Jesus Wants Your Vajayjay
Featured, The Remedy — By Sarah Thebarge on November 20, 2009 at 12:00 amA few years ago I ran the medical clinic at a camp in the Pocono Mountains. Local churches donated scholarship money, and the funds were used to bus kids from Philadelphia, Trenton,
and New York City to the mountains for a week in the great outdoors.
The summer was as much a learning experience for me as it was for them. Some of the kids had never seen a duck or climbed a tree or roasted a marshmallow. Some of them couldn’t fall asleep because it was too quiet. And it seemed all of them had stomach aches.
At first I thought there was a stomach virus going around the camp, because after every meal I returned to the infirmary to find a line of kids out the door, doubled over complaining of stomach aches.
An elderly woman who’d worked as an inner city missionary for decades was staying in the infirmary with me. I told her about the stomach virus, and she laughed. “They’re not sick,” she explained. “This is the first time a lot of them have eaten healthy food like milk and vegetables and fruit, and their bodies don’t know what to do with it.”
She was right. I came to expect that after the first night’s dinner there would be a long line of kids with stomach complaints, and as the week progressed, the line would grow shorter and shorter as their bodies adjusted.
I also came to expect the Wednesday night Girl Powwow, where the female staff delivered a stern lecture on abstinence to the adolescent girls. The campers were admonished that their body belonged to God, He was watching every move they made, and there would be serious consequences if they failed to save sex for marriage.
One Friday night I was sitting with a group of girls and I asked them what they had learned that week. They were going home the following morning, and I was wondering what resources they’d discovered over the past week to enable them to return to their life in the city. They all started chattering at the same time, but one girl was especially eager to be heard. She kept wriggling closer and closer to the edge of her seat, her hand stretched far into the air. “Ooh, Ooh!” she called. When I called on her, she said loudly, “I learned that Jesus wants your vajayjay!”
As the other girls snickered, my heart sank. Was that her understanding of Jesus? Was that the best message we could have communicated to these girls before they returned to a home where mom was turning tricks to pay the electric bill and no kids played outside because they might get snatched – or shot?
It seemed the abstinence talk we gave these girls made God seem more like a pimp than a father. Regardless of our intent, they’d learned He is more interested in your genitalia than your heart. You can do whatever you want, as long as you follow His rules for sex. He owns your body until He decides to hand it over to your husband – who, by the way, is also a male figure who gets to have his way with you.
We made God seem like most of the other men in their lives, who saw them as objects good for a single purpose, their value exclusively linked to their sexuality.
Since that summer, I’ve thought a lot about the impression we give the world about who God is and what He’s like. I don’t think the flaw is limited to abstinence education – Christians have been heralding a peculiarly corporeal gospel for centuries. God hates gay people. God despises women who have abortions. He has decidedly Prohibitionist leanings and He is allergic to cigarette smoke.
This theology is problematic partly because it gives Christians license to have a myopic view of themselves – you can be a bombastic jerk as long as you’re straight. If you would only give your baby up for adoption, you would stay on God’s good side. You can squander your life as long as you preserve your virginity. You can eat yourself to death with fried pork rinds and Big Macs, provided you don’t wash them down with a bottle of beer.
This mindset also belies the hope of the Gospel, which is that we don’t have to clean up our act before we come to God. We can come to him as wayward children, as lost sheep, as contagious lepers, and He loves and redeems us.
Is it good for teens to be spared the consequences of promiscuity? Yes. There are many healthful, holy standards we can and should advocate. But in every area of our lives, the holiness to which we aspire is a result of His love, not a condition for it.
We can make everyone in the world straight, tobacco-and drug-free, and abstinent but they would still be condemned to spend an eternity without God if He didn’t change their hearts. The message we need to take to the world is not that Jesus wants your money or your church attendance or your sobriety or your vajayjay.
It’s that Jesus wants you.
21 Comments
This is so right on! Thank you for putting it so clearly. Ive actually been thinking along these lines a lot lately. I just recently started attending church after taking a few years off to figure some things out. Mainly, Ive been thinking that God loves us, good bad and ugly. I grew up in a very conservative church, where my sister and I were the only girls in the youth group that weren’t home-schooled. We were made to feel bad that we had to endure sex ed classes and hang out with people that weren’t christians. Im very thankful for my sex ed classes…My sister and I are among the few girls in our youth group that didn’t get pregnant before marriage.
Ive just decided that instead of focusing on these hot button issues, that we need to focus on the heart of people. Does it belong to God? ARe we teaching young people to have a relationship with God? or just how to play church? You can say and do all the right things, but if your heart is far from God its all useless.
Nice piece of writing… thanks for your candor and meaningful articulation of what God really does desire from us…. a heart that believes its possible to live above the daily toll of a life absent of His unconditional love and care of us regardless of our environment. He loves us no matter the complexities of our inner voices; our life in the trenches of uncertainty; or in the suffering that frequently accompanies the conditionality of our relationships. Blessings!
Gurl. I love this piece. You rock.
I love this writing.
We are saved through Grace. NOT through our own good actions. And Saving Grace is completely unmerited. Jesus died on the cross for the sinner! Not for the righteous!
Many people who call themselves Christians are giving Jesus a bad name. I just wish they would stop calling themselves Christians. Because now the world sees Christians as judgmental hypocrites!
Just look at Carrie Prejean!
Christians have somehow likened themselves to the pharisees! The enemies of Christ! In Christ’s name!!!! How disappointing that must be to Jesus! He died for us to deliver us from that, then many of us become that, all in His name! It must break His heart!
Great writing to ponder on as I head out to work. “Let the whole earth be filled with his glory” Psalms 72:19 Look up. Look out. See it everywhere.
Unfortunately one of the principles most hammered into my psyche as a church going youngster was the idea that physical attractions to the opposite sex could only lead to trouble. It ingrained in me a constant, nagging feeling of guilt that I battle with to this day. Too often the emphasis is misplaced on what we do or don’t do, rather than on the undeserved grace God has shown us.
I understand that it’s easier to teach consequence than it is to inspire a true relationship with God and an understanding of why our response to God’s grace is trusting that abstinence is in our best interest. But it may be doing damage to future intimacy even inside the context of marriage. Not to mention doing little to further our understanding of God’s grace.
“We can make everyone in the world straight, tobacco-and drug-free, and abstinent but they would still be condemned to spend an eternity without God if He didn’t change their hearts.”
Oh, how I love that line. Great piece!
Sarah, I agree with you that such teachings are tragic. I kind of sense, though, in your writing and in some comments, a sentiment that kids should not be advised to abstain from premarital sex. And if that is the logical conclusion of anyone here, then I’m on record as being in disagreement.
There is a way to present to kids that waiting until marriage is in their best interest, but not in the way described in the camp experience mentioned above. I’m not professing to have the answer, of course. As a parent of two 8-year olds, I need to figure it out in fairly short order.
Read the 2nd to last paragraph, James. She not advocating a softening of morality, but a better presentation of it.
Larry, I saw that paragraph and that’s why i was trying to not come off as too argumentative. It’s a good paragraph in a great piece of writing. But I was somewhat responding to other comments, more than anything else.
James i agree that waiting til marriage is the best interest of everyone. but not always practical. just like handing out condoms is practical but not really in the best interest of teens. I think that dealing with actions instead of the heart is a risky business.
i know a lot of women that are grown adults in good marriages that still have some mental block about sex. like its a sin to enjoy it. period. we have to find a balance. sex isn’t just for reproduction, it is for us to enjoy and to feel physical intimacy with our partner. Unfortunately, telling anyone “dont” just isn’t good enough. And if they “don’t” just b/c you say so it may last for a while, but not for long. We need to let God move in people’s lives and do HIS work. If their heart is surrendered to Him, He will lead them and mold them into His image. His voice is so much more powerful than ours.
Annie, I don’t argue with any of that, but that’s not what I was saying. I was saying it’s easy to read Sarah’s story and come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t tell kids the value of waiting till marriage. The truth is that we should, but not in the way that was described in the story.
I think that last sentence there is right on, James. The answer is not to take God’s ideal and water it down so that humans can more easily accept it. The answer is to make sure we present the whole good news, not just focusing on the sex part, and teach it in all of its beauty and truth. Jesus does not call the road narrow for no reason.
I think you’re right on about the disparity between a works-based arrangement with God that is often taught (purposefully or not) and the heart-based relationship encouraged in scripture.
That having been said, I am curious about whether some of this is more of a reaction to gender inequity (real or perceived) when it comes to sexual teaching among believers. Case in point, were the male campers at this camp given a similar ‘talk’ on abstinence? If so, would you perceive that as condoning a worldview where only their sexual identities are important? Any biblical teaching would emphasize that both spouses’ bodies belong to one another, not just the wive’s to the husband.
I work with teens often, and the most frequent sexual questions I get are about boundaries. Is oral sex really sex? Is it okay to masturbate? If you can remember back to being a teen, you know that sex is a priority topic at that age. Teaching about sex is a prime opportunity to teach about the heart. Every aspect of our lives is enveloped by our heart (or lack of heart) for God. The fact that teens are so eager to talk about sex in a spiritual context is a blessing. When else are teens so attentive when you say God is not concerned so much about the action itself, but for their own well being and the ramifications in the heart?
I do think you’re right in that we need to re-vamp our sexual education to focus less on guilt and shame. A more healthy approach would focus on being open and honest about our own sexual failures, and on making sure physical consequences are not pushed as the highest reason to practice chastity.
Great stuff. I work with Christian men around these issues, but it’s a different ballgame with girls and women in many respects.
The irony of the typical evangelical approach is that it creates a hyperfocus on sexuality. The more you tell someone, “Do NOT for any reason, open that door,” the more it makes people, especially kids, wonder what on earth is behind that door. Teaching sexual morality is important, but we do a poor job of integrating it with the rest of our theology.
Now I’m getting preachy when all I wanted to do is tell Sarah how great this is. Sorry!
The ultimate test of hypocrisy might be how obsessive some people are about what OTHER people do with their bodies (or money, or time).
Their dire warnings and unhinged histrionics couldn’t be further from the calm, welcoming and healing heart of Jesus.
It is far easier to issue ultimatums and fear laden rules than to live a whole and redemptive life.
This is excellent and heart breaking. I wish that things were taught positively instead of negatively.
For instance- Sex is a precious, beautiful God give gift, designed to give love to someone that trust and commitment is built.
I believe kid even at a young age can have a God-given revelation of that and WANT to wait. Maybe I sound naive or idealistic, but I know that the grace and love of God is what always sets people free- from sin NOT preaching the law. I was hammered with the same list of don’t as a kid- but the problem is they give so much attention to the physical side of sex, scare tactics to avoid consequences etc. As my relationship with God deepened, so my perception of what sex really is deepened and I realized it was so much more then just skin to skin.
The book Sex God by Rob Bell changed a lot of my perspective.
Anyways, great article, I hope that because of people like you bringing these things into the open the way the church talks about sex will continue to change.
Thank you!
thanks so much! I love the way you tackled this subject!! as a youth worker, i’ve always struggled with how the church teaches sexuality to its youth. i’m still not sure what we SHOULD be doing, but i so appreciate and agree with your perspective on how not to do it… Uh…i mean like how not to teach it… not how not to DO IT…er, you know what i mean….
Great column. That catchy title got my attention right away.
Thank you for your writing. It has been a long time and I am glad to see that you are doing well.