As I was scrolling through Facebook recently I saw a post in my feed that stopped me dead in my tracks. The post said "I want every single strong Christian female to read this right away" and then I read and reread the title of the blog article in the link. My heart sank, "I waited until my wedding night to lose my virginity and wish I hadn't". I didn't want to read it. I already knew the gist of what it was going to say.
I turned off the screen but that post wouldn't leave me alone. It was in my feed because a 15 year old Facebook friend had "liked" the post. And I knew there were other girls (younger and older) and maybe grown women liking and agreeing with the words expressed on that page. I knew my mind wouldn't rest about it until I at least read it, but to be honest, I knew I was actually being called to do something. I already knew I needed to stand up and defend Chastity. So the next day I found it again and clicked on the link to start reading.
I am not going to link to the article, it's easy enough to search for and find, but suffice it to say I felt sad for the author. I understood why she felt the way she did, but it didn't change that she was viewing her experience from one very limited perspective. I would like to share a few additional perspectives.
You see, I too made a promise to myself and to God, that I would wait for marriage before having sex. I wasn't quite as young and it was not a formal oath, but I did it because I believe God asked me to. I can say now that I didn't do it for the church, for my parents, or even for my future husband, but at the time those things did cross my mind on occasion and the purity for husband part was preached often from my church leaders. I had more than one opportunity to choose differently, and in those moments I REALLY wanted to, but I stayed true to what I had already promised myself, and in that moment the only reason I didn't choose sex was because I loved God and believed he had a good reason for asking me to wait, and I trusted Him.
I couldn't know until years later why, but let's start with this: Because I abstained from sex, I never had to make a decision to keep a baby or adopt it out or abort it. Abortion would never have been an option for me anyways because of my personal values, and I could have gone to my parents and felt supported for the other two options, but not everyone feels they can deal with what would come from parents and others, even if they share the life value.
But I never had to worry about it, which is good because as I got older when I was in high school I was so desperate to FEEL loved and accepted that I was searching for anything that would leave me believing I was wanted or lovable. (My parents would probably have been mortified to find out that their love for me, and my friend's and my church leader's love for me, left me still feeling so empty.) My best friend and I had a conversation one day. We both wanted a baby. We wanted someone to love and to love us unconditionally. We both knew it was a bad idea, but babies love you no matter how you look, no matter how much money you have or what size you are. Babies don't care about your grades or so many other things. We yearned to be wanted. In my 15 year old mind I wasn't thinking about when a baby grows up into a toddler/child/teenager that tantrums, disobeys, and out right lies and swears at you. Those things would have been a reflection of what I was already believing about myself and in my eyes become evidence of what I already believed. (even as an adult I fell into that trap until recently and had to clear that up. I'm 40 years old now, being younger by 8 years for each of those stages would have been significant).
But for me, I loved God and had promised him I would wait, so I did. And while I waited I watched girls I knew make hard choices because they didn't wait. I watched girls get their heart broken and spiral into feeling even less wanted when the guy that promised to love them forever left them soon after the score for the next catch. I watched girls struggle to be a single mom having been up late with the baby, trying to study at school and work after school and even if there had been an opportunity, no one wanted to date them anymore. Or the girl that placed her baby for adoption knowing for both her and baby it was the right choice, but being heart broken every day, almost half a person afterward. Or the girl that got the abortion that afterward was tormented daily, she changed forever in a way that breaks the heart to watch from the outside. She hid the secret that she had gotten pregnant, but she couldn't hide this new thing that had been done. It didn't have a name, but now she had an even bigger more terrible secret. I can't imagine her torment. I didn't personally know "her", but her story is not unique, the stories are all around of what abortion does to the mother. And while abortion doesn't always have that negative affect on the mom, it does far more often than we are led to believe.
How loving of God to want to protect me and all his daughters from that kind of heartache and pain.
How about this: Because I abstained from sex I never got any kind of STD. That's pretty significant considering some are deadly, (HIV/AIDS/HPV) or have no cure.
How loving of God to want to protect me and all his sons and daughters from that kind of discomfort, pain, and financial expense (related specifically to sex before marriage lest someone think I'm ignorant about other ways to contact HIV/AIDS, sexual activity remains the highest risk).
Those are just TWO blessing of abstaining from sex until marriage.
I know that there is birth control and protected sex, but protected sex is not a guarantee of anything (just ask my friends, at least three who have gotten pregnant while using birth control or condoms), and neither is birth control, which when I later chose the pill as birth control when I got married it was a nightmare for the three months I was on it. I was a storm of emotion and anger inside, as though someone else had moved into my body and was at war with me. It took everything in me to not throw the huge TV out the third story window of our apartment when I had it on while cleaning and my husband had an opinion about TV usage. Feeling that way scared me to death, but not nearly so much as when I got so angry at my husband that I felt "stabby" (more than once).... meaning I wanted to stab him... with my sewing scissors... multiple times... because he asked me a simple question that I took wrong. I didn't understand why I would think our feel these things and as an adult it terrified me. I can't imaging being a teenager having that experience. I don't think I would have escaped the ravages from within to be honest.
Now, a perspective the author doesn't consider is that the feeling she had did not necessarily come because she waited for marriage to have a sexual life. Imagine these feelings at 14 or 15 instead when hormones exaggerate everything we feel! Amplify those negative feelings and that's a storm of hell raging to destroy the soul.
I won't pretend, I didn't experience what she did. (In my opinion sex has been made into a MUCH bigger deal than it is. Media and hear say has gotten expectations so impossibly over exaggerated that nothing will ever live up to what you see our read about. But whatever.) Sex is nice (when my hormones are cooperating) and still has a purpose. But the world has lost sight of the purpose of sex. Yes, we are sexual creatures, but that is not all we are! It's part of balance.
The world has separated the spiritual and emotional aspects of sex and tried to make it just physical. You can't just indulge in the physical act of sex without affecting the spiritual and emotional. CS Lewis addressed this beautifully in Mere Christianity:
"There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, “The two become one.” Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never “become one.” There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for “becoming one” with another."
He explains it beautifully,
"The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside of marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again."
I acknowledge that I have not addressed guys being chaste specifically. I feel that should come from a male perspective, although most of what I have said applies equally to them so far as STD's are concerned and that sex is more than just physical. When it comes to getting a girl pregnant, yes, it can change a boy's or man's life in a big way, but I can't imagine finding out that there was a baby that I had no say in the outcome. If you are a guy and have life values and the girl chooses abortion, how does that affect you... forever? Or adoption? I personally know a friend who had to deal with that exact situation and it is very painful for him.
Again, How loving of God to want to protect his Sons from that kind of heartache.
The assumption of the author is that because she struggled with her sexuality, the opposite would have prevented the struggle. It is naive to believe that.
Do I think religion can approach sexuality in a much more healthy way? Of course! And to be honest, many are, not from a perspective of letting go of standards, although disappointingly some actually are, but rather recognizing that HOW we teach matters as much as WHAT we teach. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, because there is a place of balance in all things. Sometimes it just takes time to figure out the balance.
When it comes to my own sexuality, I've learned how my body works over the years and understand so much more and how I would better teach my daughters to learn about their body and sexuality in a way that is safe and chaste, that would prepare them for marriage and give them the tools to bridal their passions in the meanwhile. I would teach them the best I could so that some day they too will be able to say, "I waited until I got married to have sex, and I am SO glad I did!"
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