girl interrupted #2: infidelity

I couldn’t sleep the other night....
I did the toss and turn thing for at least half the night when normally I sleep like a stone. A few days ago a friend of mine told me she had been unfaithful early in her marriage. She’s been a Christian friend of mine since we were kids. This news was brought into the light 5 to 10 years after the affair and she and her husband have been to counseling and have a fully restored marriage today. Praise God! However, I can’t help but be shocked…disturbed.
Now, if you are a crazy sexual liberation revolutionary who is about ready to judge me for the judgment and damnation of a friend, you are missing the point. Judging my friend is not even on my radar. For her I catch a glimpse of her pain. For myself, like I said, I’m disturbed, within myself. Coming from parents who’s first kiss/sexual encounter was in the honeymoon suite and have without a doubt remained faithful to each other since, puts the thought of cheating on my husband some day into the realm of the inconceivable. I suppose it would be as conceivable to me as performing an armed bank robbery or murdering my mother. But I’m disturbed because at one time adultery and fornication existed in some distant eon. Now it resides in my back yard. I’m discovering my bosom buddies are toying with it and bedding it. I no longer have the same social support for my own commitment and beliefs. I feel a little like the last man standing. Her struggle is different. Her parents set the example she vowed not to follow on her wedding day. But overturning a dozen generations’ worth of socialization requires the stringent effort of at least three. I come out of generations’ worth of fidelity but circumstance has placed me into multiple social groups where rampant of infidelity is the norm. Sink or swim is the name of the game. However, as Lauren Winner (a writer on the subject of chastity) declares, “the contemporary church community is not strong enough to support a chaste lifestyle” (nor perhaps any other theological principle into its essential integration with lifestyle). The most the church does is to “help people adjust to the sexual marketplace with a bit less guilt.” She even says that we dare not go out and try to be chaste in a world like ours by ourselves. Great!!...I think I might go and have another sleepless night.