Although we were told all sin is forgivable, premarital or gay sex seemed completely, utterly and totally unforgivable. “I was conditioned to believe that sex outside of marriage was a grave offense. Sexually active outside of marriage? You must not love Jesus. Because sexual purity is the one true measure of a person’s Christianity, as anyone who grew up in evangelicalism can attest. That’s when I could be whole again, not because a man was completing me, but because I could reunite with my sexuality without risking my salvation. So I lived divorced from myself, forced to persevere until marriage. No one, not even Kyla, could imagine a theology that allowed me to be single and sexual. Long after our small group dissolved, I considered every self-pleasure session a failure to live up to God’s best for me. ![]() My secret sin was no longer secret, and that, in and of itself, was liberating.īut, on the other hand, Kyla’s relative sex positivity still restricted all orgasms to the confines of heterosexual marriage. ![]() But Kyla was neither a nymphomaniac nor mannish - if she could forgive herself for masturbation then I could too. In my mind, masturbation marked me as hypersexual and, worse, masculine. Up until her small group, only my journals had born witness to my deep shame over masturbation, a sin boys alone were supposed to struggle with. On the one hand, Kyla’s nonchalance and edgy humor was incredibly refreshing.
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