True Love Waits?

As I’m looking through Facebook, sitting here in my bed alone, single and 26 years old, I come across some pictures of some variety of purity ceremony.  It featured a gaggle of girls wearing pastel dresses, sipping tea in a mansion and all receiving a rose, of which I am sure some variety of metaphor was made about how we are all delicate female flowers or something.  Maybe later that day, their dad’s gave them all rings that said “true love waits.”  I am sure they all also pledged their purity and talked about how they would wait for their husbands, because we wouldn’t want our husbands to have damaged goods when he married us.

Or…Maybe this isn’t the case and I am making gross stereotypes, but if it was anything like the stuff I listened to growing up, I hit the nail on the head.  There is nothing innately wrong with any of this, but let’s be honest…for anyone past the age of 21, the true love waits speech we heard (and heard and heard) in middle and high school isn’t exactly cutting the mustard anymore and I'm not really sure it did before that point either.

Remain pure until you are married.  Okay. Good.  I can do that. My word, I hope I can do that, I mean, my salvation depends on it after all doesn’t it?!  This is the only mandate God ever made! Pure. Pure. Pure!!  Done. Good. Consider my legs crossed. 

Fast forward four years and you’re in the basement alone with your boyfriend.  You’re “watching a movie” which is also known as making out passionately and you’re rounding the proverbial bases at frightening speeds.  It may be in this very moment, when it occurs to you to ask the question, “what does being pure mean, anyway?” At this point, your boyfriends hands are making his way up your shirt, and OH MY GOSH it feels so good, so how am I possibly supposed to stop him, even though there’s this nagging voice in the back of my mind screaming PURITY at me!?  At this point, it is impossible.  IMPOSSIBLE.  It doesn’t matter if you are the Virgin Mary herself, six months pregnant with Jesus. If you have the sex drive of a sugar snap pea, you aren’t stopping him.  You just aren’t. 

It’s not until you are at home that night, probably starting to feel a little guilty, that you start to wonder what exactly they meant by purity all those times they talked about it at church because if we are being honest…no one ever defined it.  They just told us to be pure, which you probably, as I did, took to mean don’t have sex.  Okay…but guys…there are a lot A LOT of things you can do between a peck on the lips and full-blown penetrative sex. I guess that just wasn’t ever covered? Or did I just miss that Sunday? (Doubtful...I did not miss church). 

I remember attending a seminar at some point in high school, where a woman (wearing a white dress…how subtle of her) told us that she viewed all girls as wrapped gifts to be presented to their husbands.  Every time we sinned sexually (keep in mind, this term “sexual sin” was never defined), a piece of our wrapping paper was torn, or the tape was peeled up and this was a tragedy because, “think of how sad your husband will be, to receive an opened gift.” Thinking back on it, I wish I had run up on that stage and punched that woman in the face.  Okay, maybe not.  I’m sure she had wonderful intentions.  BUT.  GIRLS.  You are not, nor will you ever be an opened and torn up gift! You may sin sexually, whatever that may mean, but you are NOT a torn up gift and you are NOT, let me repeat myself, NOT unworthy of ANY man because of your sexual past and you should NEVER let someone tell you that you are.  At the end of the day, we are ALL (male and female) sinners and not one of us is worthy of the grace we are given through Jesus Christ. 

As a singleton, who has spent four years living on my own, dating a few men and having “adult relationships,” (I use that term VERY loosely) I can tell you that the church did not prepare me for this phase of my life in more ways than one, but specifically in the area of “sexual purity.”  They work on the assumption that everyone is getting married, and more specifically, they work under the assumption that everyone is getting married pretty young, specifically if you are a girl.  This is, of course, grossly inaccurate. 

As Christian females, there is the constant notion that we must be pleasing to the men in our lives.  We must be good girls, good daughters and ultimately good wives.  Where does it leave you when you are no longer living with your parents, you are a full-blown adult and have no one to please?  Lost.  That’s where that leaves you.  Confused, and mad and lost.  At this point, you have spent your entire life living up to the standard of you father, or working toward getting a guy to like enough to marry you, so you can be his “perfect gift.” When that doesn’t exist anymore it leaves you totally and utterly wayward because you’ve always had the notion that you would leave your father and fill the role (in a non-creepy way) with your husband because that is what you’ve been taught.  I can tell you that when that doesn’t happen in a timely (or what you deem to be timely) manner, it can leave you very forlorn and whats more, VERY bitter. 

Girls.  It is time that we stop placing our worth and our importance in men.  We struggle with this because the Bible calls for men to lead women, both in the church and in the home and that is fine and good. However, in reality, there is a very real possibility that one day, you will find yourself no longer under the leadership of any human man.  At this point you cannot depend on men to lead; instead you are going to have to start depending on God to lead you and you are going to have to take responsibility for your relationship with Jesus Christ. 

BUT this is not an easy task! Why? Because at this point, we are mad!  We are mad we're 26-year old-virgins, we are tired of being made a spectacle of at the doctors office when you get a PAP smear (“What form of contraception do you use?” “Um. Abstinence?” “WHAT??!! WOOWWW!!! REALLY???”) and we want to have sex.  BADLY.  And heaven knows every opportunity you never had in high school is there.  You don’t have to make out in the back seat of your car…you can do it right there on your couch, or even in your bed, because there is no one there to stop you. You will probably mess up and you will probably mess up a lot, because waiting is HARD!  BUT GIRLS! LISTEN TO ME! Your worth is not found here! Your worth is not in your virginity, or lack of virginity.  Your worth is in Christ. Period.

Do not read my words incorrectly.  I am not telling you to go have sex: vaginal, oral or manual. Heck, I am not even telling you it is okay to participate in “heavy petting,” as my grandmother once called it.  The reality of the situation is that the Bible doesn’t give us specific guidelines as to what is and is not acceptable.  It simply says to abstain from sexual immorality and that there should be one husband for every wife.  The very real and sometimes hard to swallow truth is that the Bible doesn’t have a lot of guidelines specific to 26-year-old single Christian girls.  However, it does have a lot to say to Christians: married, single, divorced, widowed, whatever.  Things like “Go therefore and make disciples of every nation, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19).  Crazy how that verse, widely deemed to be one of the most foundational in the New Testament, never once mentions sex. Ladies, your worth is not found in your ability to abstain from sex until marriage, just like it is not found in the amount of money you give, or the works that you do.  Your worth is found in Christ.  It always has and it always will, whether or not your prince charming comes along.