Rememberment, Chapter XXVII: Under His Eye

 

"The eyes of the LORD are in every place,
keeping watch on the evil and the good."
(Proverbs 15:3)



Looking back to my preteen years, I think it's safe to say that my sex education was a bit off.


We watched a film at school. It was titled "How Life Begins" or something like that. Before playing it, our teacher was even more tense and stern than usual, and told us that during the film there would be absolutely no talking. Then he switched the lights off. I can't remember anything specific about the film, only the nervous atmosphere in the class during the time it played. And when it was over, our teacher switched the lights back on and told us that we were dismissed. If anyone had any questions about the film, they sure didn't have the nerve to ask; everybody just buggered off in silence.


To be fair, I wasn't entirely clueless about the subject: even without the Internet, there were some sources for information. I had found some interesting comics when rummaging through the magazines that my brothers kept in their room. And when I visited my cousins, us kids sometimes stayed overnight in the neighbouring old house where their grandma's brother used to live. He had amassed an impressive collection of adult magazines from the 60s and 70s, which we of course discovered in the attic. Good times.


At home, the subject was barely brought up but when it was, it most often came wrapped in a quote from the Bible. Masturbation was a sin because according to Paul, it was violating the sanctity of your body (1 Corinthians 6:19). Eyeballing those dirty magazines invoked Jesus himself (Matthew 5:28). All in all, marriage was the way to go (Hebrews 13:4).


Homosexuality was on a tier of its own. It was something so nasty that God wiped Sodom and Gomorrah right off because of it (Genesis 19). But that wasn't much of a concern for me anyway as I knew I would never be into any of that. Besides, it was the mid 80s when gays were little more than comedy show fodder.


But the rest of it was a bit more problematic. For all my life I had known that God is always watching; not only what I say or do, but what I think as well. And there I was, entering the age when I realized that girls are fascinating in all sorts of ways, and it wasn't going away by praying.

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