Sexuality and Purity

This blog is a response to an article http://theotherjournal.com/2014/03/03/naked-and-ashamed-women-and-evangelical-purity-culture/ about the residual effects of purity culture. A Christian sub-culture designed to help teens wait until marriage to have sex.

Writing about sexuality is difficult. Sex is personal. We are all products of sexuality. But what kind of sexuality? When we start talking about sex some eyes glaze over and others light up. Its simultaneously a topic we greatly desire to talk about, and a topic we avoid talking about altogether. Talking about sex means taking risks. We risk exposing ourselves: our thoughts, fears, anxieties, pains, scars, hopes, joys, desires for the present and desire for the future. We risk a core part of ourselves when we honestly talk about sex. And we should. We should risk, and we should honestly talk.

This blog will be my honest thoughts and experiences about sex. About purity culture. About the sex industry. About what I believe it means to be human. For in talking about sexuality we should be engaging our entire person, all of our facilities, not just our private parts. Where the culture of purity and the surrounding culture of sexuality both fail is in the engagement of the whole self in the process. We like to divide bodies and minds from each other, we like to compartmentalize our actions. This is wrong, so wrong. It's why people from both sides of the debate have scars. It's why we both need healing.

As a middle schooler, I discovered the world of self stimulation. Without anyone telling me otherwise, I felt like something was missing. But being my logical middle school self I didn't care, self stimulation was fun, at least for a while. What I began to hear at church was that self stimulation had long lasting ramifications: it would later impact my sex life in marriage, it had the power to taint my friendships. The only way to prevent all of this was to stop.

That was the message. Stop. Don't. Focus your mind on something else, don't allow yourself to look at a woman with lust in your heart. Too simple and too complex words of wisdom for a middle school kid. Yet somehow, a middle schooler pulled it off. In the transition between 8th grade and high school I said no. Without external intervention. I didn't have an accountability partner. All I had was the desire to have pure friendships that weren't going to be tainted by my sexuality getting out of control. I took personal responsibility and made it happen. It wasn't easy. I watched a lot of friends fail. I felt for them, because I knew how difficult the fight is; no one faults an athlete for coming up short. I didn't fault their mistakes. I faulted them for hiding the truth.

I completed high school and college without self stimulation. Without having had sex. Without having my first kiss. Looking back at the photos and the memories, they were truly blessed. I have no regrets about the decision I made to keep my body and my mind pure. Looking back at high school, I did not date. I'm glad I spent time in co-ed groups creating memories I will cherish for the rest of my life. I stepped into the dating scene in college, this is where I have regrets.

One doesn't make it through multiple years of purity without having formed a few habits. The most notable habit I had was not liking being touched. I hated it. Even as I say that, I was also the kind of person you could get a big enthusiastic hello hug from. Only my church friends got to see that side of me, I didn't trust the outside world with that kind of familiarity. I was also a wrestler. This is where we encounter our first form of division, and its the most important division to understand. Touches, although physically experienced the same way, are not the same.

From a physical standpoint, our bodies have one nervous system. This system reports pleasure and pain in exactly the same way: electrical signals. The brain interprets the signal to determine whether or not the touch was pleasurable or painful. Culturally, we have areas we do not often touch and when we touch these areas we often interpret these signals as sexual. As a wrestler I turned off the culture. You touched what you had to in order to win. It wasn't dirty or gross, you just had to do what you had to do within the acceptable movements to win. I carried this mentality with me when I became a cheer leading base. You touched what you had to touch and looked where you needed to look in order to keep your flyer safe. It wasn't about where your hands went. I knew this, and most of my flyers knew this. Some of the time they forgot and were weirded out. It happens. My focus was always the team, it was always success, it was always safety. When I wrestled and when I cheered I didn't have issues with touch. Outside of those arenas it was a different story. Unless I turned it off.

For example: senior year of high school we had a spirit assembly, and as all seniors know, spirit assemblies mean competition. Being the competition person I am, I volunteered to compete and was dead set on winning, despite not knowing the game. This assembly's game? Pass the orange. From under your chin to under the next person's chin, without touching the orange with your hands. They spaced us out male, female, male, female with eight participants per grade. I was third in the order. As soon as they said go, we all watched to see how best to pass the orange. This game is about awkwardness, especially because you don't know what to do with your hands. I became impatient watching. I thought, "there has got to be a better way to do this" When the orange passed to the girl beside me it was game on! I was six feet plus. She was five foot nothing. Three seconds passed as we tried without touching each other to pass the orange. Bending down was awkward and we weren't making good progress. She almost dropped the orange. My instincts kicked in. I wrapped my arms around her, got a secure hold on the orange with my chin and let go. The crowd went wild. I, who didn't like touching, had figured out the secret and the awkwardness to the game. Passing the orange makes it look like you're making out with the other person. I didn't have a clue and I didn't care. I wanted to win. Winning was more important than touching. My brain only saw what I needed to do to win. Nothing else mattered.

This is how the sex industry runs. Winning means making money. Making money means surviving, no matter the cost or the touching involved. I visited a ministry that reaches out to prostitutes on the streets of Seattle, they put together a video to help us understand the mentality of street walkers. this video had a clip from a doctor asking a prostitute if she was having sex after being treated for STDs. Obviously, this is paraphrased.

Doctor: Are you having sex?
Girl: No, my boyfriend and I aren't having sex.
Doctor: You're having no forms of sexual contact?
Girl: Nope, my boyfriend and I are waiting it out.
Doctor: How's business?
Girl: I've turned a couple of tricks to make a few bucks to make ends meet while my boyfriend and I explore alternatives.

The girl did not consider turning tricks, sex with strangers, as the same thing as having sex with her boyfriend. They were two different and unrelated categories in her mind. Like me, she had figured out how to turn parts of her self off in order to do what she needed to do. The stranger would have had no clue. Everything she does while turning a trick is an elaborate façade to win. She might take some pleasure out of it, but when these cards are played day after day, the end result is a shutting down of the self. This is the sex industry, a world that projects an outward image but inwardly shuts something else down to win. It's an unhealthy division of self that everyone faces. It's not just a problem for sex workers.

This division of self is the damaging component of purity culture, not just repression of feeling, but the total denial of it. The resulting struggle of anyone adhering to purity culture? How do we turn it back on? There's no quick and easy solution, the only way out is through retraining and breaking down the barriers we've built up.

How do we choose when to breakthrough? What methods do we use to restore what's been lost?

This is partly why the sex industry claims to exist: to help us overcome our fears and barriers, to give us tools to make better sex. This is wrong. If we've naturally learned to shut down our bodies down, we can naturally learn to turn them back on. No props, fantasies, or sex industry workers needed.

But how? And when?

These are the questions I've asked myself as I am months away from being married. This is the process I've been going through once I asked her to marry me. There's not a chronologically right time, only being in a right relationship that's not built on sex, even though their is plenty of physical attraction. Our major method of therapy? Talking. We're on opposite sides of the planet. We're talking through our fears and learning to trust each other with this part of ourselves, even though there's already other levels of trust in our relationship. We're talking. And its helping. And the relationship is deepening. And I'm learning that sexuality is much more than physical desire and physical touch. There's another side of it that has been left out of the books, and has been left out of the articles. Its the side that gets forfeited when we turn ourselves off. It's the side people go searching for but can't find because no amount of explicit material, magazines or paid sex industry workers can turn it back on. The sex industry can't turn it back on because the nature of their work requires them to turn it off. Their desire to win and survive forfeits what should be rightfully theirs.

This tension between, how does it turn on and when, are where I've actually found real answers from my faith. From the Bible. The book is called Song of Songs, or the Songs of Solomon. What it is, is the love poetry between a lover and his beloved.

Before they get married.

For those who pay close attention to the details and descriptions, and not just the parts about fruit, deer, grass and streams of flowing water, is the evolution of a relationship. A relationship that is about to be consummated. In other words, there's a lot of passion and desire between the lover and his beloved. It's obviously grown and been kept in check, but even in few days remaining before their weddings its a struggle. The struggle? How to let the feelings grow while not letting the feelings overwhelm and control. The answer? Good friends and community support. Oh, and to let the feelings grow. Because they are supposed to be growing.

Like fruit on a tree, sexual feelings are supposed to be growing; they should be ready for picking on the day of the wedding. With that encouragement, that's exactly what my fiancé and I are practicing. And that's the standard we're holding ourselves accountable towards. To let the feelings grow at a slow and stable pace. Which takes a lot of patience.

This is where my physical training is helping me the most. I know strength and endurance take time to build. I know there are shortcuts, but none that will produce the longevity I desire. Like my physical training, I have to take the time by communicating with my fiancé to build what it is we want. It's more than physical intimacy. It's being intimate with each other's souls. We're taking efforts to keep our pace slow, to keep ourselves from speeding ahead, yet moving towards our goal.

It's not perfect. We don't have a formula. At this point it comes down to deciding what's pure and what's right each and every day. That's all we can do.

For those who want to know what's right and what's not, I suggest reading and discussing the materials from purity culture. Some of the books are bad arguments for good things. No author is perfect. Take the principles and find out how to apply them. You'll need to learn how to focus your mind, and you'll need to learn how that's different from shutting your body down. It's an art form of living, its not something you only achieve by learning how to say "No, I won't," its something you learn how to live by saying, "Yes, I will."

There's more I could say and there's more that needs to be said. There are terms that need to be defined and probably some of my experiences that need to be clarified. Being silent won't create the change we want in our world. We have to take risks. We have to talk about what's happened, what's happening. We need to open up the dark closets of fear, or we will find ourselves incapable of changing. I want to live in a world where we are unafraid of wholeness. I want to live in a world where we encourage one another to live undivided lives. Amen.

Food

I love food. Any kind. Any time. When asked what I want to eat for lunch I often reply, "food sounds good." Eating is always preferable to not eating. When offered new foods I rarely turn them down, Seriously, I'm willing to try anything once. About three weeks ago my intestines started acting funny. Food started to sound less good. Lunch started sounding optional. Breakfast just sounded gross. Dinner kept getting pushed back later and later. I keep eating because I know my body needs food. Me without food is a disaster waiting to happen, but right now, eating feels like a chore. Something I have to do, not something I want to do. The uneasiness of my stomach messes with my appetite. Food sounds good, but when I look at my options, the food I see doesn't sound good anymore. It's like having a craving for a specific flavor of ice cream and you can't seem to find it anywhere. Welcome to my discomfort: of needing to eat, but nothing sounds appetizing.

Right now I'm staring at two sandwiches that constitute my usual lunch. I was hungry for them a few minutes ago, but now that they are occupying space on a plate inches from my fingertips, I have no desire to touch them. Disappointing, really, because its not the sandwiches fault. The sandwiches have done nothing to be spurned so. All they are currently doing is existing. My brains applies all the logical reasons behind eating: maintaining weight, growing muscle, improving mood, healing sick parts of the body, but my stomach doesn't care. My stomach lacks the appetite that makes the sandwiches appealing. I'm sure giving it more time will help, as eventually I will be hungry enough to eat, but right now I'm looking at bored sandwiches looking at a bored eater. It's a sad picture of first world problems.

This blog isn't so much about the food I don't want to eat right now as it is about some of the other things going on in my life. According to the doctor I visited yesterday, I simply might have too much stress in my life. Which means a hearty dose of antacids could be just what I need to recover my appetite. Or I could have a bacteria that's been slowly growing over time and now making its effects known. Either way I have a problem, and the only way to find a solution is to be methodical about testing for what's wrong. And waiting. And smearing my feces on a card for lab testing. (Sorry I just had to throw that one in there.) We've established there IS a problem and I need external help to solve it, because what I've tried so far, isn't working. Which means its not a vitamin deficiency, stomach flu, dehydration or something else simple I could fix on my own. I have a problem and I need help.

While this whole process has been frustrating, and I've finally given up on the stiff-upper-lip approach, there's something else going on in my life that's bothering me. I just finished reading the Old Testament Prophets (hosanna!) and have moved on to reading about Jesus in Matthew. I was super-excited about this transition, but as I've made the switch, Jesus has just sounded super boring.

Not what I was anticipating at all.

It's like staring a plate full of food and not being hungry. Even though you like eating.

The transition from Prophets to Gospels is disorienting. They take place several hundred years apart. The writing style is different. The original language is different. LORD goes from all caps to a single capital. Lord is no longer the sacred name of God, its a title. The prophets give long discourses full of history, making poignant statements about the practices happening in their cultures. They break out in poetry and song. They make proclamations about the Messiah. I get caught up in their passion, their ardor, their longing for a righted world and then I started reading about Jesus of Nazareth. My brain did not make the connection. Jesus sounds crazy.

Let me rewind a little bit for some context. Reading the prophets was HARD. It was so hard I had to stop reading and let my mind wrap around what was happening. It was hard because I heard them speaking to a people who weren't willing to listen, who didn't want to change and were destroying their nation. It struck home. It broke my heart.

I expected Jesus, whom we call savior (meaning healer) to help put some of the brokenness back together. I expected passion, strong discourses and a narrative easy to follow. Guess I'm reading the wrong gospel! Honestly, that's possible because Matthew categorically organized Jesus story, and the organization makes my head hurt. We have pronouncements and decision-making about Jesus life, then he preaches, (boy did that sermon cover too much material) and then he heals sick people and casts out demons (not figuratively, the words mean literally) then he prepares his disciples to out into the world to do what he's been doing (but there's zero follow up material to say what happened when they went out). It all happened so fast I'm trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. It's like having a brain freeze from too much ice cream, and my brain-freeze screams Jesus is weird!

This is not a crisis of faith as much as it is a statement of truth. Jesus is weird. He does insane things. He fixes crazy people, when crazy people aren't supposed to be fixed, even when he's supposed to be doing other more important tasks, like saving more important people's lives. Instead he's stopping in the middle of a street to pay attention to a woman in desperate need no one else even sees. Jesus is weird, and not living up to my expectations of the Messiah. Which is exactly what the people around him are thinking. He doesn't measure up, but what he's doing adds up. Jesus sounds cryptic, even though he's speaking plainly. It's just that hard for us to understand the world he' calling us to be a part of. We'd much rather fit him into our world than make the transition to live in his.

Jesus isn't a politician coming to change policies to make the world a better place. He's a man walking into the world and living by a different set of rules, rules so different he's deemed a dangerous revolutionary to public order and summarily executed. That's what's so radical about him. He doesn't wait for the world to change, he doesn't preach long sermon's hoping people will listen, he acts. His actions are so different from what people expected they are thrown into confusion. Is this the Messiah we've been waiting for? Is this the guy who's coming to save us? He doesn't look or act like we think he should, he pays attention to the wrong people and his philosophy is unlivable idealism. So said many then, so say many now.

I'm eating my sandwich (and no, not just for dramatic effect, I'm actually hungry). I'm chewing it slowly. I guess I should use the same approach with Jesus. Chew him slowly (see I'm starting to sound crazy too) Encountering Jesus in the Bible is unlike encountering everyone else. He's different, which is probably why the gospels are written differently. So we'd have to stop and figure out exactly what we are eating.

What I learned about church post college: Joy

Before I started my youth internship at the church in North Dallas, I spent a week fasting. As a group exercise instructor I had to keep eating, so instead of dropping all food from my diet I dropped and reduced three things: dairy, carbs and protein from animals (thank God for fish!). On day three of my week long fast, I felt my body consume the last of its stored carbs. I started craving meat and bread, desiring them the way a spoiled child craves a new toy in a toy store. My body hungered for these foods. Around day five I sat down to my usual fasting lunch: salad with celery, blueberries, cranberries, apples, hazelnuts and walnuts. I had almost a full gallon of this healthy and nourishing food with me and I ate more than half of it. When I finished my stomach was full, yet my body was empty. I had filled up with good things, but my body told me in no uncertain terms that something was missing.

This blog series has been about finding that missing piece, and the unlikely place I found it. I've spent most of the series writing about the spiritual hunger I've had post college, and the places I have been trying to satisfy an internal craving I never encountered before. I went to the places Christians often point to satisfy their hunger: reading the Bible, attending church, praying, fasting and living in community, and though each of these things is good, my spiritual stomach was still hungry. It craved something I didn't know how to find until I found myself at a little YMCA in the southwest part of Dallas.

I was there to audit. Early that week I knew there was something missing in my life, and I was praying I would find the answer. As I had never been to this particular YMCA before I wanted to explore the whole building, and in doing so I found one of my friends who I had connected with a few weeks earlier. We started talking about life, choices and being involved with youth. He knew of my prior coaching experiences in North Dallas and invited me to come back later that night to help coach the teen basketball team. I agreed, thinking I would at least check it out, that it wouldn't be for me and I would move on.

That was nine months ago. Yesterday, we finished our winter basketball season. We started with six teens and now we have become two teams for a total of sixteen players. What started out as me 'helping' ended up with me as head coach and then grew into the following: two very skilled assistant coaches, three passionate young men from Christ for the Nations who assist in everything we do, a program leader for our additional life skills lessons, and assistance from a program helping my players see past high school into their futures. What started out as "I'm not so sure about this, but I'll give it a try" has become the highlight of my time in Texas. I'm telling you that coaching basketball at this southwest YMCA has filled the void that none of my other Christian activities could fill, and its launched a program that will continue improving the lives of my brothers in southwest Dallas.

Why?

Coaching basketball has challenged my status quo. I have had to wrestle with the things I believe and the way in which I live them out. Working with my teams, and teaching them that basketball isn't about a scoreboard, but an attitude with which we play has been difficult. The most difficult part has been adjusting my own attitude, recognizing when my actions contradict what I preach. These come-to-Jesus-moments have prompted me to re-evaluate my approach as a coach. In North Dallas I learned how to manage and remain positive. In Southwest Dallas I learned how to fight: to embrace passion and make it an integral part of everything I do. What I have learned on the court as a coach has spilled out into all other areas of my life. It has been the single most impactful thing I've done.

Why?

It's not about being a coach, or playing basketball. It's been learning how to express myself through a medium, much like any artist. Except I've realized that the medium has been me and how I live my life. I've had the wonderful opportunity to recognize this on the court, for my attitude is constantly on display and challenged by game situations. I wholeheartedly believe we can live out our beliefs in any area of life: working a front desk, as a manager, as a single, as a couple, as an athlete, as a writer, musician, poet, IT specialist, car mechanic or simply as someone's friend. The challenge is to recognize when our actions are not aligned with our beliefs, and being aware our attitude has an effect on others.

Coaching has not been an easy ride. Especially in southwest Dallas basketball arena. I've experienced winning teams so upset they almost got beat, they couldn't shake hands with my players. I've watched parents lead their small children in inappropriate negative cheering. I've watched them flip out when the referee doesn't call the game in a way they want, causing technical fouls against their own team. I've also watched said parents chew out anyone associated with the functioning of the scoreboard. I've seen one of my players get ejected, because he got off the bench to defend his teammate who got punched when the referee wasn't looking. And I'm only describing the past three weeks!

Crazy would be the right word to describe what I've seen, but the joy of watching young men overcome, band together, fight for each other, celebrate the good in the bad and keep improving has all been worth it. Which is what my coaching has all been about: improving our hearts, changing our lives and drawing closer to Christ.

One of my players took another teen's iPhone. They used GPS tracker to follow the phone to his house. Because of this, and a few other missing phone incidents, we were ready to kick him out. I literally walked into the confrontation, and immediately saw what was happening- we were about to deny a young man the opportunity to grow and change his own life. He had moved to Dallas to get away from the juvenile detention life he had been living in Alaska. As a new kid on the block, he was befriended by the people his parents wanted to get him away from. Moving doesn't change our behaviors, confrontation does. I created more conflict by asking he be given a second chance, so long as he chose to apologize. We still turned him away for a week. This young man came back and has chosen to work with us, helping him break the bad cultural habits he's learned. He's fourteen.

That story is the reason I choose to be a part of the team working to make a difference in the lives of southwest Dallas youth. I simply don't believe we would be making this difference without Christ as our example. For it is through Christ we are humbled enough to recognize our own shortcomings. It is through Christ that we find the support and encouragement to keep going. It is through Christ that we change, finding healing from the bad habits we have learned. It is through Christ we are enabled to confess our sins and still be loved.

Coaching basketball has taught me about the love of Christ. That it isn't always easy, that we have to lean into conflict instead of avoiding it and at all times give everything. It has been a wild ride, but I would joyfully do it again.