I recently had to explain to my 13-year-old daughter what “cum” means because someone had scratched the word into the side of the bathroom stall, and she, like me, is incurably curious.
As usual, excellent take. Whether your kids internalize the religious values you're teaching them and live by them or not, they'll be better prepared to cope with their choices and consequences.
Your post here reminded me of something. When Joshua Harris did his kinda-sorta "mea culpa" for the "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" movement, there was a period of time when he (or someone on his media team?) was publishing comments from people writing in to tell him how badly they had been affected by it when their church went in that direction. I'm not sure what it was like in much of the world, but I grew up in the South where that stuff was commonplace after his book was published. Not just abstinence, which is at least Biblically supported. No dating **at all**! Why NOT put the weight of possible marriage on even a casual conversation between teenagers of the opposite sex? What could go wrong, yeah? Anyway, when I read those comments I had one of the most powerfully helpful experiences of my life because I saw several comments from other girls who had, like me, after disclosing sexual abuse, been required by their church leaders to pray for forgiveness for the sexual sin. (We had, after all, had sex without being married.) I was so sure that I was the only person that had ever happened to that I never bothered to tell anyone but my therapist. The "virgin until marriage or completely worthless" dichotomy was directly behind a lot of bad choices made by the commenters who shared my experience. (It wasn't as powerfully negative to me as to them, but it didn't help matters, either.)
Sorry for rambling in your comments, LOL. Anyway, excellent take. Thank you.
The notion that you could be expected to repent for being abused is just so heinous to me that it makes me want to throw things. Some people need to give their heads a good shake. I’m just so sorry. 🤬
Thanks. I'm just glad I found out it happened to others; that helped. BTW, I never really got angry about it until I was 15-ish. My relationship with my parents was so bad that at the time I just assumed I was left out of the planning for the purity necklace ceremony crap because everyone knew that our home was a battlefield and nobody wanted to get near trying to put me and them in the same room for planning. Two years or so later I realized that there were other kids with known-to-be-bad (though to be fair, less bad) parental relationships who participated. I realized that the reason was that I was already "impure." Which made me angry until it made me laugh -- the people running the damn ceremony were "impure" too. What do I mean? Well, everyone said, all the time, "pure until marriage" and "pure until I enter a covenant marriage" and all that stuff. I seriously wondered, do they believe the Bible or not? My Bible says that the marriage bed is undefiled, so why would God-approved, marital sex make someone 'impure'? Yet it did, by the very language of the vow, so they were just as impure as me. The contradiction there cracked me up and I enjoyed a few weeks of feeling smugly superior and then forgot about it.
As usual, excellent take. Whether your kids internalize the religious values you're teaching them and live by them or not, they'll be better prepared to cope with their choices and consequences.
Your post here reminded me of something. When Joshua Harris did his kinda-sorta "mea culpa" for the "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" movement, there was a period of time when he (or someone on his media team?) was publishing comments from people writing in to tell him how badly they had been affected by it when their church went in that direction. I'm not sure what it was like in much of the world, but I grew up in the South where that stuff was commonplace after his book was published. Not just abstinence, which is at least Biblically supported. No dating **at all**! Why NOT put the weight of possible marriage on even a casual conversation between teenagers of the opposite sex? What could go wrong, yeah? Anyway, when I read those comments I had one of the most powerfully helpful experiences of my life because I saw several comments from other girls who had, like me, after disclosing sexual abuse, been required by their church leaders to pray for forgiveness for the sexual sin. (We had, after all, had sex without being married.) I was so sure that I was the only person that had ever happened to that I never bothered to tell anyone but my therapist. The "virgin until marriage or completely worthless" dichotomy was directly behind a lot of bad choices made by the commenters who shared my experience. (It wasn't as powerfully negative to me as to them, but it didn't help matters, either.)
Sorry for rambling in your comments, LOL. Anyway, excellent take. Thank you.
The notion that you could be expected to repent for being abused is just so heinous to me that it makes me want to throw things. Some people need to give their heads a good shake. I’m just so sorry. 🤬
Thanks. I'm just glad I found out it happened to others; that helped. BTW, I never really got angry about it until I was 15-ish. My relationship with my parents was so bad that at the time I just assumed I was left out of the planning for the purity necklace ceremony crap because everyone knew that our home was a battlefield and nobody wanted to get near trying to put me and them in the same room for planning. Two years or so later I realized that there were other kids with known-to-be-bad (though to be fair, less bad) parental relationships who participated. I realized that the reason was that I was already "impure." Which made me angry until it made me laugh -- the people running the damn ceremony were "impure" too. What do I mean? Well, everyone said, all the time, "pure until marriage" and "pure until I enter a covenant marriage" and all that stuff. I seriously wondered, do they believe the Bible or not? My Bible says that the marriage bed is undefiled, so why would God-approved, marital sex make someone 'impure'? Yet it did, by the very language of the vow, so they were just as impure as me. The contradiction there cracked me up and I enjoyed a few weeks of feeling smugly superior and then forgot about it.
Truthful, comprehensive knowledge delivered in a set of values, i.e. education.
You have suffered and gained a heart of wisdom, friend.