I am a Russell Williams at heart

In the wake of the atrocities perpetrated by Russell Williams, I'm left feeling a strange paradox of emotions. As I read with horror the events leading up to his arrest, there was a something disturbing poking and prodding around at my heart: A keen awareness that I too have the capacity to be a Williams.
In fact, we all do.

Any honest person who's willing to look long and deep enough into their souls will find that selfishness is almost always the motivating factor for just about everything that we do. Because we have dethroned God in our hearts, Self stands in His place. We have made Self central - life revolves around me - and thus live with a deeply entrenched, fierce sense of entitlement. In our attitudes we actually believe others should bow to the master of Self, which translates into other human beings being reduced to slaves who are expected to bolster my own ego, sense of power, and control. When each of us lives with this same expectation (the world should revolve around me) we end up living in a perpetual state of frustration since nobody else is going to conform to what I would like all the time. These frustrations and unmet longings and desires are enough to cause extreme conflict between each other. It is the root of every argument, divorce, or murder.
But Russell Williams did not just murder those women - he sexually violated and tortured them first. Are unmet longings and desires really enough to drive someone to do what he did to them? It would if this anger and frustration - his longing to be powerful, respected, and in control - became sexualized.


Enter pornography.
In this hyper-sexualized culture, we have normalized and mainstreamed the objectification, devaluing, use and abuse of human beings made in God's image through pornography. We are responsible for having this ingrained right into the developing sexuality of children, and as such, are losing touch with what it means to relate to another in a healthy relationship. With every use of porn, we reinforce the selfish attitude.
The reason pornography traps so many men is not because men are more visual as so many claim, but because it is appealing to his desire for respect, power, and control. It becomes a channel through which some men vent their frustrations with women who they can't dominate in the real world. The sense of power and control experienced from pornography both feeds the beastly desire for more and reinforces and strengthens the underlying attitude of entitlement. The affirmation of the ego and/or the venting of frustrations then become sexualized. Alternatively, the endorphins being released from the brain while watching pornography make it highly addictive for many people, and just like any drug, they become increasingly desensitized to it over time and must continually increase the intensity through less conventional forms of pornography (like snuff) to maintain the same high. From this point on, every kind of pornography watched - even if offensive at first - is burned into the person's sexuality and becomes a turn-on. Problem is, as the thrill gradually wears off (and it will), the only level left to take it is outside of porn-land and into the real world with real people.


Russell Williams, while entirely responsible for his actions, fell victim to our increasingly pornified culture, and by extension, so too did Jessica Lloyd and Marie-France Comeau.

We have all had a hand in this tragedy.


Yet underneath the anger, frustration, and sorrow, I find deeper still, a thankfulness.


What Russell Williams did was entirely consistent with the fallen nature of mankind. Pornography almost certainly energized and intensified his selfishness, I'm sure. And what he did is a little too similar to all the shocking pornography produced these days to think it was a coincidence. No, my guess is he had degenerated into snuff and came to act out the fantasies planted in him through it. But it was all fueled by the very same thing that we find in the core of each and every one of us...



Selfishness. It is weaved into the very fiber of our souls.


Not all of us will be lured into the slimy pit of pornography. And alternatively, not all of us will spiral out of control once in it. But each and every one of us has the capacity within us to become a Russell Williams. This was exactly the reason Jesus Christ came to die on the cross for our sin. Not primarily to save us from the world or evil people in the world. Not even to save us from the sinful things we do, but to save us from the sin in who we are.


I am not preaching at you, and if I am preaching, it is at myself as well. But as we grimace at the brutality of Russell Williams' crime, let us resist the temptation to label him with such labels as "an animal devoid of humanity." Instead, let's consider the possibility that this was God's hand lifting off the veil, unmasking the brutal and ugly reality of the true nature of our fallen condition apart from His grace.



Let us consider this a call to humility for those of us who would judge Russell Williams, a wake-up call and call to repentance for those of us who are puddling around in porn-land, and a call to thanksgiving for all of us who, because of the gracious, staying hand of God, have escaped the power of sin and death that has taken Russell Williams captive.