Not having sex before marriage should be good. Abstaining from all those tempting things is hard, yes, but that's what the church and the Bible say and we all (believers) know that God is always right. Man, no touching; girl, no sneaking. Keep the marriage bed undefiled. All solid contents must be kept in your bra, in your underwear. You can look, even imagine (though that's a sin too) what's in there, but you can't weed or till the soil. You can salivate, but you mustn't slurp or suck before you say “I do” and you've been given the license. Then and after, you can start drilling and depositing, planting, harvesting, as the authorized owner of the rig and the land.
The waiting time can be cruel to both the body and the spirit. Christian courtship is hard, but the wedding night and the sweetness that follows are often very rewarding. I remember a young bride who ran to the pastor of her church two weeks after the wedding, distraught, confused. “I can’t stand it, pastor.” “Stand what, sister.” “My husband wants sex every day. Is it food? I’m tired. My body hurts. I walk funny. I’m even afraid to go home after work. He’s a Christian, why does he want sex every day? It’s carnal, isn’t it?” The pastor laughed and called in a counselor (you can guess who) who explained to the frightened bride the techniques for coping. One, her new boyfriend is a guy, a raging bull who has been kept under control until he got his license to do as he pleases. He’s making up for lost time. Two, sex is food for all healthy men, Christian or not. A guy is a guy. He loves his woman all day long, if possible. There are strategies to avoid wear and tear and bruises. As long as the couple waited, God happily approves all activities and everyone is happy.
Sadly, it is not always so. It has been discovered, very, very sadly, that there are now terrible, embarrassing, ungodly complications to this “no sex before marriage” part of Christian courtship. What is normally supposed to be a beautiful, worthwhile wait has been discovered to bring with it the kind of torture and nightmare that is confusing and debilitating. Too many Christians are evil, too many dating couples are a disgrace to both God and the body of Christ. In fact, I am refraining from calling them murderers because what they bring to a Christian union after saying “I do” before God and men is nothing short of marital terrorism. A man who professes to be a born-again, tongue-speaking, demon-binding Christian abstains from sex during courtship, only for the bride to discover on her wedding night that the groom’s gun is only for urinating! Yes, he only has two legs! Her third leg is virtually non-existent and divorce is not supported by the Bible or the Church except on grounds of infidelity, and even then remarriage is not permitted until the spouse dies. Can someone help me? What if the person you divorced lives to be 100?
Or this other scenario: The sister, who wore a turban and no earrings but was beautiful, insisted on keeping her body holy and the marriage bed undefiled. Three years after the wedding and many lies about why she was waiting on the Lord for the fruit of her womb, the real reasons for her barrenness came to light. Her sister had her uterus removed years ago after a tragic miscarriage in college. She didn’t tell the man she professed to love. She didn’t tell the pastor at her church. According to her, “I believe God will give me a new womb, a new beginning.” Ah, faith is great. But what’s wrong with letting the man you’re marrying know this big secret so he can decide whether he’s okay with the arrangement or not? What’s wrong with letting the guy know what he’s getting into, what the total package is so he can join his faith with hers and they can have faith raised to the second power (like faith 2)?
The distraught husband recounted the horror of the heartbreaking discovery this way: “She kept insisting that we pray instead of going to get checked at the hospital. I went from one mountain of prayer to another, observing vigil and fasting throughout the month. Yet, we could not conceive. I decided to go on my own and get tests done on my system. I got the all-clear and that was when I started getting suspicious. I threatened to call the pastors, report her to the church marriage counselling unit, call a family meeting and finally left. I told her that she would come back to live with me only if she agreed to get tested. That was when she broke down and confessed. I was devastated.”
Now, how does a pastor deal with that? Dissolve the marriage or remind the deceived husband that their marriage vows were “until death do us part”? Imagine you are a father reading this. If the husband were your son, what would you do? How would you feel? Your son is 36, your wife is 32, and she has no uterus! You are all members of a denomination where even uttering the word “divorce” is almost a sin. Will you happily accept your fate and hope for a new uterus from your lying daughter-in-law or will you damn all the consequences and tell your son to “throw out the trash and get a proper woman to bear him children”?
Is the definition of infidelity simply having sex with someone you are not married to? Is it godly to enter into marriage knowing that you are cheating on your partner in the worst possible way? How will the church stop its members from attempting polygamy and extramarital affairs when skeletons start dancing “shaku shaku” out of the closet? How can the church stop the rate of failed marriages in the body of Christ when young men and women marry for the wrong reason, wearing only blatant lies as wedding clothes?
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Should the church simply accept this new trend of hiding very important details during courtship as part of the end-time turbulence, or should pastors simply remember that they are end-time pastors who must do their job wisely?
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Dear pious reader, imagine it is your daughter who ended up with the man whose third leg is incompetent, malformed or deformed. That on the wedding night, your daughter who had maintained her virginity till she was 25, was the one who discovered that her husband’s manhood is the same size as her pinky, her smallest finger! The thing can urinate, but it cannot get to work. It is just there, like a little boy’s penis. You spent millions of naira on the wedding ceremony, you had high hopes for this marriage and here you are with a son-in-law who could not consummate the marriage. It is not his fault that he was created with a gun that cannot sink or fire, but it is what it is. Your daughter may have to resort to self-help at some point. Pastor, this is a member of our congregation who is more likely to seek sex outside marriage.
But Ariyike’s story is the most pathetic. She is the respected daughter of a respected pastor. She was even a youth pastor herself. So, of course, keeping her body as a temple of God was a given. Her husband is a petroleum engineer who lives in one of the southern states of the country. The couple moved there right after the wedding. Six months later, Ariyike called her parents to tell them that she was going to visit them in Lagos.
Everyone had missed her, her parents were eager to hear the long-awaited news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t, but she looked different, dull, withdrawn. One week turned into two weeks and Ariyike still refused to go back to her husband. After a long lecture, she told her parents that she would never go back to their marital home. Was he beating her? That was the only question on everyone’s lips. It seemed like the only reason a young bride would run back home, right? It wasn’t Ariyike’s reason. Her husband is so big, his unbalanced manhood a heavy, terrifying weapon that scared the hell out of the poor girl the first time he confronted her with it. “I tried to cope with it, but it’s too big. It leaves me bleeding, in pain and crying the few times we tried. It’s scary, I can’t go back. It will kill me. You don’t understand what I’m talking about because you haven’t seen it. Please don’t make me go back or I will run away.”
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What does a pastor or a church do when faced with a case like this? What do parents do when it is discovered that their daughters or sons-in-law have hidden such important facts? Admittedly, it must not be easy to reveal to anyone, including your mother, that you have deformities down there. Imagine all the beautiful girls with incredible cleavages out there with private pains deep within them, the men with abnormalities they cannot speak of below their belts. I read that one in 165 male births can produce a baby with a micropenis. There is also penile torsion and scrotal transposition. I read that many men “suffer” from penile torsion to varying degrees – corkscrew-shaped third legs that sometimes compete with a horse's weapon designed to frighten. Scrotal transposition is where the scrotal sac is situated above the shaft making the equipment look like elephant ears. Women's problems are loosely referred to as mullein duct abnormalities and go all the way with all sorts of implications. I'm not a doctor, I'm just a Christian and a concerned mother who is trying to protect these young girls from future unfaithful husbands by hiding important details, from “absent” uteruses to python-like or pinky-sized penises. Should we test all the “spirits” and see which one is the real one or just fly blindly in that direction? I'm just asking.