Memoir: The Quest for Purity

In July 1991, after I had already been convinced that my skirt was too short (see this post), the head of the Advanced Training Institute, Bill Gothard, and several “example” apprenticeship students (as we were called) talked to us about physical and emotional purity.

This was a main feature of Mr. Gothard’s Basic Seminar that I had attended the year before with my family (see this post) and where my friends and I had been horrified to discover that this middle-aged, unmarried preacher wanted us all to give up dating.

Give up dating? We were aghast. We had all been raised in church our entire lives and had waited not so patiently to be 16, the magic age when most of our peers (and ourselves) were allowed to date boys. Picture us at 16 and 17 years old, listening to Bill Gothard talk about giving up dating, just when we were finally old enough, and finally had it semi together!

It went over like a lead balloon in 1990. We scoffed at the thought, laughed at the fact that Mr. Gothard had obviously never been on a date in his life, and went our merry way.

A year later, I sat in an auditorium with my parents, sister, and brother and heard the same message again.

“What is the definition of dating?” Mr. Gothard asked the question, but didn’t wait for an answer.

“Singling out one person of the opposite sex and cultivating interest through thoughts, looks, notes, talks, or events.”

He had an overhead projector and the definition of dating was neatly printed out on a transparency. I stared at it, feeling a knot in my throat. I had made it through a day and a half of the conference without really having to consider what I was giving up. And now that Mr. Gothard had moved the apprenticeship students in with the adults for the week (at least he had mercy on our lack of air conditioning in the theater), my parents sat right beside me hearing the same information. I felt cornered. This was what our family was going to do. I couldn’t run. There was nowhere to hide. So I listened.

“Why dating causes conflict.” Mr. Gothard went on.

His transparencies changed as he talked.

“Wrong motive = getting vs. giving. Wrong goal = pleasure versus commitment. Wrong idea = license vs. self-control. Wrong results = hurts vs. edification.”

Whoa. I felt numb in my chair, the burden of my entire teenage angst on my shoulders. Was I wrong about dating? I had been so looking forward to it now that I was old enough. But now it seemed the truth was, if I dated, I only cared about getting something for myself, and about having fun without any consequences.

My mind flashed through scenes from my life back home: choir tours with friends, boys and girls, that required long bus rides all over California. My Christian high school friends. My classmate who picked me up every morning for school week after week in his car. He had dated one of my best friends that year. Were they all wrong? Were we all that selfish?

I struggled to reconcile what I was hearing with what I knew. We were good Christian kids, we obeyed our parents, we stayed in school, we didn’t do drugs. And sure there were kids that slept around while dating, but you didn’t have to. You could date and not go that way. I had friends who were dating and not going that way.

But I was fighting a losing battle. The argument presented to me was solid.

“How far can you go on a date?” Mr. Gothard asked. He looked out at all of us sitting in the arena. “Nowhere.”

Suddenly my 17-year-old brain clicked in, like an obedient servant signing over my life. I couldn’t get out of this without acknowledging what he was saying. As I read the words again and copied them carefully in my journal, I began to doubt. My skirt had been too short, my music was wrong, my dating goals were wrong. My massive church youth group had steered me wrong. We had all been deceived. My better judgment tried to argue, but the burden of what was on that transparency overpowered me.

To escape the pressure, I succumbed. I believed. I took the mantle onto my shoulders.

Everyone asks me why now. Why did you do it? Why did you believe it? Why didn’t you run?

Because it sounded worthy. It sounded good. It sounded like a plan. As I said yesterday (in this post), believing in Jesus Christ is taking a huge risk. We’re about to step out into this world and say that we have nothing to fear. That takes faith. Huge faith. And we get weak sometimes. We concoct these massive religious structures out of fear that we will miss something. We create legalistic rules because we fear that we’ll get lost in this overpowering love that is Jesus Christ dying on that cross.

As human beings, we simply can’t bear it. It’s too much. It’s too overwhelming. In a world that claws its way through a dirty, dark existence, simply believing in Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world almost seems too easy.

In Luke 23 it says:

³²Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. ³³When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. ³⁴Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

³⁵The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.”

³⁶The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar ³⁷and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

³⁸There was a written notice above him, which read: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

³⁹One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴²Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

⁴³Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Being a Christian is not easy. Believing that a God of the universe willingly died to save me is a hard one to swallow. It means that I have choices and that God won’t strike me dead for those choices. He covers them all: the good, the bad, the wicked. Covered. 100 percent. Not 80, not 99, but 100 percent.

In that seat in an air-conditioned arena with thousands of other families in 1991, I believed that I had to do more. I had to earn my salvation by staying pure, by letting go of everything in my life to that point. But what I believed was a lie. God doesn’t demand we live as nuns. God doesn’t demand we do anything, except one thing. It’s the first commandment. With it comes a Christian life, full of joy, but also full of hardship. There is no easy way through.

In Exodus, God gave Moses the law, what are known as the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is:

³ “You shall have no other gods before me.”

I don’t know what I called it then, but now I see that the god that came before God was purity. It was more important to me than anything else. I changed how I dressed, how I dealt with boys, my thought life, my music, my movies, my books. All in the pursuit of purity.

It took a decade after that hot summer day in 1991 for me to finally let the mantle fall off. In September 2001, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in New York City, through circumstances that still astound me to this day, God freed me from pursuing a false idol.

Why did the attack on the World Trade Center affect me in such a way? I don’t know. But I met my God there. I saw Him. I saw that He loved us all and He loved me. And I didn’t need a bunch of extra rules anymore.

True, I didn’t immediately go out and dress like a hooker. I didn’t go sleep around. I didn’t go date every man I could find. I just gave up on that god. I started to talk to the God of the universe. I told Him everything and He quietly, but with great power, took His rightful place in my life. The pressure disappeared instantly. I dated, I cried, I got a crush or two, I got my heart broken, I put up with sexual harassment in the workplace at my job, I watched FRIENDS and realized I wasn’t the only one completely lost in my twenties. It was me and God and it was good. And then 2003 rolled around and there was my husband.

Yes, the pursuit for purity wasn’t all bad. I missed about ten years of angst and sorrow and sadness, but more importantly, I also missed out on God. For ten years, I didn’t even see Him. That’s the real tragedy here. And oh how I missed Him. But God loved me so much that He waited, patiently, for me to come running back.

Tagged as: faith, memoir, overcoming resistance, purity