Sovereign Spirit | One Woman's Path from Shameful Sheep to Spiritual Sovereignty | Chapter Four, Part Four

Sovereign Spirit
..One Woman's Path from Shameful Sheep to Spiritual Sovereignty

Chapter Four, Part Four

Over the next few years, I was bombarded with messages regarding sexual purity in church. It was like God knew the sweetness of the apple I had tasted, and was giving me warning after warning to spit it out.

Wednesday night youth group messages often pertained to sexual purity. One night, a woman from another church was brought in to teach us, from the Christian standpoint, about sexually transmitted diseases and abortion. She passed around photos of what STDs looked like, statistics and numerical probabilities of how many people had these diseases in our country, our state, and even in our school. She told us horror stories of young teens who had sex before marriage and either contracted an STD or got pregnant. The wrongness of abortion was severely emphasized, and shame was dealt out in copious quantities for any female who A) put herself in a position to dishonor God with her body by having any sexual interactions, B) got pregnant or contracted an STD by doing so, or C) dared to consider abortion as an answer to her sinful sexual choices.

Another year, a True Love Waits campaign was held at our church. It was a conference solely focused on sexual purity. We were taught that our bodies were spiritual temples that needed to be kept pure, and all of the ways we should strive to keep ourselves clean in God’s eyes. Impure thoughts were discouraged, and we were taught that thinking a thought was essentially the same as engaging in the act. The subject of sexually transmitted diseases was rehashed. They scared us with stories of how easy it was to become addicted to pornography, and how looking at porn could lead to one to commit violent sexual crimes. Masturbation was thoroughly discouraged. They taught us that masturbating was the same as cheating on our future husbands and wives. They drilled into our heads the idea that masturbation meant stealing pleasure for ourselves that only our future mate was supposed to give us.

So, there I was, a teenage virgin, no where near getting married, but convinced that I had already cheated on my husband.

Talk about a mind fuck.

At the end of the weekend, there was a commitment service, complete with a ring ceremony in which we declared publicly, before the entire church congregation, our promise to remain sexually pure until the day we entered a Biblical marriage relationship. Rings were given, inscribed with the words “True Love Waits” to remind us of our vow to God, to ourselves, our family, our friends, our church congregation, our future mate, and our future children. I wore mine on my ring finger until the day I got married.

From these and other church events, I grew to fear sex on many levels. I was led to believe that if I had sex outside of marriage, I would almost definitely end up with a horrible disease or pregnant. I learned to fear my own desires, and to push them away as far as I could.

The older I got, the stronger my sexual desires became, and the harder they were to ignore. After I learned the art of self-pleasure, thanks to that late night phone conversation with the older church boy, there was no turning back. My hunger for sensual experiences grew exponentially, often leaving me with an inner feeling of insatiability. I tried to cram these desires down into some dark black box hidden deep in the back of my mind, but they wouldn’t stay put.

I was still careful with the guys I dated, and made sure to remain a virgin, but I let my guard down significantly and allowed other sexual activities to take place. As long as nobody’s penis entered any of my orifices, I thought I must be doing okay in God’s eyes.

I still felt some sense of shame for allowing myself to engage in more sexual activity than I had in the past, but almost everyone I knew had already lost their virginity, even the girls I knew from church. By comparison, I saw myself as one of the most sexually pure people I knew, and was thereby easily able to justify the longer, more intense make out sessions I was enjoying.

Still, even with the heightened levels of pleasure I was engaging in, no boy was ever able to bring me to the point of ecstasy like I could. They wouldn’t even get close. My sexual relief had to come by my own hand, and it became something I looked forward to. No matter how hard or stressful my day was, no matter what I made on my history test or how much homework I had or what argument I had with my mom, at the end of the day, I knew I could lay alone in my bed, and let it all wash away while I let my body fill me with the most divine pleasure.

The mornings, however, always took on a different tone. There, staring at me from my bedside table as I reached to slam the alarm off, was my Bible. I’d been able to ignore it several hours prior, while night’s darkness shrouded every corner of my room. Now morning’s sunlight beamed in through my windows, laying bare all my midnight transgressions. All the Bible verses that had been drilled into my brain regarding sexual purity resurfaced.

I spent many mornings beating myself up over the activities I’d engaged in the night before. I’d get down on my knees on the floor beside my bed, and tell God how sorry I was for giving into temptation yet again, and for not being strong enough to resist. I’d beg for his forgiveness and the strength the overcome my desires. The guilt was suffocating. The tighter its stranglehold on me, the more feeble my own sense of self-worth became. I made promise after promise to God, and each time I failed to keep it, I trusted myself less and hated myself more. I thought God must feel the same.

Over time, chunks of my personal value began to splinter off until I had mentally whittled myself down to such a diminutive state that, in my eyes, my usefulness as a Christian, as a person even, was shadowy at best. The cycle repeated itself night after night, week after week, month after month. Some nights I’d leave my light on so I could see my Bible in hopes that it would thwart my attention from sexual desire and help me bring my focus back to godly desires. When that proved not to work, I tried playing Christian music when I went to bed to keep my mind on pure thoughts. That didn’t work either. After a while, I got so frustrated that I started asking for forgiveness before I even started masturbating, just to cover all my bases.

“This will be the last time,” I’d tell God.

Of course it never was.

And so that pattern repeated itself: masturbation at night, confession complete with groveling for forgiveness in the morning, long make out sessions with whatever boy I was dating whenever possible, confession and groveling after, and church services to cement the shame of it all firmly in my conscience. My self-worth, self-trust, and self-confidence dissolved like seltzer tablets in water. Even though I gave into my desires, up to a certain level of course, my sensual self was being repeatedly blocked and repressed. I learned not to trust that part of myself. I learned to be ashamed of it. I learned to fear it. I learned to operate sexually from a foundation of deep inner shame, fear, and self-hatred.

I walked around with what felt like a dark cloud draped around my shoulders. A sense of dread followed me, a constant reminder of the ugliness of what I was. These damaging thought patterns were my constant shadow on into my young adult years, and have only in recent years have I been able to slowly begin to bring them into the light with new understanding.