Why I Told My Four Year Old About Condoms - It's Scriptural

“Mama, what is a condom?”

We were at a family member’s house when my four year old daughter decided that she needed to ask this question right now.

The family member, without missing a beat, said, “It’s condominium. It’s a place to live. We just call it an apartment.” My daughter looked puzzled and suspicious, but the family member kept smiling in an assuring manner.

I shot the family member a look, turned to my daughter, and said, “It’s something people use when they are trying not to have babies.”

“Oh,” my daughter said and returned to her Nutella sandwich.

It was the family member’s turn to shoot me a look and indicate that we should leave the room for a moment. I was pretty sure what was going to happen, and I was right.

“Don’t tell that baby that!” she said as the door closed between us and the kids. “She’s too young to know about stuff like that!”

“Evidently not, she asked and I am not going to lie to my children,” I stated. “And it’s not like I gave her the banana demonstration.”

This was just one of the many questions I got asked as parent, and one of the many times I found myself bucking the trend among my conservative Christian family and friends about how I answered them. I decided early in life that I was not going to raise my kids the way so many of my peers and I were raised. That is I was not going to raise them in a Christian bubble that denied or avoided all the ugly out there in the world in an attempt to protect my children’s innocence.

Several things lead me to this decision: My own experience in a marriage where my now ex-husband’s sexual practices were so foreign to me that I did not know how to cope. The number of “good Christian kids” who were first stunned, then shaken, and then embracers of values new and exotic that they discovered when they left their parents’ home, and the large number of these kids who became victims of abuse because they were not prepared to deal with real world.

It was not an easy decision. Friends and family could not understand why I would be so frank with my children about the hard realities of this world, and they were not shy in telling me that I was screwing my kids up by telling them these things. “They are just children,” “They are little girls,” “Babies don’t need to hear that”, or “I can’t believe you told her that” were constant refrains in my life. Nor did the girls make it any easier because they did something that few kids are willing to do to their parents – they asked me the hard questions, and the questions just kept getting harder as they grew older because they knew they could trust me to give them an honest answer.

I won’t lie. It wasn’t always easy and there were times that I had to fight not to flinch. Like the one night my daughter calmly asked, “Is anal sex what you do when you are on your period?” I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that I was the cool mom – and try not to choke on the fish we were having for dinner. (In the meantime, Ty has fallen out of his chair and had small seizure in the dining room floor.) Turns out that the cafeteria conversation among the thirteen year olds at school had revolved around this topic that I was blissfully oblivious to until I was twenty one and married.

So why did I do it? Even when it was one of the most difficult and unpopular things I have ever done in my life?

I never allowed myself to think of my children as “little girls”. They were young women who just happened to be little girls at that time. My job was never to keep them in that state or to hold them in some type of stasis. In fact, my job was the exact opposite of this. My job was to help them become women who could handle whatever the world had to offer them and help them not flinch when confronted by those realities that I could not protect them from indefinitely. Talking about these things at home, where it was safe, where they could consider different and opposing views without outside pressure or threats, where they could ask why this or that was contrary to our faith, or why it might be a danger physically or emotionally, gave them the room to determine their course of action before someone else could present a counter-argument that just made mom look like a naïve relic.

I, also, believe that this is a Scriptural approach to parenting. Stop and consider these verses:

Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, and teach them to your children – reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and one your gates – to the end  that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them as long as there is a heaven over the earth. Deuteronomy 11:18-21

What were these words? The Torah, otherwise known as the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures! The laws that God handed down to Moses on Siani, the ones that recorded the history of the Jewish people with all the sex and violence that anyone could want, the ones the described proper sexual expressions, how to deal with bodily fluids, rape, incest, homosexuality, witchcraft, death, burial, childbirth, and so much more! Teaching the Bible, really teaching it and not just doing a cute flannel graph presentation of it, means that we talk about the hard issues with our kids.

I know someone is reading this thinking, “But our lessons need to be age appropriate!” Really? Your ideas of age appropriate or God’s?

Jewish custom dictates that children should begin learning Torah as soon as they can speak, and by the age of 13 they are responsible for fulfilling all the laws contained in the Torah. Now, how can they fulfill what they do not know? And remember we are not talking about the Ten Commandments, we are talking about the entirety of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – not something you are going to cram into a six month crash course. This is why formal training in the Torah began at the age of five.

And we should consider the example of Jesus in Luke 2:41-52 when he was found at the Temple asking questions of the teachers and amazing them with his understanding and answers. What would the standard conversation have been between the teachers and boy of twelve? It would have been about the Torah, double checking to see if his parents had been faithful in their obligation as presented in Deuteronomy. Luke specifically tells us that Jesus was growing/filled in wisdom, both before and after this passage, and in rabbinic debate we find that to be wise was to be “wise in Torah.”

Now this is where I could get lost in a big long lesson about how each part of the Bible hinges on another and that cutting and pasting the pretty parts together while ignoring the messy bits leaves us with nothing but fluff that will not sustain our faith. I won’t, at least not here, but I could and so could anyone who took the time to really study the totality of its message.

Unfortunately, this is what we have done for our kids and we wonder why their faith crumbles the moment they leave home. The issues addressed in the Bible were meant to be taught in the safe and loving environment of the home. They were not to be ignored because they make parents uncomfortable. They weren’t to be skipped over in favor stories that we can give the Precious Moment treatment – no! We are to discuss it all, and when we do we will find that there is no modern issue of sex that is left unaddressed. All the answers and tools our children need to make wise decisions is right there, but if we are shielding our kids from it then we do them a disservice in offering a form of religion without the substance of wisdom.

Furthermore, we need to remember that these words were not given in a sexual vacuum. Quite the contrary, with temple prostitution, the small cramped houses, the agrarian lifestyles, sex was at the center of the ancient world. Daily families would have been confronted by the need to teach wisdom and truth their children concerning this issue. Thankfully, God gave them the means to do so in His Word, and notice what you don't find, you don't find any commands to deny reality or to hide the truth from your children. Instead we are told to discuss these things at every waking moment and teach them to guard their hearts, a command that I believe encompasses the need to guard their trust in our integrity and courage by speaking even the uncomfortable truths. (Proverbs 4:20-27, A passage written by a father to a son and is followed by blunt discussion over the dangers of adultery.)

This is why I don’t worry about the news stories or what TV shows. In our home, they were just an opportunity to dive deeper into what the Bible had to teach us about sex and sexuality. We turned what is tearing so many families apart into a springboard for what brought us closer together, and my children learned three significant lessons from this approach – 1. God is not ashamed or confused by sexual issues. 2. There are answers to be found in His Word. 3. They can always come to me with the hard questions and I won’t flinch because the God I serve doesn’t flinch.

Together we can seek out the answers and there is no shame in having the question or need to fear a world that does not share our faith.

Photo via PhotoPin

Why are Christians afraid of ratings?

Originally posted on Exploring the Pagus

It seems like a strange question to ask about Christians. We seem to be the biggest supporters of ratings. We do things that are rated “G” and we shun anything above a “PG-13.” “R” does not stand for restricted and only for mature audiences, it means rejected as too sexual, too violent, too disturbing, or too raw. Pick your adjective, it really does not matter. Ratings make our lives as parents easier, we do not have to monitor what our children watch if we shove “G” rated movie into the player. We do not have to deliberate if a movie is appropriate or not if someone has already made that decision for us.

I do not want to get lost in a debate on whether we have grown lazy in allowing others to make our parenting decisions. I do not want to get caught up in whose responsibility it is to regulate the content of our cultures creative endeavors. What I want to know is, why are we afraid of ratings?

This question strikes at the heart of Christian creativity. We have placed such a high value on being family friendly that we will do anything to keep those family friendly ratings. We have trained our population to avoid those things that might not be kid friendly, and Christian artists operate with the knowledge that to be successful commercially we must retain our “G” rating.

At first this may seem to be a good, even beneficial effect of the rating system, but the problem arises when we fail to recognize the purpose of art. The problem becomes exacerbated when we fail to recognize our own hypocrisy of the rating system.

I would ask each of you ask yourself, is it good that your child read the Bible?

We give them pretty pastel works, with cute pictures and fun little facts in the margins. We have all sorts of clever marketing campaigns, and from this evidence I would conclude that we as whole believe that children having and reading their Bibles is a good thing.

I recently looked through a children’s Bible I had given my daughter, and I noticed something peculiar. On almost every other page there are verses written in a different color, memory verses, or a small commentary on a passage. However, there was nothing in the four pages it took to hold Judges 19-21, or in the Levitical law pertaining to sex. Song of Solomon received some light comments about relationship and glossed over the sexual nature of the book. Large chunks of Ezekiel were completely without anything to draw attention to his warning.

Here’s the thing, if we were to put a rating on the Bible it would have to be “R”. If you don’t believe me go back and read that passage in Judges, examine the words of the prophets, or the laws that deal with sex. You see, God doesn’t flinch when it comes to our sexuality or our tendencies towards violence. He is pretty bold about blood and other bodily fluids. And yet, none of us deny that the Bible is good. We just have to stop insisting that it is “G” or “PG.”

So what does this have to do with books, movies, or music?

The Bible is beautiful because God did not flinch when he looked at us. He saw all the things we do wrong, and he said that he could redeem us any way. He said that no matter how much destruction we caused in arrogance, he could restore those who repented, but he knew that first we had to see our sin as the damning event it is. We had to recognize our depravity, our filth, and our pain. It is never a pretty thing to see.

When we as Christian artist struggle to put form or words to a spiritual reality we should be operating under the mandate for excellence. We should not be diluting the message in order meet the Christian industries demands for nice. God isn’t nice. The Bible isn’t nice. God is real and so is his word.

We love to quote Paul, Whatever things are true, whatever things are good, whatever things are lovely , think on these things. But we are failing to hear what we are saying. True, not nice. People struggling with addiction is true. Divided families equally true today. Lonely people, bad people, good people in bad situations all truths of our culture. As for good, Jesus says only God is good and he has a heart for those who are trapped in sin, for those who have been hurt by violence. Lovely, full of love worthy of love, in need of love, I cannot think of any one more in need of love than those who are portrayed in today’s media.

They are fictional characters you may argue, perhaps, but they came from the mind and experiences of real people.

And Christian artists must be free to express the truths of our culture, just as the prophets offered up the wounds of the people before God to plead for his mercy upon their culture. That is why a Christian must be able to write the song about addiction, paint a person broken, or write the book about a failed sexual relationship. They are the truths our time, and in fact the truth of many Christians. We need the freedom to be real with God, and with each other through our medium.

I can’t help but think it was a good thing that there was no rating board when the prophets spoke or when the Bible was written. Can you imagine the scandal when millions of good Christians purchased an R rated book?