True Love Waits

Pardon the late post. I am late for two reasons. First, this morning my husband came in and invited me to go shopping with him not to Lowe's, not to Home Depot, not to Bass Pro Shop, but to WalMart (yes ladies, miracles still happen!)! Since we live in a small town, how could I possibly turn down such a miraculous invitation? So, hi ho, hi ho, it's off to WalMart I go.

The other reason was that I was thinking about exactly how to approach today's post. I am still staggered by the statistics I found while researching teen pregnancy. I chose this topic because I have a fourteen year old granddaughter and a four year old granddaughter and I don't want them to make the same mistake I made. You see, I am a child of the 60's and 70's; the height of the "free love" movement. I can honestly say I never slept with anyone but my husband, but I can't say he was my husband the first time I slept with him. I remember the secret meetings, the hotel rooms booked as a single but used as a double, the "friends" that let us stay with them in the same bedroom. If we weren't ashamed of what we were doing, why all the sneaking around? I was lost while all this skulking around was going on, but Thank God I was on birth control. At 19 I was definitely not ready to have a baby.

Let's take a brief look at the problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2007 48% of high school students (male and female) have engaged in sexual intercourse. Out of that 48%, 15% had four or more partners! In 2006, 435,427 infants were born to 15-19 year-olds which translates to 41.9 per 1000 (It doesn't sound that staggering when presented that way, does it?). Eighty percent of those pregnancies were unintended and cost nine billion dollars tax dollars. 2006 was the first year that teen pregnancies increased since they started to keep statistics in the U.S. That's pretty scary right there.

But this is what concerned me the most. Yale and Columbia Universities did a study on teens who took the abstinence pledge. They found that 85-88% of those who took the pledge engaged in sexual activity anyway before marriage. In fact, Johns Hopkins found that those taking the pledge were 10% more likely to have unprotected sex than their counterparts.

These statistics just left me staggering. I have vowed to redouble my prayers for my granddaughters that they will remain pure until marriage. I pray that they will look at dating like my oldest son did. He only dated two people in his entire life. It was not because he didn't have any offers. He had plenty of offers. It's just that he considered a date and interview for marriage. I wish I could take credit for that point of view, but reality is that he learned that from one of the best youth directors I have ever seen or known, "Burr" Lovett.

I am eternally grateful to that Godly man. My son dated one girl, discovered he could not spend the rest of his life listening to that (I'm sorry, but that's what he told me) and he married the second girl. They have been happily married nine years and they are in it for the long haul.

My son was patient and willing to wait on the girl that God had especially for him. Some people wait until they are 20, like my son, and some wait into their 40's and 50's. Because they were willing to wait on God, they have loving, spiritual, wonderful marriages. They have found "happily ever after."

Love is patient. It is willing to wait for the joys God created for the married until after the marriage. Won't you pray with me that God will open the eyes of our 13-19 year-olds to the truth that if he/she really loves you, they will wait.