10/11/2025
All the Pleasure, None of the Regret"
How God's Design Delivers What Freedom Couldn't - Part 2
The rebellion felt like relief.
She posted a photo on Instagram—her and Bree, faces pressed together, cups raised, caption: finally living. Thirty-seven likes in the first ten minutes. Comments: "YES GIRL" and "you look so happy!" and "this is YOUR year."
She did look happy. She stared at the photo, at her own face, and almost believed it.
Three months later, Maya sat on the floor of her dorm bathroom at 3 a.m., knees pulled to her chest, mascara streaked down her face.
There had been more parties. More names she couldn't remember. More mornings waking up feeling like she'd given away pieces of herself she didn't know how to get back.
The Instagram posts continued—each one a performance of the freedom she'd been promised. But the girl in the photos felt like a stranger. Someone playing a part. Someone who'd traded one costume for another and somehow ended up more trapped than before.
Bree was asleep in the next room. The guy from tonight—she genuinely couldn't remember his name—had left an hour ago. And Maya sat alone in the fluorescent bathroom light, staring at her reflection and asking the question she'd been avoiding for weeks:
I got everything I wanted. So why do I feel so empty?
She'd thought leaving God behind would feel like liberation.
Instead, it felt like falling.
The pleasure everyone talked about—the wild, uninhibited, freeing kind—kept promising satisfaction and delivering nothing but a hollow ache that grew wider with every attempt to fill it.
She'd chased it at every party, in every kiss, in every late-night conversation that felt deep at midnight and meaningless by noon. She'd tried to outrun the voice in her head that whispered this isn't it, this isn't it, this isn't it—but the voice was getting louder.
Because the pleasure was real. The rush was real.
The temporary escape was real.
But so was the morning after. So was the shame that crept in uninvited. So was the growing suspicion that maybe—just maybe—the choice she'd been given was false from the start.
She pulled out her phone, scrolled to her mom's contact. Her thumb hovered over the call button.
What would she even say?
You were right?
I was wrong?
I don't know how to get back?
She locked the phone. Put it face down on the tile.
Because the truth was worse than admitting she'd been wrong about the world.
The truth was she'd been wrong about God.
Not in the way her youth group would think. Not "I sinned and now I need to repent and come crawling back."
She'd been wrong because she'd believed the lie that God was the enemy of her joy. That holiness meant misery. That the choice was between God and pleasure, and she could only pick one.
But sitting on that bathroom floor, empty and aching and utterly exhausted from chasing a promise that kept evaporating the moment she touched it—
Maya realized something:
What if the choice I was given was never supposed to exist?
Three years later, I met Maya at a coffee shop.
She ordered a latte, sat across from me, and told me her story—the parts I just shared with you, and the parts that came after. The slow, painful process of unlearning the lies. The discovery that God wasn't who she thought He was. The realization that pleasure wasn't the enemy—but pursuing it outside of its design was killing her.
"I thought I had to choose," she said, hands wrapped around her cup. "God or happiness. Rules or freedom. And I chose freedom because I thought that's where the good stuff was."
She paused, smiled—a real one this time, not the filtered version from those college photos.
"Turns out, I didn't need permission to have pleasure. I needed to know where it actually comes from."
Here's what Maya learned that night on the bathroom floor, and what took her three more years to fully understand:
The enemy's oldest trick isn't to make you hate God.
It's to make you believe God hates your joy.
That He's standing at the edge of every good thing with His arms crossed, waiting to ruin it. That His boundaries are barriers designed to keep you from living. That the life He offers is gray and small and joyless, and if you want color, you'll have to find it somewhere else.
It's the same lie from the garden: Did God really say? He's holding out on you.
And we fall for it. God, we fall for it.
We walk away from the Source of all pleasure, convinced we'll find it on our own. We chase it in parties, in bodies, in bank accounts, in achievements, in anything that promises to make us feel alive—
And we end up on bathroom floors at 3 a.m., wondering why everything we wanted feels like nothing now that we have it.
This is where the lie breaks down:
God is not anti-pleasure.
He invented it.
Every good thing you've ever tasted, every beautiful thing you've ever seen, every moment of joy that's ever taken your breath away—that's Him. That's His design. That's what He wanted for you from the beginning.
The pleasure is real. The design is real.
But so are the boundaries.
And here's the part nobody told Maya, the part nobody told you:
The boundaries aren't there to keep you from pleasure.
They're there to keep the pleasure from destroying you.
So here's the question Maya had to answer, and the one you're holding right now:
What if the choice you've been given—God or pleasure, holiness or happiness, faith or freedom—isn't real?
What if there's a third option nobody told you about?
What if the path to the pleasure you're actually looking for runs through God, not away from Him?
Maya's sitting on that bathroom floor right now, and so are you.
Maybe not literally. Maybe not at 3 a.m. Maybe not with mascara running down your face.
But you know the feeling, don't you?
That ache. That emptiness. That quiet, terrifying question:
I got what I wanted. So why doesn't it feel like enough?
The answer is coming.
But first, you need to know what went wrong.
You need to see the lie for what it is.
And you need to understand that the way back isn't shame or surrender or giving up everything good—
It's discovering that the goodness you've been chasing has been waiting for you all along, just not where you've been looking.
REFLECTION:
Where are you running TO right now?
And if you're honest—is it working?
