WILL YOU BRING A SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE?
An excerpt from the book, IMAGINE THE FUTURE YOU
By Ada Brownell
“Be
sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walks
about, seeking whom he may devour” 1 Peter 5:8.
A high school human sexuality teacher who is a Christian did
this experiment for me in a class I taught at our church’s Dunamis Academy.
She gave paper and pencils to everyone. Before class, she
marked an X on the back of one of the papers, but none of the kids knew it. She
instructed students to shake hands with other teens and have them sign each
other’s papers. They shook hands and gathered signatures for five minutes, and
then returned to their seats.
“Turn your papers over and see if there is an X on the
back,” she told them. A girl found the X and raised her hand.
The teacher told her to stand up. “She has Virus X. Who
signed her paper?”
Five hands went up, and those kids stood.
“Now these five have the virus. Who signed their papers?”
Four more got out of their seats, also contaminated by the fictional “virus.”
Six more admitted their fate.
Eventually all remaining students were “infected.”
“This is how sexually transmitted diseases spread,” the
teacher said. “When you have sex with someone, you are essentially going to bed
with every person that individual had sex with, because once a sexually
transmitted disease is shared, it is contagious until the disease is cured—if
the disease has a cure. You might be intimate with only one person but be
exposed to multiple diseases.”
Some STDs, such as herpes, cause severe misery and are
incurable, but they don’t kill. But the HIV-AIDS virus isn’t the only one that
kills. Both hepatitis B and C affect the liver and can take your life. Human
papilloma virus (genital warts) sometimes causes cervical cancer. Chlamydia and
gonorrhea, left untreated, can affect joints and heart valves and cause pelvic
inflammatory disease, infertility, and even blindness.
A story by Lawrence K. Altman published
in the New York Times on March 12,
2008, said the first national study of four common sexually transmitted
diseases among girls and young women found that one in four is infected with at
least one of the diseases.
IMAGINE YOU—CLEAN!
But the federal study
could have pointed out three out of four do not have the disease. I imagine a
large number of them were virgins.
When my husband and I were married, couples took blood tests
to check for STDs. When a virgin discovered she was set to marry someone
affected with a disease, there was time to call off the wedding. Of course, my
husband and I had nothing to worry about, and the test came out negative.
I would guess in my day most of us were virgins, and I knew
my beautiful white satin gown testified to that fact.
According to Kelsey McIntyre in From Times Past, white has been accepted as the preferred wedding
dress color since Queen Victoria married her cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg in
1840. Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849
reported, “Custom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most
fitting hue, whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and
innocence of girlhood and the unsullied heart she now submits to the chosen
one.”
A wedding gown probably is the most beautiful dress most
women wear in their lives. Even the least expensive are exquisite.
Young men, too, probably will never be more handsome than
the day they stand at the altar waiting in a tuxedo for the beautiful bride.
Children often like to play “bride and bridegroom,” and
during their growing years, many girls dream of the day when they walk down the
church aisle, dressed in white, as the wedding march fills the sanctuary.
In 1953, about half of all women were married by age twenty,
and half of all men by age twenty-two. In 2002, the average age for the bride
was twenty-five and bridegroom age twenty-seven.
Today, thousands of couples are living together without
being married, and multitudes of young women give birth to babies without being
married. In addition, approximately fifty million babies have been killed by
abortion in the United States since abortion became legal in 1973.
Something happened. A large number of young men don’t bend a
knee and extend a tiny box containing a diamond and ask their beloved to marry
them. Instead, many just want to rush the girls off to bed somewhere and
perhaps live together.
Some folks blame the lack of finances and needing to wait to
earn a college education as the reason to delay marriage, but it doesn’t make
sense. You can get a marriage license for a few bucks. A pastor will marry you
for free, but it’s customary to pay him one hundred dollars or so. A couple can
live cheaper than two single people, and you can get your education after
marriage. I did. Thousands of people earn their degrees later, and most of the
people did from generations before us.
But there is something else—and it’s huge. Young women and
men are giving away their virginity as if they are dropping a penny on the
sidewalk and leaving it there. Guys who already have a sexual relationship with
a woman won’t hurry to get married. A woman who gives away her virginity before
marriage risks never being married—especially to him!
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