The challenge for this week is to be honest in one aspect of your life (see here for the full challenge). I think at one point, every single one of us has hid something from someone. For some of us, we are still hiding something, and for others, we have a clear conscience. So I’m challenging you to make a confession.
In order to walk-the-walk and not just tell everyone what they should be doing, I decided to open up my vault a little bit. This is going to be a long one, so be prepared.
To be honest, I was a little scared to share this but I received a little encouragement recently.
Premarital sex, something that is taken so lightly by so many people today, yet it can have an enormous impact on not just the people involved but the families as well.
Back when I was in high school, I started dating this girl. We were in love, at least with a 17 year-old’s understanding of what love is. We had been dating awhile and so we decided to see what all the talk was about. Sure enough, after a few months the condom broke. We decided to go to planned parenthood and take the day after pill.
It was a terrifying experience going to planned parenthood. They had people protesting outside showing dead fetuses on signs and yelling at us as we were going in. We were just young kids and really had no idea what we were doing and those people definitely did not help our situation.
This was pretty much the turning point of our relationship. We continued to see each other for awhile but I started taking interest in other girls so we broke up.
So now things didn’t seem so bad. I removed something from my life that was leading me away from God and I was finally getting my life back in order.
And then it happened…
She showed up at my work and told me she was pregnant. I didn’t think there was any possible way that she could have been. So I made her take a pregnancy test because I didn’t believe she actually was pregnant. She took the test, brought it out and showed me that it was positive.
I had no idea what to do, so I did the only thing I could think of at the time. That was to continue to hang out with her and see this pregnancy through. One time we were sitting in the car and she put my hand on her stomach and told me to see if I could feel the heart beat. If I’m remembering correctly, this was about 3 months into the pregnancy and the crazy thing was, I actually felt it, or felt something.
A little while after this happened, I received a call from her and she was crying. She told me she just went to the hospital and gave birth to two stillborns. I debated at this point to even tell my parents.
A couple days passed and my mom noticed I wasn’t acting right. Who would be acting right after all of this happened? So I opened up to her. I revealed just about everything to both my parents. When I’m done, my mom immediately reaches for the phone and calls my girlfriend’s parents. Her parents didn’t know a thing. They didn’t know she was pregnant, they didn’t know she went to the hospital, and they didn’t know she just gave birth to two stillborns.
After that day, I never talked to my now ex-girlfriend again. She disappeared for a few months. Rumors started flying around school that she was in a mental institution, that she had to move, that she went and lived with her aunt in Georgia. Nobody knew and I couldn’t bring myself to call her parents, I assumed that her parents would know where she was. I couldn’t stop thinking that she may have really been pregnant still and just told me she gave birth to stillborns for whatever reason she had.
She finally showed up at school again. I tried avoiding her at all costs. A couple of years passed and she calls my parents and leaves a message that her father had passed away and she would really like it if I could make it to the funeral. I didn’t go.
Another couple of years passes and I start hearing rumors that she got mixed in with the wrong crowd. Shortly after that I receive a bunch of messages that she had passed away. I don’t know the cause nor do I want to make any conclusions about it. All I knew was that my first “love” was no longer on this earth. I always had this thought in the back of my mind that I would run into her again and she would have a child that I didn’t even know about. Or that I would run into her and she would be doing great.
Up until a few months ago, I honestly had no idea if I had a child out there. It took me the better part of a decade to finally reach out to someone in her family to see if they knew if she was ever pregnant. Apparently around the time she disappeared, not only did my ex-girlfriend disappear from me, but she disappeared from her family too. They told me basically that they didn’t think she was ever pregnant and that they had no idea where she ran off to. I didn’t ask about the cause of death because it wasn’t important.
Now back to my main point about premarital sex and how it can have an enormous impact on so many lives. Granted that most situations do not turn out as dramatic as this one, the point is that it can. Who would have thought that a little premarital sex could have led to all of this? Do I blame myself for what happened to my ex and the pain I put her family through? Absolutely. If you take me out of the equation, who knows what would have happened to her. What I do know is that I was a part of the equation and I know what her outcome was. I’m not saying that I was the one that caused her death but I definitely didn’t help the situation.
You replay those key instances in your life over and over to see how you would handle situations differently, especially now that you know part of the outcome. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing I can say or do to change what happened.
So there are two lessons to be taught here…one is simple, premarital sex is not in God’s plan and is not worth risking your relationship with Him. I don’t know how many readers I have that are in this situation, but if you are struggling with something, please reach out for help. It doesn’t have to be to me, it can be anybody. The second lesson is to be honest to yourself, God and others. God forgives, even in the midst of the depths of sin and can pull you out of any sinful situation if you confess and lean solely on Him. He loves you no matter what sin you have committed.