Today, I went with one of my friends to hear someone she knows speak. It was an odd topic called, “The Art of Singleness”. The lesson was spoken from someone who is in fact, married. So my initial thoughts were one of what does this person know, but I was willing to be open and listen. The speaker was funny and I could tell had a reverence for the Scriptures, but the part that stood out to (in the flashing neon sign way) was the part about sex and singleness. This is a heated topic among every single person I know and most will admit that they think about it, but I am here to say I not only think about it, I struggle with it, more than I really care to admit here. It is a subject I have given great thought to. I have read the books and never got any answer that made any kind of logical sense to me.
I grew up in the hay day of True Love Waits and I stood out there and pledged, I wore a promise ring and the WWJD bracelet. (Now you have to give me a break I was only a young teenager who was trying to make sense of my life and throwing it “recklessly” to Jesus in form of a WWJD bracelet seemed the way to go. I won’t even get into the fact I went to a Carmen concert) The topic of sex seemed easier then, for the most part. Everyone around me seemed to stand their ground so it was easier and harder for me to be me. I had already experienced sex and knew more ins and outs that most people twice my age. The True Love Waits bracelet bought me a place among the people I called friends, it bought me a face to the public high school, but what it cost me was confusion as to how I was still struggling with sex and not only sex, but purity. Purity is so much more than being a virgin, they don’t tell you this when you strap on that bracelet or ring. The main cause is not to have sex, forget anything else, but do not have sex. There is such a higher calling, there is your heart at stake. I wish someone had told me this when I was 12 and really starting to search for that thing that could help me feel normal in my upside down world.
It has just been recently (in the last two months) that I have even begun to unpack sex. I look at all that is before me and know how much damage I did to myself and to anyone who is in any kind of relationship with me. I built myself up for falling. I built myself up around a slogan and a thought that showed me nothing but the fact that sex was wrong. In my logical brain then I was wrong and somehow, maybe just somehow that bracelet, if I clung to it hard enough and told myself true love waits, that would make it all okay.
Today as I sat there listening to this speaker, I began to feel a freeing of that part of my past. The speaker began to explain the reasons behind not having sex and for the first time, it really hit me that what I was hearing was not only right, but so very true. Not having sex is not to take away the fun, it is not even to keep me safe (as I so often hear), it is to keep me connected to Christ. When I release myself to have sex with someone I am giving away a part of myself and therefore releasing some of my ability to commit not only to my future spouse (if there is to be one), but to God himself. That part of me that is given is dead, it was used, and not used in a life-giving way in the sanctity of a relationship that is whole, not perfect, but whole.
When we were leaving my friend asked the speaker about repairing the ability to commit and without saying an answer he replied by the way we live. That can be open to any (and many) ways of interpretation. I chose to believe it is the choosing to let God renew me every day. To pray, to bring myself in communion with people who love me, to allow God’s love to get into my core and hopefully shake me so hard that I will have no doubt that I was molded by the God who made the universe.
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