Yeah…

Sometimes Craig gives us homework. It trips me out too (LOL). It seems that for the next several weeks, I will be posting excerpts from chapters of my new book, my “second born”: “Pure Heart: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Integrity”.

If there’s anyone who’s been reading these for awhile, then you know that title is soooooooooooo not my style/personality/choice. Personally, I wanted it to be named, “Eyes Opened. Legs Closed” (and I’m waiting on Craig to make some shirts with that on it…HINT…HINT). Yet, before I copy and paste a couple of paragraphs from the first chapter, let me show you how God operates…a lot of the time; how, indeed, his ways are not like ours…most of the time (Isaiah 55:8).

Timing is something. Today, I received a book review of my “firstborn”, “Inside of Me: Lessons of Lust, Love & Redemption”. That was a book written six years ago. When I public speak, I sometimes share that when I got the first copy of the book in the mail, my boyfriend, at the time, had just been…intimate with me that day. Hmph. A book about the lessons I’ve learned on lust, love and redemption and clearly, I was still learning them.

During the time between the two books, I knew there was some stuff I needed to work on. Abstinence, for more than 10 months, was on top of the list. A prayer request that I had, after celebrating my first year of abstinence, now, almost three years ago (it’ll be four years of no sex in January and one year of no masturbation in October) was that the Lord, even after all that I’ve done, would make me PURE and that I would become a woman of INTEGRITY.

And again, what’s the title of the book? One that I had absolutely no say in?!? Yeah. God is indeed hilarious, at times. (LOL)

So, there’s my James 5:16 for the week. A little background on why I am sharing a few of the paragraphs that I am today. There is a songwriter that I have a lot of respect for by the name of Hallerin Hill. He once penned a verse that said, “He didn’t solve the problem the way you thought he would. He chose a different answer, but it was twice as good.” Sometimes, life doesn’t go the way we planned…but the plan is still a good one. Here’s a teaser of the first chapter. All of the excerpts won’t be this long, but I wanted to give you the gist of where my head was…years after “Inside of Me”. I hope you dig it…oh, and will buy it. Thanks. 😉

In the Beginning…Pg.16

This book? Prayerfully, it will pick up where Inside of Me left off—for both the writer and the reader—because the funny thing (not in the “ha-ha” but the “aha” kind of way) is that in the intro of my first book, I listed all of the reasons why sex outside of marriage was not a good idea. And all of them were dead-on. But it wasn’t until 2007—that’s right, three years later—that I actually stopped having sex for good. Well, until I get married, that is. Hey, I’m obedient, but I’m not a nun. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and I have a big imagination!). I mean, I got mad respect for the apostle Paul, but I have no desire to be like him when it comes to his quest for singleness (1 Cor. 7:8). I love the single life, but not enough to be single (and celibate) forever.

So yes, that means I desire to be married. And when I do, I hope to remain so until death parts me from my mate. While sex is not the be-all of marriage (believe me, I’ve heard enough war stories to know), I did once hear a wise married man say that good marital sex is 10 percent of a marriage and bad marital sex is 90 percent of a marriage. The bedroom tends to set the tone for the rest of the house, whether married or single.

Pg.17

The Beginning . . . of It All

Sex isn’t just about what we see on so-called reality television shows or our favorite romantic dramedies (thank the Lord!). Sex is about joining two human minds, bodies, and spirits together. It is one of the ultimate forms of communication between a man and a woman—ideally, husband and wife. The truth is, whomever you have sex with, you become joined to . . .forever. I once heard a man say that they don’t pay prostitutes for sex; they pay them to leave. According to 1 Corinthians 6:15–16, that man was delusional. It may be by floss
or it may be by tightly woven rope, but every single individual you have sex with, you become linked to from that moment forward. That is the main role sex plays: connector.

Like so many women (and while I think men can benefit from reading this, I am writing to my spiritual sisters), I didn’t really understand the true role of sex in life. My mom told me about the birds and the bees at a fairly young age, and my
Christian educational upbringing pretty much beat into my head that sex outside of marriage is not something that “good girls” do. Looking back, I guess they meant single good girls, because aren’t married women “good girls” too? (That was not a rhetorical question; we’ll get to that in another chapter!) But even with all of the “book knowledge” I had on the issue, I still didn’t really get the purpose of why God created sex or what he desired for his daughters to experience in that area.

And so, on my current quest for sexual fulfillment—from spiritual perspective first—I figured why not go to the first woman documented in the Good Book? The Woman (she wasn’t called “Eve” until after sin—Gen. 3:20). The Woman
was brought to Adam. See that? As much as we quote this section of Scripture and say many a man may find a good wife (see Prov. 18:22), Adam didn’t actually find his; he slept, while God planned his future (Gen. 2:21–22). Wonder what
the experience was like for the Woman? How did she feel being created from a man and then seeing him for the first time? Well, I won’t speak for her because I hate it when people speak for me, but if I were to put myself in her shoes, as a
Words of Affirmation person (because you have read Gary Chapman’s The Five Languages of Love, right?), if Adam had been my husband, he would have earned major points for praising me on seeing me: “And the man said, ‘Now, this
is someone whose bones came from my bones, whose body came from my body. I will call her “woman,” because she was taken out of man’” (v. 23).

More to follow,

SRW