The other day, somebody sent me words of a woman, words about how she regretted waiting until she was married. How she’d waited until her wedding night and how she wished she hadn’t. How waiting wrecked a deep and real part of her.
How all those years of NO made her ashamed of when she finally said her marital YES. How she couldn’t be intimate after she got married because she still felt she’d be in sin.
She felt the only way she could heal, that her marriage could survive was if she chose: a God relationship or marital relations. Guess what she chose — and your first guess doesn’t count.
Hey — I get it. I really, really get it. I waited and I was her.
After getting it into your head that you don’t — it can take a long time after you say “I do”…. for the rest of you to say I do. There’s a story I know about that, that’s likely never going to be told. You don’t need to know the self-hating, shaming pain of that story – just that your father is a very caring man who knows that the soul of a woman needs to feel a deep safeness before you ever touch the skin of a woman.
And I guess that is exactly the point that nobody really told us:
Your skin is the outer layer of your soul.
Your skin and your soul are one in ways that TV and the world won’t ever tell you.
Your skin and your soul are profoundly connected and this is a profoundly beautiful thing. There is no shame in this — only the glory of God who made your body art to reflect your soul.
So contrary to what hook-up culture may be touting in the back halls of high schools and behind the closed doors of university dorm rooms — there’s nothing casual about giving away your soul.
The union of two bodies is nothing less than the union of two souls.
Physical oneness is a holy God-created ceremony to express nothing less than a soul oneness.
So I guess that is the question your generation has to answer — Why do with your body what neither of you are willing or ready to do with the whole of your life?
When someone isn’t willing or ready for spiritual oneness, emotional oneness, legal oneness, financial oneness — why let them steal physical and soul oneness from you?
And the thing was, after I said I do, I somehow thought there was shame in what my body needed to do — instead of beauty in what my soul got to give.
Somehow the focus during my youth had been on mere skin — instead of on ultimate soul-intimacy.
But maybe if we preached this far more often from the pulpit, maybe if parents told their kids far more often, maybe it would not only make waiting until marriage make more sense — but it would make marital intimacy make real happy love.
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