Just Like That: a short story about my journey to redemption
Do you ever look back and laugh in disbelief at how much you thought you knew about life, love, and everything in between when you were a teenager? I can remember exactly how I felt when my dad told me “Briana, you have no idea what love is.” I was so offended! Of course I know! “I know how I feel about [insert some teenage boy’s name here] and it is love daddy!” Lol…. Crazy right.
I thought I knew what love was at age 12…yeah 12. There was this boy who I thought was so cute. He went to my church; the choir director’s youngest son, and I just thought he was everything. For 2 years I crushed on this kid. I was so sure I loved him that I made sure he was invited to every birthday party, and kept pictures of him on my school folder. I made up stories, lied to my parents, and pulled out every scheme in the book to make sure I was at every place he was whenever possible. I even wasted my precious first kiss on him at a Cine-mark movie theater. Looking back, obviously I realize that I was borderline delusional about this love thing. But that is how powerful our emotions are – and it was only about to get worse.
When I was just fourteen years old, I thought I had met ‘THE ONE’, or so I thought. A young stallion, tall, very handsome, athletic, brown skin, ears pierced, the whole nine yards. He came to our church for the first time and had every single teenage girl in the building breaking necks to get a look at him. I was looking too, but internally I just knew he wouldn’t be interested in me. Out of all of my church girlfriends, I definitely didn’t think I was the most attractive, and they definitely had more experience than me in the guy category. I had kissed a boy before, but that was about it. So many of the girls my age were already looking forward to losing their virginity before marriage, which for me at the time was just blasphemy. I was swore by my life that I was going to wait until marriage, because that’s what Christian girls do. We wait. Right?
I was at a high school football game with all of my church girlfriends and the stallion made his way over to us. He gave all of us a little bit of attention. But when he asked me for my digits I was in pure disbelief. So like the good old days the phone calls began. We talked on the phone for a bit here and there, maybe met up at the movies once or twice with our friends. One day while we were out he asked me to be his girlfriend! Obviously I was just passing out from shock at this point. I didn’t tell him anything right away. I knew I would be so happy to date him, but I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 16! And since I was only almost 15, this would require some lying, disobedience, and some really advanced rebellion skills on my part until we could make it official. It took me about a day or two to decide …. but I was with it! How could I miss an opportunity like this. He was a ‘dream come true.’ I snuck out of bible study, called him on the phone and said “The answer to your questions is YES, I’ll be your girlfriend!” A truly invigorating feeling at the time. I was going to do what I wanted.
If you haven’t noticed by now, It was clear that I did not really have a clear sense of true self-esteem, or sense of self during this time in my life. I’m not sure how I got that way, seeing that I have parents who love me very much and taught me better. I have a father who CONSTANTLY told me how beautiful and precious I was, that I was a queen. I’ve been hearing those words ever since I could comprehend English. But even with all of those affirmations, It was something about this idea of “love”, and the opposite sex, that had a very interesting and insidious effect on me. I can honestly say, whatever self-esteem I had back then, came from knowing that this guy wanted to be with me. And I didn’t want to let that go. I got to a point where I would literally do anything to keep feeling the way he made me feel. And he made me feel desired.
Speaking of desire, it wasn’t long before I was on Myspace (that I wasn’t supposed to have) messaging with my new boyfriend whenever I could get the chance. And the things he was sending me sparked some crazy feelings that I had never really felt before. We were sexting before sexting was even a thing. He would describe in GREAT detail, all of things he would like to do to me. But I was still a virgin and that was clearly very important to me. I made sure he knew that even though I was entertaining him, I was not taking it lightly.
I was 100% confident that I still wanted to wait until marriage for sex. That is until those 3 little magic words started carelessly and thoughtlessly flying from both of our mouths. Love was the game changer. The thing I’ve always wanted my whole little short life! It’s finally here!! And this guy, who is handsome and gives me butterflies, and desires me in the [worst] ways finally said it! Of course it’s love. My little moral conscience began to waiver.
Things got serious when he finally asked my dad if he could date me at age 16. This meant I could talk on the phone with him after school, which I did, EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. For hours. So much so, that my dad had to put down phone rules for our telephone romance. But I was “in love” and I NEEDED to talk to him since I couldn’t see him everyday because that we attended different high schools. I quickly found my way around the house rules and would talk to him all throughout the night, just about every single night. In the Harris household disobedience is no joke. I was risking it big time. I mean -- my dad is a cop, so honestly, he probably knew what I was doing the whole time. I truly got to a point where I didn’t care. I would do anything to feel my little piece of happiness, which seem to only come from this teen aged love affair.
After a while all the sexy talk was staring to get to me. We started acting on some of it. I was feeling things I wasn’t supposed to be feeling at such a young age. These physical encounters intensified everything that we were already feeling. And the more we flirted with intimacy, the physical barriers between us got weaker, and this thing which we thought was love, was getting A LOT stronger. So when he finally proposed this idea of making love, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
I was hella nervous. I thought about it all of the time. Was I really going to do it? Of course I was, I loved him. We had already talked about getting married like a million times by now so that means its ok, right? That’s the lie I constantly told myself to go through with this feat. We planned it out down to the very second so that we wouldn’t get caught. I went to his house one evening when I was supposed to be at a school dance. To my surprise, his aunt, cousin, mother and sister were all there at the kitchen table. First warning. The aunty took one look at me and knew something was off. I could see it in her face. Second warning. We did the formal introductions and then he took me to his room. I wanted out. I told him there was no way I was doing this with his whole freaking family on the other side of the wall. But he wasn’t having that, and I guess after a couple of kisses to the neck, neither was I. I put aside every unction in my gut to leave that house, because this is what I had been waiting for, right?
So we did it. I had no idea what I was doing (neither did he, but we faked it until we made it). It wasn’t awful, or boring like many other ‘first time’ stories that I had heard from girls at school. But it also wasn’t everything I dreamed of either. Not even close actually. When we were done. I made him promise that he would love me forever, because it truly felt like I had just given him everything I had. I knew instantly a special part of me was gone, so he had better hold up his end of the bargain. He promised. And so it was done. Just like that. I went back home, feeling sort of proud of what I had done. Feeling like I was grown, and that I knew what I was doing.
Sike. A few days later I woke up in tears. I called him on the phone and told him that I felt so awful that I had lost my virginity. This made him genuinely very sad. He really did try to say everything he could to make me feel better. He promised to love me, to never do me wrong, that we would be together for ever…all of that. But I knew what I had done. And to me it felt like there was no going back. Now I felt like I had no choice but to go along with it. I had learned all kinds of things about my body and what it could do. I couldn’t erase what we did from my head. I couldn’t forget how my body felt. It was literally like a point of no return. So I convinced myself that what we did was out of love. I told myself that lie every day. These lies allowed me to keep giving myself away to him, whenever and wherever I could. We never got caught, which made it easy to keep on going. I became numb to the lies I told, a slave to the chills deep in my spine. I became prideful. Full of dirty and foul language. I had an obsessed, lustful mind. I was changing.
The important thing to note here is that I had lied to myself so much about what I was doing that I really forgot that what I was doing was actually sin. I still thought I was a good Christian girl, praying and speaking in tongues on Sundays, and serving in all the ministries. But no-one knew what I was going through Monday- Saturday. There was a completely different side of me that I was really good at hiding. I was living a double life that revolved around lust and sex.
My little love saga finally started to come crashing down when I found out that my forever boyfriend had cheated on me. All of my sneaking around finally started to catch up to me and resulted in me not being able to go to his senior prom. That’s pretty traumatic in teenage world. But I ‘loved’ him and thought I could trust him. I told him that he could go with someone else and I would be ok. Well he had sex with her too. And just as easily as glass breaks, my heart shattered into pieces. I was furious. Hurt. Depressed. Confused. Shocked. Suicidal at one point. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t be with someone who was cheating on me. More importantly he broke his promise to me. After I had given him all of me, he said he would never do this to me and that we were forever. I was completely shattered. All of my happiness and hope…gone. Just like that.
It was now my senior year, and we were both trying to get over each other by seeing other people. But I was not over him in any way shape or form. When he started dating another girl, I couldn’t take it. Enough was enough. So I made one last attempt to restore the love I thought we had. I returned to the one thing I thought I knew he couldn’t resist. We met up after school just to ‘talk’. But he knew what he could get from me, and I knew what I was willing to give to him. I let him have my body once again, thinking it would return all of the love we used to feel. This time I knew what we were doing didn’t have much to do with love. I didn’t feel special, magical, fireworks, or anything else Zane describes in her literature on makeup sex. I honestly felt used. When all was said and done, I asked him if he was going to choose me. He looked at me and said ‘No. I’m not going to be with anyone right now.’ That was March 23rd, 2011. That day changed my life forever…just like that.
I got hit with reality so hard that day. I never felt so worthless in my entire life. The pain was so strange and so deep. I had no choice but to come to grips with myself or I was going to lose it. It was time to face the music. I had to admit to myself that somewhere I went wrong. I had to face the reality that I had no idea what life or love was about. I realized that I wasn’t the same young bright eyed bushy tailed teenage girl fantasizing about love. My actions had taken away my innocence, my purity, skewed my self-esteem. I was messed up.
I went home, went straight to my room, and I cried. But it wasn’t just any kind of cry. I was on my knees begging God to forgive me for all that I had done. I knew the turmoil that I was feeling inside was no one’s fault but my own. I had gotten myself into a terrible mess and there was no way out for me except by His grace. These things that I had learned about as a child: God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, repentance, salvation…didn’t really click until that moment. I hadn’t been that sincere, and transparent, and broken before God like that ever before. All I knew was that by the end of that sob session, maybe I had a chance at redemption. I couldn’t change all that I had done, but I could change how I would proceed in the future. And maybe I could go back to being that innocent little girl who loved God with all her heart. I didn’t have to sleep on it this time, it was instantly settled for me. Enough was enough. From that day forward I made up in my mind that I would not give my body away carelessly anymore. That day I made up in my mind that I was going to wait. Just like that. I was seventeen years old.
Now a lot of people are going to read that and say “girl please that was all emotion!” Honestly, there’s a million other girls with a story similar to mine that got hurt, and cried, and said they were done with the whole sex thing…and then the next guy comes around and it’s a wrap. Well to my own surprise, I wasn’t aware myself of the power that I unleashed in my room that day. Later that year, I left to start college in Atlanta, Georgia. Here I wasn’t dealing with high school boys anymore, they were men. Yet still, I had no problem saying no to sex. Oddly enough, it was something I never had to think about or consider. It was always just a flat out no. However, although I was saying no to sexual intercourse, I was still figuring out what it truly meant to be ‘celibate’. In my first relationship in college, he knew from the jump that sex was not an option. But I still felt I had some obligation to make up for the fact that he wasn’t getting pleasure like all his other friends were. Not to mention my hormones didn’t just disappear into thin air either. So I still found myself engaging in physical intimacy that wasn’t quite sex, but wasn’t quite not sex either. I was still making excuses to be lukewarm in my celibacy.
The cool thing is, while I was in a relationship with this guy I also had this desire to re-learn everything I thought I knew about God, Jesus, and being a Christian. I was in college now, away from home, no one telling me what to do or making sure that I go to church. I discovered after some months of not being at any body’s church that something was missing, and I knew exactly what it was. I needed to be at church, around other young people who wanted to know God, I needed to be reading my Bible and really figuring out what it means to be saved. I grew up in a Christian home, my dad was a preacher, my grandfather a preacher, I went to Christian school, and won Bible verse competitions…but I realized you can do all that and still not be a ‘Christian’. And that became real to me when I reflected on all that I went through as a teenager in high school. My behavior and my character at that time did not reflect someone who claimed to have a relationship with God. So now that I was of age, old enough to read, comprehend, and make educated and informed decisions about life, I decided to give my relationship with God a sincere and honest effort.
As I pressed into God I also began to change my behavior in my relationship. I could no longer engage with my boyfriend intimately without feeling a tugging in my spirit (which I later discovered was the Holy spirit.) I started setting boundaries, and slowly but surely all of the lukewarm sexual things that I was willing to do with him started to fall back one by one, until it got to the point where we barely kissed. I imagine that was a lot for him, and my new affinity towards pleasing God compiled with a list of other things ended our relationship. But I knew one thing, I was ok! And I got a real kick out of knowing that my decisions were ultimately pleasing to the God I claimed to love. As I reflected, I could clearly understand the impact of that sob session that I had in my room that day when I was seventeen years old. That sob session I experienced was TRUE REPENTANCE.
So now here I am, seven years, four dating relationships, and one engagement later, and I am still celibate. (Engaged! I know… another blog for another day lol). Those numbers demonstrate to me that repentance is a real life changing thing. It shows that I have finally learned God’s position in my life - FIRST, always. No matter how fine or nice a guy is. However, recently I have discovered that those numbers can also be a frustrating thing. Because I know what sex feels like, as a human of course I long to experience it again. I also know that I won’t experience that again until my fiancé and I become one before God. He and I have yet to even kiss (I KNOW...another blog for that too). I’m still a sucker for love, and I believe in my dream to be married and have a family whole-heartedly. And there have been times when I have questioned God in this whole dating/love/engagement thing.
Before I started a committed relationship with my now fiancé last year, I used to really get frustrated that I wasn’t having the luck I thought I deserved in the relationship department. I mean it had been six years… wasn’t it about time my Boaz showed up now? And don’t think that after six years I wasn’t feeling what a twenty-three-year-old female body is supposed to feel. My hormones still exist and it definitely gets hard. Sometimes I would think I was a little ‘tired’ of waiting. As frustrating as it is, I have to remember that my decision to become celibate wasn’t a bargain with God to find true love. It was a small part of a big decision to fully give my life to Christ. Meaning he is in control of it, he can do what he wants with it, and that I no longer (really never did) have a say in when the important milestones in life should happen to me. That is a terribly difficult pill to swallow. Especially for someone like me who has been wanting to love since they were twelve years old.
The longer I live, the more I dedicate myself to learning about God. And moreso the longer I am engaged, the more I realize that my purpose won’t be found in marriage. God’s purpose for my life will be completed with or without a man in life because that’s what I asked for him to do when I truly gave my life to him. My purpose is to simply bring God glory in all that I do, to plant seeds of salvation by living in a way that will cause others to want to know Him too. Do I need a man to do that? No, I don’t. Do I love my fiancé and pray every day that we make it to our wedding day alive… you bet! God knows the desires of my heart. But as for now, all I can do is aim to find my satisfaction in being the woman that God wants me to be. Just like that!
I don't know who this is for - but even if just one person who reads this can relate, feels inspired, no longer feels alone in their struggle and shame, or is now thinking about making a change towards celibacy, then I will continue to be transparent, open and honest as I continue to write about ALL the ways faith has worked for me. And not just the pretty Instagram worthy parts, but the REAL parts to!
