The Birds and The Bees

My husband is snow-tubing with my almost 12 years old son.

The past 24 hours have been spent with us getting ready for my husband to take our son on an "adventure". An adolescent adventure that all parents have to some day decide what to do with.

The se*x talk will be given to the middle-schoolers at our church on February 8th and my hubby and I decided to beat the pastor to the punch. Our son will now know what is going on before he gets to that class full of rowdy pre-teens.

We chose to do, "Passport to Purity" by Dennis and Barbara Rainey. It's a 24 hour adventure where the parent takes the child "away" and they have to listen to numerous cd's addressing what God wants out of their life when they are a teen and why they need to respect their parents, etc. Then the program moves into the Se*x stuff. It's done in a very tactful way, though odd at times (just because it is such an awkward subject....).

The parent also asks the child questions and the child asks the adult questions, for interactions sake, I suppose. Then there's a fun activity that the parents chooses ( Hubby chose tubing) and a fancy dinner. Then a presentation of a very special gift to honor the child(our son is getting a real sword), to show the child that he is being ushered into a new age of his life.

The program is all immersed in Biblical Scripture and the message basically states that our bodies are not our own to play with, we must follow Christ in everything we do, even whom we kiss. It lays a foundation for the child that is on the brink of being a man, right before the hormones hit and the body changes. It shows that child what God thinks of se*x (He loves it~when done according to His plan) and what He expects and what the parent will expect of the said child.

When I look at my son who is 11 3/4 years old, I cannot imagine the changes that are before him in the next few years. He is already in 6th grade (home-educated) and only has 6 small years of school left. He (God-willing) will grow strong and tall and start thinking and talking more like an adult. He will notice girls more and start his path onto his new life of adulthood. How much can one soul take in 6 small years!?

When I was 11, I had wonderful parents, but I think that the topic of se*x was just something that they didn't want to take the time on. One day, when I was 10, my Mom knocked on my door and handed me a pile of red books and told me to read them. I didn't have a CLUE about what went behind locked doors( in those days anyway), and I bit off way more than I could chew by reading those books and they were definitely NOT biblical.

I didn't know how to really handle all the information and I didn't have anyone to talk to it about, so I got a totally different view of se*x than my own son did. I don't fault my parents at all, they did the very best that they could and at least my Mom was trying to educate me properly.

My husband had a different, but at the same time, similar experience with learning about the subject. He had an older brother and that older brother had friends and eventually my hubby learned what was going on in the world of that. He had a very skewed view, thinking that it was just a free-for-all fest for the hormonal soul.

If only someone could have told us how utterly sacred and beautiful it is.

In High School, after my husband and I started "dating", we had decided early on that we wouldn't go "all the way", that somewhere, in our lives we heard that it was something to hold on to. Keith eventually changed his life from little criminal to a God-fearing man soon after we started going out, so his perspective became very solid, while mine (I was "Christian-Lite") still was a selfish view of Christianity. I pushed him and pushed him to go farther and farther. We never actually went through with it until the wedding night, but oh.... when I look back , I can't believe the agony I put him through so many times, just because I wanted to please my earthly self. I had no view of God in my "Christian-Lite" world~ just myself.

I am thankful to this day for my husband's resistance to me.

When I look back at our own experiences and how se*x was introduced to us, I see where we made so many mistakes. We didn't get the opportunity, like our son has had, to learn early on what God expects of us and why he expects it of us.

I'm so glad that there are resources out there that make it so much less awkward to parents now.

I'm so glad that my son will have this as his foundation (a 24 hour period with his father learning about a really tough and sensitive subject), instead of a stack of strange red books and an older brothers' friends.

~B