths from heroin overdoses climbing from 2,500 in 2010 to 13,000 in 2015. Meet Lily and Mark, individuals who had accepted Christ earlier in life, but were wandering through the Earth when we meet them. Lily is a heroin addict. Mark wants to save her but does not know how. When they meet, it was if they had known each other forever. Follow them on their journey, as each learns how to cope -with drugs and with the person on drugs. Will their friendship last? Will they ever find romance? Will they survive the perils of life around them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640798380

Mark Foster

MARK FOSTER is a museum exhibit designer who applies his broad background in history, the arts, and architecture to making history accessible to the general public. 

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Hey!

No Peeking

Or how I learned to stop worrying and

start embracing unrequited love

Mark Foster

ISBN 978-1-64079-837-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64079-838-0 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by Mark Foster

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Jesus, my Savior. Because of him, both of the main characters in this book, with the author being one of them, now realize that the eternal life they are guaranteed through Jesus is one that will sustain us here on Earth through all trials and tribulations. Our hope is that those who read this book are the people it is geared for.

First, this is for the lost souls of the Earth. Those in pain through addiction of whatever kind. May this book help you overcome that addiction, no matter how small or how big it seems to be, through Jesus, your Savior, who overcame much more than that when He died on the cross and rose again. If Jesus can overcome sin and death, and He did, then He can also help you with your addiction. The addiction can be sexual, or drugs, or alcohol, or even church life. Whatever your addiction is, just hand it over to Jesus to take care of. Watch Him destroy the addiction in front of you. Watch Him embrace you as He does.

Second, this is for those who judge others instead of helping them. Did Jesus ever walk past a leper and say, I wonder what he did to deserve that? No. Did He ever walk past a tax collector and say, Yes, but he could have chosen a different profession. No. Jesus met people where they were. And that is now our jobs. I pray that you open your heart to the people around you who need your help, your prayers, and your faith. Show them what Jesus was really like. Show them what Jesus would really do.

I also want to say thank you to those who have helped me along my journey. To my pastor, my friends, my family, and especially to Lily. The names in this book have been changed to protect the innocent. But you all know who you are.

Prologue

This is a story about a man with troubles. Namely, me. I don’t mean troubles as in with the law. I mean troubles with the law and with grace. Those troubles begin with, well, let’s be honest here, naked women. Or maybe I should say, my choosing to view naked women. I said I wanted to be honest here, after all. A recent study showed that seventy-one percent of single men in America who call themselves Christian are addicted to or have been addicted to pornography in one way or another. My challenge to you, dear reader, is to read past the part where I confess my sins before all, and get to where God met me on Forgiveness Road. This book has been written with a frankness and honesty that may leave some people to question whether I am really a Christian. But if you dare to read the Bible from cover to cover, you will only be able to recall one perfect man—Jesus. So you may say that maybe I am just too honest here. Most Christians, and I am not saying this to judge, are not open about their major sins. Especially if those sins would seem embarrassing in front of a crowd.

The first part of this book may be a little risqué for the younger people, namely, those not old enough to understand emotional pain. That understanding comes at different times in everyone’s lives. For me, it came in my mid-twenties, when my job got me transferred from one city to another and to another and I had to leave people behind I loved. Others, unfortunately, find that pain comes at an earlier age. I really don’t like it when that happens before the person reaches ten. I am different in some ways. I reached the age of thirty-nine without having sexual intercourse. I told you this book was frank and openly honest. Now that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it. I reached fifty without getting married. That puts me in a minority among American males, many of whom have been married three to four times by that age.

Once again, I am not judging with that statement. I am just stating facts. Many American males have been married more than one time, and quite a few of them more than two times. And if we can’t say things like that to each other, then how could we ever discuss it with God? But when it comes to marriage in the twenty-first century, I also believe in forgiveness. Here is an example of forgiveness: Remember the county clerk in Kentucky who took a stand against having to issue same-sex marriage licenses. It wasn’t that she hated gays; she just felt like she should abide by God’s laws, which always trump man’s laws when there is a disagreement; like the coach recently in the news for praying with his players. But back to the county clerk. All the media could do is talk about the fact that she was on her fourth marriage. Well, if God can forgive her for those first three, who I am to say otherwise? So I just concentrate on her stand. If Christians refuse to have backbones, who will?

You see, I have always been a Christian. That’s not to say I am perfect, though. I did attend Catholic schools for twelve years. And at seventeen, I accepted Jesus as my savior and had my moment in His arms, knowing where I would be going in my after-this-life—to a real life with Him. But during my early adulthood—really, it started in junior high school—I was also into reading and looking at pornography. I’ve always been attracted to the female figure. I won’t go into details here, though.

That brings me to the start of this story. I vowed to wait until marriage, and I made sure that whoever I was dating at any time knew that I wanted to be celibate. To wait. To make it special. But my addiction finally got the better of me, and I sinned. I had sex outside of marriage. Still, God forgave me. When I asked for forgiveness. Now, being a one-woman man, I have had plenty of women of all shapes and sizes and ages go out with me. Almost every single one of them, however, was within five to seven years of my age. And though I found myself close on a few occasions, I never did find the right one.

At least, until she walked into my life. Or so I thought upon first glance. Which was about her body.

Chapter One

The Meeting

One adage says that age is just a number. Another says you will know the right one when you meet that person.

Baloney, I said one day.

That attitude started for me about the time I turned fifty. I was still single. And it had been more than two years since my previous relationship of more than two weeks. I was beginning to feel lonely, thinking that, as the band America once sang, Life had passed me by. Like most people, though, I was hanging my hat upon the wrong lyrics. I should have been thinking about the next line—Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup. I am not using that as an excuse. That’s just how I was feeling. I even had the nerve to ask God one night to take me away, to take me to heaven. I knew that was where I was going to go, and I thought I was ready. I thought my work here was finished.

That doesn’t mean God agreed.

My morbid thought was that if there really was one for me, she had probably been aborted, something that happens not-so-rarely in our society, no matter what the politicians want you to believe. Think about it. If two exact people are meant to be together, what if fate had intervened and caused one to belong to a woman who found it too inconvenient to be pregnant. That’s possible, right? Well, especially with more than fifty-five million abortions having been legally performed in my lifetime, I was beginning to think that scenario was more probable than imagining one in which my one and only had been hit by a bus, or had been too close to a building that some terrorist blew up. My one-and-only had either escaped me already or had suffered some tragedy that prevented us from ever meeting.

I did tell you I had just turned fifty, didn’t I? A strange time in a man’s life. Especially a single man. Before I continue with this story, though, I need to ask you a simple question. One to ponder on. Just think about it for a minute. Answer later, if you wish.

Are you the kind of Christian who prefers to dwell on the past and what people have done, or are you, like God, a forgiver of sins who, once he forgives us, takes your sins and throws them into the sea of forgetfulness?

I think, by the way I worded that question, that you know where I stand on the issue.

You see, I didn’t need to be lonely. I could have been married before. Things just had never worked out completely in any relationship I had before. But I still had my youthful looks. My hair had not even begun to turn gray. My beard and mustache had, so I just kept them shaved off. I wore tinted glasses, and one of my lines upon meeting a woman at one time was to tell her it was because the blue in my eyes was so pure, too many women had fainted at the mere sight of them. You can pause and moan; that’s a corny line. I was beginning to be more than pudgy in shape. Once upon a time, I used to run a lot. My weight when I was in peak conditioning, playing basketball and slow-pitch softball all the time, was about 185 pounds. But I took a sedentary job and didn’t take time to exercise for too many straight years. So my weight had ballooned to 340 pounds. Mostly because I had failed to notice. Or didn’t care to notice. Or maybe it was that I just didn’t see myself that way. That I couldn’t see myself that way. Still, I knew deep down that if I would ever lose the weight, I was quite a catch. That’s confidence. But for too long, that confidence was centered on the if and not on the taking of any action.

One year, I had taken a vacation from my job in early June. This seemed to be a good time to me to be on vacation, so I started a ritual of taking the first ten-to-twelve days off in June, or something in that neighborhood. After just a couple of years, that ritual turned into a stay-cation. You know what a stay-cation is, don’t you? That’s when you don’t feel like going anywhere or going to see anyone, so you just stay at home and put on a little weight.

The putting on a little weight had become routine for me as well—over the past three years especially. I went from a top-bachelor-in-town weight of 210 pounds as a thirty-five-year-old to a glorified 340 pounds in no time, it seemed. Not bad for someone five feet nine, huh? But that would make this a story about weight loss.

So here I was, a man of fifty, on his June stay-cation, with nothing to do. Bored, yes. Lonely, sort of. I knew I still had God on my side, but somehow my flesh did not feel that was enough. Well, my flesh actually preferred an old stand-by for me—a little pornography.

My pornography of choice over the years had changed from looking at the pictures of what seemed to be thousands of magazines when I was still struggling through puberty—which came later in life for me than too many others—to watching adult films on my TV screen, to watching women of all shapes and sizes and ages and nationalities on the internet. Basically, I learned to love naked women. Even the glimpse you see in some movies. Even when those glimpses aren’t really, in real life, actually naked bodies. Because just the thought of nakedness was good enough for me. Just talking to a woman on the phone was enough for me at one point. My choice at this point in my life was going to the local strip club—you know, just to watch.

Yeah, right. And men have read Playboy for the articles for years.

I first started going to strip clubs when I was in my early twenties. I was in a remote town in west Texas at a management convention when the group wanted to go out one night. We went to a strip club. I tagged along because I did not have my own car to go back to the hotel. Not that I didn’t enjoy myself, mind you. But it didn’t really feel right being there. Until one of my buddies bought me my first lap dance. You know what a lap dance is? That’s when you get a one-on-one dance. Just you and a topless girl who grinds against you in all the wrong places. This was something I could get used to, I thought. After all, it wasn’t really sex, now, was it?

Still, I knew going there was not good for me. It cost money. Lots of it. Which was probably why I was always trying to play catch-up with my finances. Those dancers work only for tips and they like a lot of tips just to talk to them. I knew that a better use for that money would be to fix up my house and yard. But that was too practical. And I hardly do anything practical. I also knew that, even though I had known God and listened to His voice for many years, God was not entirely pleased with my choice of going to those places. They cause you to focus on yourself, your flesh, and not on God. In my flesh, though, I incorrectly reasoned that I was going there to see people (i.e. women) who probably just needed someone to talk to. Because that’s what I needed—someone to talk to. Sure, the nakedness was pleasing as well to my flesh, but my flesh really wanted a companion, if only for a few hours. Not someone to get physical with later. That would never happen anyway. I was looking for an emotional companion. My need at the time was to find someone to listen to me. Well, other than God. Because I had lost contact with God at the time (yes, I stopped listening to Him and I stopped talking to Him), even though I still went to church regularly. I should highlight that last sentence. But I felt in my flesh that I needed more. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but that must have been how Eve in the Garden of Eden felt also. She just wanted to know what more there was and what more could be offered. Surely, it wouldn’t be disobeying God just to find out about more.

But that was exactly wrong. I know that now. Don’t kid yourself—God really is enough. He always has been and always can be. If you let Him. It was the more that was always getting me into trouble. For when you choose the more, you are choosing a path that God has not yet ordered for you to walk. You force God to build a new road that will help you get back to Him and into His good grace and mercy. But, by the way, you never really surprised Him about the more. He knew which you were going to choose, but still wished you would have chosen Him all along. And He is merciful enough to build that second road back to Him. In fact, He already knew you were going to need it. Thank goodness.

Actually, thank God.

I live in the reality that there are broken people in this world. Broken as in not sure if they are connected to God, or not wanting to be connected to Him because of what they have gone through already in this life. But God is the ultimate freedom-giver. His version of freedom is to let us decide whether to connect with Him or not. It has always been our decision. Just like it was Adam’s decision to sit by and watch the serpent tempt Eve into doing something Adam knew she should not have done. You know, the more she craved.

It was in that reality that I purposefully went into the strip club that Tuesday evening, June 2, 2015. I could choose better words and tell you that I stumbled into the club. Or my car had broken down and it was the closest thing open. But I have to admit it—I chose it. Purposefully. God made it all work for His glory anyway. That’s what I mean by His mercy. Literally, the flesh part of me was winning over the spirit part of me at that time.

Once I was there, I was actually beginning to be a little bored. A pudgy, older male in there with a bunch of women, most of whom were strikingly beautiful and very young, and I was the one feeling bored? This boredom came on me despite the fact that many of them were stopping by to say hello. Finally, I went to the restroom. To get there, I had to pass by the area where they do the lap dances—those one-on-one shows that were like the show on stage, yet much more intimate. There was no one in that area when I went in. But at least five couples joined in that area while I was in the restroom.

And since we are being honest here, let me just admit it. By going into the club, I was going out of fellowship with God. Not because of God, but because of my choice. The same kind of out of fellowship you would find in the last day of the Garden of Eden, when Adam felt naked in the presence of God. But neither situation was about the nakedness. Both were about finding something other than God. And both happened to end with a form of nakedness. And Adam even tried to teach us all how to cover up.

So when I came out of the bathroom, I had to pass by a few of the