Abstinence. It seems like one of the most unnatural concepts out there. And yet, thousands of Christians are trying, however imperfectly, to hold to it. So why on earth would an otherwise normal, fully functioning adult turn down someone who was willing to sleep with them? The reason usually has something to do with Jesus, although it plays out in a lot of different ways in different people’s lives. Last month, we heard from two different men who’ve given it up for the time. This month, we bring you one woman’s story.

Kim grew up with her mother and older brother in a small town in East Texas. Her father was physically abusive, and her mother had left him before Kim was three. The family went to church for a few months following her parents’ divorce, but that was short-lived after a worker in the church tried to molest Kim’s brother.

“A lot of it was just moralism, but there was a strange part of me that always said, ‘I don’t want to give myself away.’”

Her mom, who was raised Catholic, bought Kim a Precious Moments Bible and the two would read it together at night before bed.

“I became absolutely fascinated with Jesus and … have not stopped thinking about him ever since,” says Kim. “I would pray and talk to him as if he had lived with me my entire life … I used to draw pictures for Jesus even though I knew very little about him. My mom has all these old pictures with a bird drinking out of a pond that say, ‘To Jesus, love me.’”

That sense of a greater presence stayed with her, assured her later when her brother was abusive to her, and guided her, too. “I think it saved me from doing a lot. … I was always modest compared to girls I grew up with. … A lot of it was just moralism, but there was a strange part of me that always said, ‘I don’t want to give myself away.’”

“I don’t think I had a relationship last longer than three to six months, max, before the guy realized, ‘Ah there’s more fun to be found elsewhere.’ And they found it.”

So Kim dated guys in high school, but the guy was usually just looking to hook up, while she to try and change or save him. “I thought that I had this good understanding of what it meant to be a good person, and I always wanted to be other people’s savior, which never works out. And so I would be drawn to the bad boys in hopes of being a good example in their life.”

Inevitably, the relationships never went very far. “The guys would act supportive [of my views on sex] until they got bored and realized they could get that somewhere else. I don’t think I had a relationship last longer than three to six months, max, before the guy realized, ‘Ah there’s more fun to be found elsewhere.’ And they found it.”

In this time, she also watched the lives of others close to her. “Friends and family members spoke of regret, hurt and frustration when the ‘oneness’ they thought they had created with someone was gone and they were left tainted, feeling used, or adding another piece of luggage to their sexual history baggage,” Kim says. She took note.

“He made her feel guilty for calling herself a Christian because she [had slept with him] and he’d call her a hypocrite.”

She saw this particularly in the story of one of her best childhood friends. Her friend, a Christian, had started to sleep with one of her boyfriends then started to feel guilty about it. When her friend told the boyfriend she wanted to stop having sex, the boyfriend broke up with her, “didn’t want to have anything to do with her.”

Moreover, says Kim, he used her Christianity against her, “He made her feel guilty for calling herself a Christian because she [had slept with him] and he’d call her a hypocrite.” It was difficult, she says. “I was there for her, and she cried a lot.” Even years later, says Kim, that it’s still an issue that comes up for her friend.

“I thought of it like having guys attached like a balloon on a string to my wrist, and I could kind of pull them along.”"

So Kim didn’t have sex with any of her boyfriends before meeting her husband, though her motives for maintaining her virginity still weren’t exactly virtuous. “I lived a very moralistic, score-keeping life. I had been hurt by so many men in my life that my virginity became an idol or means of protecting myself and maintaining or having control over the guys that I was in relationship with.”

The pattern in high school didn’t change in college, even though she was attending a Christian college. “Guys would either leave me because I wouldn’t have sex with them, push me to my limits, cheat on me to get what they wanted from someone else, or never even bother to pursue me.”

She recognizes that a lot of it had to do with her own emotional issues. “I’d describe it as a control issue, not only with my virginity, but in terms of other ways of protecting myself. … I thought of it like having guys attached like a balloon on a string to my wrist, and I could kind of pull them along.” Whenever she felt uncomfortable, she could cut them off. There weren’t deep roots on either end. The guys, she says, didn’t “love me for anything more than what I could give them.”

Read about what happened when Kim met a man who was entirely different from all the others, after the jump:

The One Who Stuck

When Kim began to date the man who is now her husband, the difference was obvious. “There was a pursuit for my heart, mind, well-being, and understanding of the gospel before my body. It was absolutely fascinating and exactly what I knew I was supposed to be waiting for. Even more so, it is what God designed and created women to desire and receive,” Kim says. Their dates weren’t what most would call typical: “We would go on our dates and talk about the Word and how we viewed redemption.”

When she went to live in Asia for two years, he sent her care packages, books to read. He would send letters, she says, detailing “what he did that day and what he was learning and struggling with and just this complete honesty that I lacked in a lot of other relationships.”

“My absolute favorite things about only having sex with one man are the entirely new levels of peace and trust.”

As she and her now-husband dated, he challenged her in her faith and her previous misconceptions about God, morality, and sexuality. Before getting married, “purity,” for Kim meant strict physical virginity. But since, especially through reading 2 Corinthians 6, she says, that to include a lot more: “motive, speech, heart, desires, conduct, and love in how I interact with others, but also in how I worship God.”

After a year, he flew to Asia to propose. She said yes. A short time later, she flew back to the states, the two got married, and he moved back with her for the second year of her program.

Within the marriage, there’s been a special security and intimacy for Kim in the fact that only her husband ‘knows’ her sexually. “My absolute favorite things about only having sex with one man are the entirely new levels of peace and trust that comes out of no one else knowing me the way that my husband does … It makes me all the more grateful that God would give me a man that I would not only want to give that too, but that would willingly receive it.”

She knows it could have very easily been different. “Had I slept with other guys before [my husband], I know that there would have been the same sense of shame and guilt that people talk about,” she says.

“With marriage, your body isn’t yours. My body belongs to my husband, and my husband’s belongs to me.”

But it could have affected her husband even more: “He could have struggled with comparison issues, not feeling good enough or feeling as if he had to live up to someone else, etc. I think I would have felt free from my bondage but after getting married and having sex, it could have just been beginning for him. Instead, he has total freedom from those fears.”

In the end, it still goes back to that biblical notion (1 Corinthians 7:4, namely) of marriage and sexuality, that often directly counters culture’s norms for sex.

“We think that just because it’s our body, that it’s our right, our privilege to do what we want with it. But … with marriage, [your body] isn’t yours. My body belongs to my husband, and my husband’s belongs to me,” says Kim.

For the majority of people who arrive at their wedding night having slept with other people, it’s more difficult, she says, but that’s hardly the end-story. “Your spouse will have to work through the consequences of your sin and all the shame and guilt that go with it. Thank goodness we are free in Jesus.”

Kim and blog team volunteers Norelle and Kelsey, who contributed the header image, all attend the Ballard campus.