when sexual shame meets the love of Jesus

God is raising up warriors, an army of women and girls who are telling stories of the One who loved them at their darkest and rescued them from the deepest pit of their shame. I am one of them.

The following is excerpted from “I’ll Go First: When Sexual Shame Meets the Love of Jesus,” an article I wrote for Willowdale Women about two years ago. You can read the original piece there!

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Growing up in the heart of the Purity Movement meant that I was bombarded with messages about setting boundaries with boys, dressing modestly, being careful about the things I read and watched, and, of course, saving sex for marriage. And honestly, those things aren’t very hard to do when you don’t have a boyfriend, you grow up in a conservative Christian home, and you’re a firstborn child who is naturally a rule follower.

It felt like the Purity Movement was made for girls like me.

The problem was that nobody taught me how to set boundaries with myself. Because it was assumed that I, as a girl, didn’t need them.

After all, the message I kept receiving was that girls don’t struggle in that way. Girls are supposed to be the ones making sure that guys don’t struggle in that way, by wearing skirts longer than our fingertips and covering up our bellies at the beach.

But what about the girls that do?

What about the girls that learn how to clear their browsing history in middle school so their parents won’t see what they’re Googling? Or the girls who keep reading that paragraph in that one book or replaying that one scene in that one movie, ashamed by the fact that they just can’t peel their eyes away?

How about the girl who locks herself alone in her room when she’s anxious or stressed or heartbroken or even just bored, and she turns to the one thing that gives her a brief physical release from those feelings for a moment…but then those bad feelings are immediately replaced by worse ones, feelings like regret and disgust and shame.

Because if this girl has been taught her whole life that “only boys” struggle with this thing, then what does that make her?

It makes her dirty. It makes her broken. It makes her irredeemable, unloveable, different.

At least…that’s what I believed. That’s what he would tell me as I laid on my bed, face burning as the endorphins wore off and left me with a hot coal of shame smoldering in my chest. I remember thinking that if anyone, even my closest friends and family — no, especially my closest friends and family — knew the truth, they would never look at me the same way again. I didn’t want to look at me again.

Here’s the thing, though: in those moments, when I felt the darkest and dirtiest I’d ever felt, I knew that Someone else was looking at me. And somehow I knew that He wasn’t looking with shame, or disgust, or anger, or even disappointment.

In those moments when I hated myself for giving in to temptation again, something inside of me held tight to the belief that this He — the He who knew me inside and out, who chose to go to a cross in my place, who promised to never leave my side once I knelt by my bed and asked Him into my heart at four years old (which is also around the time my struggle with sexual shame started) — was looking at me with only love in His eyes.

And His heart was breaking for the little girl who thought she was all alone.

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January of 2021, this kind and gentle Friend of mine led me to a point where I had no choice but to start telling others about my secret.

Don’t get me wrong: it did not feel kind or gentle at the time.

It actually felt a lot like dying.

The best analogy to what I went through when I first started confessing my sin is having food poisoning. When we let some harmful food into our body, we have to go through an intense period of suffering to get that bad stuff out. Every last drop.

That’s what it felt like for me when I first started to drag this thing I’d kept in the dark for so long into the light. It was excruciatingly painful. It was, hands down, the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

But two years* later, on the other side of that suffering, I am filled to the brim with a joy that the best of my writing can’t put into words. I wake up every day and dance (sometimes literally) in the freedom I never thought would be mine.

I am so, so thankful that my Savior loved me too much to let me stay in the darkness, and I’m also thankful that He showed me there are people in my life who love me that much, too. People who didn’t run from the skeletons in my closet, but instead helped me clean them out to make room for better things.

Things that are full of life.

Hear me say this, sister: we are not alone. You are not alone. God is raising up warriors, an army of women and girls who are finding their voices and telling their stories, stories of the One who loved them at their darkest and rescued them from the deepest pit of their shame.

I am one of them.

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There may be people who read this and wonder why anyone would choose to share about something so private. I understand this thinking, but I also believe that this way of thinking is what has kept so many women trapped in cycles of sin, shame, and silence, convinced that no one else — certainly no one in the church, anyway — could understand what they were going through. It’s the underlying or even blatantly spoken message that “women just don’t struggle like that.”

It is wrong.

Sin thrives in darkness. Shame keeps us stuck. Secrets whisper that we’re alone, that no one will understand our pain and so it’s better for everyone if we keep it to ourselves.

But when we let the light in, it can change everything.

For so many years I was terrified of telling my story. Now, I think I’m more afraid of not having the chance to tell it. Once you start talking about how God rescued you from something you never thought you’d be free from, it becomes surprisingly hard to stop.

It might sound dramatic, but there are moments when I stop to look back on what God has done in my life and heart over the last two* years, and I feel nothing short of a walking miracle.

When I was caught in the throes of my sin, I would confess it to Jesus and know that He forgave me. Even when I had to confess multiple times in a day, multiple days in a row. I knew His grace for me was endless.

But He wanted me to experience more than forgiveness. He wanted me to experience healing. And for me, that meant letting His people see the parts of me I thought were too ugly for anyone else to love by finally saying out loud to other trusted believers what I’d kept inside for all those years.

It meant sitting across from my friend on her couch late at night, holding a mug of tea and sobbing as I told her things I had never told anyone else.

It meant sitting across from the therapist I’d been seeing for two years, who knew everything about me except this thing, and trusting that she could hold this, too.

It meant cracking open the closet door that little girl shut tight, sure that her monsters would scare everyone else away, and watching in awe as the Light scared them away instead.

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*four years, as of yesterday!

author’s note:

I wrote the first draft of this article after reading the first few chapters of this book by Jessica Harris, a resource I recommend to anyone — especially church leaders — interested in diving deeper into this topic.

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