Not Ready for Marriage, Not Ready for Sex - Chris Padgett, Linda Padgett

Not Ready for Marriage, Not Ready for Sex (eBook)

One Couple's Return to Chastity

Chris Padgett, Linda Padgett (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
168 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-184-0 (ISBN)

When Chris Padgett met Linda Dodge for the first time at the end of high school, sparks flew. Or maybe that was just the glare from Chris's mustard-yellow polyester vintage suit, a typical item in his shock-and-awe wardrobe. Linda was impressed if puzzled, but the beautiful cheerleader and Chris, winner of the senior class's Most Unique Personality award, were soon a couple. Even sooner, the two young Christians found themselves involved in a passionate sexual relationship. Certain they should stop but just as certain they couldn't, the relationship began to unravel. When they found the courage, in college, to choose chastity, they discovered a renewed friendship, affection and the self-discipline that would serve as a firm foundation for marriage. Wondering if you have the resolve to choose sexual purity? Wondering why you should choose it? Read the Padgetts' story for some straight talk about sex and the truth that will set you free.

Section Two

The Fall

Chris

As Christmas vacation ended and we returned to high school, nothing was the same in either of our lives. Linda and I were a couple, and boy, did we love it! All was fresh and explosive. Life focused on us.

We did everything together when our schedules per-mitted and found creative ways to cope when they didn’t. We had to be in constant communication. Writing notes, talking on the phone or just thinking about one another— that was daily life. Love notes passed to one another between classes (for all seven periods) enabled me to get through the day. I don’t know if we managed to actually learn anything at school during this time.

At home, when we were apart and unable to talk on the phone, we made audio recordings for each other. We’d fill a tape with sixty minutes of our myopic understand-ings of love and then give the other the tape. We don’t recommend this: it can cause extreme embarrassment when someone—not your parents, you hope, or years later your own children—finds these tapes.

Our behavior was obsessive and led us to do things we never imagined. Linda left a job at which she excelled just so we could work together at the local grocery store. The store’s uniform was a lime green polyester number so Linda went from looking great in her short skirts to resembling the character we affectionately know as Gumby. She was still strikingly attractive!

We skipped school regularly until school officials caught us. I was suspended for a few days, and Linda was refused a scholarship opportunity due to these poor choices.

Our love continued to grow, until we made a choice one evening that changed our relationship irrevocably. We didn’t intend things to pan out in this fashion, but once begun, everything tilted into a new dimension.

That evening we had sex for the first time, in my car. We excused ourselves by saying that in our hearts we wanted to completely give ourselves to each other. This seemed the logical next step in such a serious relationship.

Growing up, both of us had learned that premarital sex was wrong, but in our passion we quickly justified our sin. As a result, doors opened in our spiritual lives that allowed the enemy to get a foothold. We felt trapped in a vicious cycle, unable to gain control. We couldn’t figure out how to stop.

We felt terrible about our immoral behavior but experienced defeat after defeat as we struggled with the desires of the flesh. There was no way that I wanted to stop. When you stumble repeatedly in the same sin, you begin to feel hopeless that you will ever achieve lasting victory over it. That sums up our situation. As much as we tried to avoid sexual promiscuity, our flesh managed to find every opportunity to satisfy our desires. It was war within and without.

I was terrified that my mother would somehow find out how corrupt her child had become. She would be crushed if she knew I was sexually active.

One day as I came into the house, I heard my mother say, “Chris, explain to me what’s on your bed.” I knew she was baiting me for the kill. This was not an expression of interest but a tactic she employed when confronting some issue with me. Whenever I was in trouble, this red-headed wonder called Mother would place the convicting evidence on my bed, wait to hear my pathetic excuse and then dish out my deserved punishment in a supersized format.

I stumbled into my room, my heart beating franti-cally. My life was in peril, but I didn’t know the specifics yet. And there on my bed was an unused condom out of its wrapper. Fear surged through me as I turned to face my mother. Panic held me in its grip as I tried to think of anything that would explain such incriminating evidence.

I mumbled some less-than-enlightened comment like, “Well, since it’s here on my bed, that means we didn’t use it.” It was something as stupidly nonbrilliant as that. I knew at that moment that my mother was disappointed in me. I realized that God was disappointed too, and truthfully, Linda and I were disappointed with ourselves as well. But we seemed powerless to break the hold of sex on our lives.

Some people think that physical sexual expression is a natural reaction to raging hormones that overwhelm all young people. Certainly the hormones are animated, but just as certainly we could have controlled them, especially if we had never started having sex to begin with. Rather than quench our desire, the physical expression just made us want more.

Our consciences reminded us of our sin, but we found ways to numb them. I was no longer thinking clearly, hav-ing pretty much given my entire self over to being with and experiencing Linda. All the values I once held dear as a child were moved to the back burner of my heart. Life centered on my giving myself to the one I loved.

Deception seemed a small price to pay in order for us to be together. We sacrificed the trust of our parents on the altar of selfishness.

During these turbulent times we cried many tears of repentance and made commitments we didn’t keep. We felt we had no power to help us stop what we had begun. We needed a miracle. We needed a transformation!

Shame

Linda

Have you ever felt that God has turned his back on you in shame? That he is so ashamed at what you are doing that he can’t stand to watch? That’s exactly how I felt every time Chris and I participated in premarital sex. Despite our sincere aspirations in the beginning to have a spir-itual relationship, we fell into the same trap into which many have fallen.

For both of us this relationship was not the first that involved sex. The difference in this relationship, though, was that both Chris and I knew better. We both grew up knowing that sex was to be saved until marriage, even though no one ever explained the importance of this moral standard. So we surrendered to the feelings and accepted our sinful behavior as normal.

A large part of me enjoyed the promiscuity, and why not? Sex was intended to be fun. But the other part of me knew I was playing with fire. I knew the sex I was engaging in was not the best sex God intended for me to experi-ence. How could it be? I was using it as it was never meant to be used.

When I look back on that period, I remember the many great times we had that didn’t involve sex. We made the mistake, however, of assuming sex was an appropriate means of building our relationship. Our weakened spiri-tual life could not counter the strength of sexual sin. This sin held us and would not let go. We justified our actions by saying we wanted to marry each other someday.

We also found solace in the idea that sexual exper-imentation was supposedly normal for teens. Looking around our high school, it seemed that everyone was sexually active. I assumed that the hurt and emotions that accompany promiscuity were natural and normal feelings that teenagers experience.

This was incorrect, of course. There were plenty of students who were stronger than I and able to say no to temptation. As a result they didn’t have to live with the fears of hurt, pregnancy and sexually transmitted dis-eases as well as the dread of our parents’ finding out.

Our refusal to control our physical obsession led us to do things we would never have considered before. Once Chris lied to his mother and told her he was spending the night at a friend’s. As soon as the TV distracted my father, I snuck Chris in through the back door to spend the night with me. We were terrified of getting caught and so got very little sleep. Chris left early the next morning feeling that the whole event was a bit too risky.

Stupidly, we repeated this affair at Chris’s house. I lied to my parents about where I’d be that night and crawled through Chris’s bedroom window. The next morning I hid under his bed while his mother demanded to know the reason for the locked bedroom door. As his family prepared for church, I escaped undetected, pass-ing his blind grandmother on my way out the front door.

What were we thinking? Our lives had become a breed-ing ground for lies and deception. Sin propagates sin.

Not only that, but our tunnel vision made us neglect everything else. School suffered, family suffered, faith suffered and eventually our relationship suffered. Our bond began to unravel as a result of our promiscuity; rather than strengthen our relationship, sexual involve-ment nearly destroyed it. We fought constantly. Decep-tion, which had become the norm in our dealings with others, infiltrated our own relationship. Things spun out of control. Everything needed to change, or we were not going to make it as a couple.

Even though we eventually gained victory over this stronghold, the effects of our sin would linger for a long time. As a result of our sexual intimacy, I developed a premature emotional dependency on Chris. This caused great confusion in my heart when I started to grow spir-itually. I wanted all that God wanted for me, but I was so tied to Chris that if I had had to choose between the two, I would have been inclined to disregard God. I was con-sumed by fear that God would take Chris away.

I was controlled by these feelings because I had already united myself with Chris in a way that is suitable only for married people who are forging a permanent life together. If we had waited until marriage to express the sexual side of our love, I wouldn’t have had to deal with the emotional confusion that affected me for...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	23.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Partnerschaft / Sexualität
ISBN-10	1-63582-184-3 / 1635821843
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-184-0 / 9781635821840

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