Shame, Part 1

It was the summer before my third grade year when I first heard about sex. I was playing Barbies with my neighbor Wendy who was a few years older and she asked me if I knew how people "did it." Being completely clueless, I asked "did what?" She picked up her naked Barbie and Ken dolls and demonstrated how babies were made. Up to that point, I truly thought babies were made from prolonged kissing and whenever I saw my parents sharing a kiss, I prayed for a baby sister. But seeing those plastic bodies entwined (well, as much as their rigid forms could be entwined) left me feeling not only confused, but very ashamed.

I couldn't tell my mom and dad because for one, I wasn't really supposed to be playing boyfriend/girlfriend with my Barbies and two, I had never said the word naked out loud. So I kept it to myself.

A few years later, I was a little more knowledgeable, having secretly watched some soap operas at my Mamaw's house. Feeling a little brave one day, I asked my best friend's much older sister to tell me about the birds and bees.

And did she ever. She held nothing back and by the time she was finished, I regretted asking her to tell me and felt guilty for not asking her to stop. Again, I couldn't tell my parents because I thought they'd be upset about what I just heard. So instead, I just felt ashamed.

Ashamed after watching a mature movie at a slumber party. Ashamed for reading my neighbor's romance novels after I put her kids to bed when I was babysitting on Friday nights. Ashamed for seeing a nearly nude photo of my friend's dad when we were snooping in her parents' room. Ashamed for being secretly jealous as I listened to all the sexual escapades of my college-aged co-workers at the ice cream shop. Ashamed for compromising my convictions and going further than I wanted to before marriage.

I had all that exposure to sex, but absolutely no idea what it meant to have a godly, healthy intimate relationship. My parents gave me "the talk" when I was a teenager, which basically consisted of the phrase "The Bible says don't do it until you're married, so wait til you're married." Instead of associating sex with love and romance and communion, I had a hard time seeing past the secrecy and guilt and shame and embarrassment from years before.

Needless to say, I brought all of that junk into my marriage bed. When I had God's permission to finally be sexually free, I was in more bondage than ever. I felt ashamed for enjoying sex, ashamed for being sexually expressive and ashamed that no matter how hard I tried, all those little thoughts and images from before kept playing in my head over and over, making it nearly impossible to focus on the gift that God had created for us.

I know I'm not the only one. It seems that most of us have carried or are currently carrying around some sort of guilt over sexual experiences BEFORE marriage. So for the next few Fridays, I want to talk about this... how to overcome that shame once and for all and how to hopefully prevent our children from experiencing those same pitfalls.

But first, was your initial introduction to sex healthy or unhealthy? Positive or negative?