I've been watching a new series about pastors' teen girls. It's fascinating to see the way that the girls are raised to save themselves for marriage. For some of the girls, it's easy to see that they think it's all a load of hogwash. For one of the girls, though, who has 4 older sisters, you can see how much she values it. Even as she protests to her mouth and demands the right to date, I love seeing the commitment she has in her heart to purity. She and the boy she wanted to date had, of their own volition, a discussion on boundaries and desiring purity together. When her eldest sister, who is 30 and married with a child, revealed that she was wasn't a virgin when she got married (she hadn't had premarital sex with her now-husband, just one other man), she broke down in tears because she was so heartbroken for her. She couldn't even imagine the pain that her sister had gone through after she made that decision, and later had to tell her husband and now her family.
On the one hand, the feminist in me just cringes at the thought that we're educating young woman to not make their own decisions in their sex lives. (In that specific family, while the eldest few girls had grown up with no other message than that sex is "bad," in the interim, their mother actually became a sex-educator who taught the ins and outs while still promoting abstinence, so her younger girls got the whole message.) The other part of me, though, is so incredibly envious. While my mother is Christian, she made no effort to raise me with Christian values or in the church. She never monitored what I was doing or watching or what I was talking about with who. For the majority of my middle and early high school years, I was a staunch atheist. While part of me entertained the notion of saving myself for marriage just as a sentimental novelty, I never gave it much thought. When my best friend, who I was head over heels for, offered me the opportunity, I took it without a second thought. While I wouldn't say I regret that, I can certainly see how easy it made it for me to become so sexually open. Pairing that with a desperate desire to be validated by men as a straight heterosexual girl plus a lackadaisical mother, and it's no wonder I became so promiscuous so young.
I'm so curious how that would have changed if I'd been raised to see the value of my purity. To see myself as a child of Christ, someone who has so much intrinsic value outside that of attention from men. If I had had a mom who, rather than just befriending me, actually made the effort to be a mom and know what I was doing. If I'd actually followed Christ throughout my life. I vividly remember, for the first almost two months of dating The Ex, I prayed very literally every time I looked at her. I begged God, without ceasing, for the ability to love her right and to stay pure in my love for her. Obviously, in a wide variety of ways, I failed terribly at that. I think that has to be one of my biggest regrets in our relationship; when I combined a lack of constant commitment to prayer with my past promiscuity, it was a failure from the start.
I keep feeling God place this one my heart lately. How much I want to be pure. One friend hypothesized it was because of my rape in October that I want to avoid sex. Really, though, I feel it going so much deeper than that. I'm not sure what to do with it, at this point, other than keep praying for clarity on it. It's terrifying, because, other than those months with The Ex, I've never tried to stay pure. I suppose this is where I fall back on knowing I never have more than I can handle without a way out, right?
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