I'm Super Impressed By The Way You Handle These Questions! Personally While I Love Church And Have Been

I have such respect for you! You are lovely.

Whaaattt!!?!? Ohmygosh, thank you so much!! You're the absolute sweetest! That means a lot to me :)

how do you feel about sex before marriage? where do you draw the line? i'm struggling myself in a new relationship. I don't know what's ok before marriage and what isn't for me. what are your opinions.

Okay, so…given my lifestyle in 2014, it would be hypocritical and counterproductive for me to tell you, “you can’t do anything! nothing at all! hands off! this is a kissing-only zone!”. Not only because that is not representative of all of my experiences, but also because it doesn’t really help you arrive at any kind of real conclusion for yourself. If you are a Christian like me and believe the Bible, you would agree that God is pretty clear about the “no sex before marriage” thing. What sometimes gets debated depending on people’s interpretation of the Bible is what actually, *teeeeeeechnically* constitutes sex. Mainly I think that this is because we tend to look for loopholes so that we can do the stuff we want to do without having to feel guilty about it because it’s “not technically sinning”. So you’ll see different definitions from different people. Some would say that “real sex” is only the insertional kind, that is, the kind when the penis enters the vagina. So not only is that super heteronormative and binarist, it’s also a very conveniently technical definition, which ignores how very nuanced the situation is. Some would tell you that the only thing you’re allowed to do before marriage is kissing. Some would say it’s not even that. One of my friends has a definition of sex that dictates that all parties involved must have an orgasm for it to be sex, which essentially disqualifies a lot of heterosexual encounters. I have a broader definition. I personally think that anything involving the genitals qualifies as sex. Whether it’s hands or mouth down there, or even if there’s layers of fabric in between, I think it still counts. This definition has not been formed based on theoretical morals or a sense of superiority. It reflects my personal experiences. And based on this definition, I’m not really uptight about wandering hands, as long as they avoid the crotch. That right there is a stance that’s quite a bit more liberal than some people. 

Now, all that being said, my personally-held belief is that God tells us not to have sex before marriage to protect us, and to preserve the sacred bond of matrimony. Lots of people use sex as an easy high (like I used to) but its real purpose (besides reproduction) is to strengthen interpersonal bonds. Sex causes the release of the hormone oxytocin, colloquially dubbed “the cuddle hormone” which gives you all the warm and fuzzy feelings and makes you feel attached to the person you had sex with. That’s why casual sex has the potential to be really emotionally and psychologically damaging if someone doesn’t know what to do with those feelings. But sex has been God-ordained to build intimacy between you and the person you choose to spend the rest of your life with. 

So the first question you really need to ask yourself is “when do my actions cross the line from fun, playful and affirming, into intimacy-building territory?” And you will know. That oxytocin is powerful stuff, man. The level of trust and vulnerability you need to be intimate with another human is no trifling thing and you will know when you feel like you’re building bonds with this person that might need to be saved for a later time and a more cemented relationship. You will also know when you’ve achieved a level of intimacy with someone that you weren’t ready for. My hope for you is that you never experience that, because it kinda sucks. So you need to figure out where your own line is for you. I’ve told you what my definition is. That being said, have I always and do I always adhere strictly to my own boundaries? No. Because once you’ve crossed the line, you become desensitized, and it’s hard to go back. So the best piece of advice I can give you is to be proactive and figure out where your line is before you cross it by accident, cause it’s a lot harder to cross back to the other side of the line. In saying that, I must caution you that the line is in different places for different people, and you may be less desensitized that I am, so just be careful to figure out where your line really is. And your line might be different from your person’s line, and then it comes down to not causing other people to stumble. So it’s important to know where your line is and where your partner’s is, so that you both can feel safe and comfortable and at peace with the physical aspect of your relationship. 

The second question you need to ask yourself is “how close do I want to get to the line?” That translates to, “where are wandering hands allowed to go?”, or “in what situations will we allow ourselves to experience that closeness?” (hint: in bed in an empty house is a bad idea if you’re not so great in the self control area) and “are clothes coming off or staying on?” It can be a really slippery slope, and the more “breathing room” you give yourself, the happier it will be. If you go aaaaall the way right up to the line the very first time, you’ve put yourself in a very precarious position because one little slip up could be disastrous. If you start off far away from the line, a little slip up is like “oh okay, still not a big deal because we still haven’t totally crossed the line.” 

I do not want you to experience the guilt and shame that I experienced, the stuff that comes with moving too fast and not caring enough. So like, go you for asking this question and for giving it some thought. I know it can be really tricky. I encourage you to think long and hard about it so that you can be proactive and so that you know what choice you’re making. I am not a huge believer in like “oh it just happened! it was an accident!” I think you need to know what you’re doing and you need to own it. 

Finally, be gracious with yourself. I know you’re gonna work really hard at this, but we are not perfect people, and if human nature is any indication, you’re probably going to make mistakes. You are not damaged goods. You are not ruined. A friend of mine once told me that grace is not a once had, once lost kind of thing, and neither is purity. Yeah, sexual sin is given a fair amount of screen time in the Bible, and I believe that is because of the repercussions that sexual promiscuity can have for us in this lifetime. But all sin is equal in the sight of God, which means that yes all sin is equally transgressive but also all sin is equally forgivable. Do not permanently condemn yourself for anything, because God doesn’t do that and neither should we. 

And of course, the best advice is to keep God at the centre of your relationship and pray about your relationship. If your ultimate goal is to foster a God-honouring relationship, it’s a lot harder to disobey him in that relationship. 

Good luck! If you know me in real life you’re more than welcome to contact me through any medium to chat more. If not, you can always ask me more questions here. 

Peace and love! 

- Katherine

reblogging from myself because this is how strongly I feel about it 

ALRIGHT EVERYBODY LISTEN UP

I AM A CHRISTIAN.

I BELIEVE IN HEAVEN AND HELL.

KNOW WHAT I DON’T BELIEVE?

THAT PEOPLE GO TO HELL FOR BEING GAY.

KNOW WHY?

CAUSE THAT’S NOT WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS.

KNOW WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS?

THAT EVERYBODY WOULD GO TO HELL IF NOT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST WHO DIED ON THE CROSS.

THE BIBLE ALSO SAYS THAT IF YOU CONFESS WITH YOUR MOUTH THAT JESUS IS LORD AND BELIEVE IN YOUR HEART THAT GOD RAISED HIM FROM THE DEAD, YOU’LL BE SAVED (ROMANS 10 FREAKING 9 MOTHER-TRUCKER)

THEREFORE!!!

PEOPLE GO TO HELL IF THEY DON’T KNOW THE LOVE OF JESUS.

YOU KNOW WHO’S NEVER GONNA KNOW THE LOVE OF JESUS IF THE CHURCH KEEPS BEING RIGID JUDGEMENTAL CONDESCENDING NOT-NICE PEOPLE!?!?!

YOU GUESSED IT!

GAY PEOPLE 

CHURCH, BY OSTRACIZING GAY PEOPLE YOU ARE LITERALLY LIVING THE ANTITHESIS OF YOUR MANDATE.

I am with you. I am for you. I am sorry. I love you. I want to help.

Don't be fooled by kids and their follies, you have wisdom beyond fear.

I don’t know where this came from but I like it!

This is more of an issue directed towards the Catholic church than towards you, but i feel like your insight might be able to clear it up for me, at least somewhat. So. Why is it that homosexuality is such a prevalent issue now, and why is it still so strongly enforced that it is wrong and a sin when there were SO many other things in the bible like eating pork or talking to a woman who was menstruating which were equally as wrong. Times have changed, why is the church denying human rights?

I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to answer you! I have been…how shall I put it? Emotionally unstable as of late, teehee ;) And as a general rule, I try not to do anything of much importance during times of emotional instability. :P If I can help it. And your questions are very important to me.

I’m also flattered that you value my insight so highly, and will do my best to give you some clarity.

First off, I beg of you to appreciate how difficult this issue is for Orthodox Christians. That is, Christians who believe the whole bible. I am one of those. And when I try to sort out the homosexuality issue in my head, I end up with a sort of temporary split-personality disorder.

Katherine 1 says that obviously, you can’t blame someone for something they can’t help.

Katherine 2 wonders why the bible would say it’s wrong if it can’t be helped.

Katherine 3 says to shut up both of you, because there’s no condemnation for sin anyway through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Katherine 3 always wins and that’s usually the end of the discussion. But you see, some people ONLY have a Katherine 2. Now even with that as our starting point, we’ve still got flawed logic because there’s all this other crap, like you mentioned, such as eating pork and talking to women who are menstruating.

On a sidenote, avoiding women who are menstruating is not only an Old Testament law, it’s also just good sense!

Anyway…the point is that those things are Old Testament laws. They’re the kind of stuff you would find in Leviticus, where it also says stuff like “don’t sit on a beaver while wearing red horizontal stripes on the third Tuesday of the month if it’s raining…because aliens don’t wear hats.” That is, obviously, hyperbole meant to illustrate the sheer ludicrousness of some of the laws in the OT. They had all these random laws because that was back before Jesus died so they legitimately had to be perfect. And if they messed up, they had to sacrifice animals to pay for their sins. This whole cosmic consequences thing is no joke. Our actions have earthly and spiritual repercussions, and we owe a blood debt. Thankfully, Jesus paid that debt. But before that, they had to kill firstborn lambs and crap like that. So that’s where the pork and period stuff comes from. All that stuff became obsolete after Jesus died. The old laws don’t hold us captive anymore because the blood of Christ covers all our sins.

UNFORTUNATELY, homosexuality is also mentioned in the New Testament, by Paul, who lived years after Jesus’ death. He also says it’s wrong. So now we’re back to square one.

The way I see it, there are at least three reasons why the church sees itself as capable of condemning homosexuality:

They can distance themselves from it. All other sins, cheating, sexual deviance, drugs, lying, pride, have all infiltrated our pews and made themselves at home. We can’t judge any of those sins because we commit them. So we preach forgiveness, redemption and freedom for all those sins, but not for homosexuality. You know, sometimes I think that the church just wants a way to make themselves feel better, like they’re not as bad as everybody else. I dunno, I might be making that up. Bottom line is that we forget that all sin is equal.

The church is very fond of behavior modification. Obviously, the bottom line is a relationship with Jesus. That is the number one most basic, most primary need of every human being. But on top of that, the church likes to fix people and work out strategies to get them to stop doing the “sin” instead of focussing on what really matters: the incredible saving grace of the gospel. And homosexuality…cannot be modified. Gay people don’t want our “help”. They don’t want to change, and can’t even if they wanted to. In a way, I think that infuriates us.

The government and structures of society, until recently, have supported our intolerance. It only started not so long ago that amendments were being made to legislature to allow gay people to marry. Being supported by the law can make anyone feel secure in a position of hate. I read Huck Finn last year, and the poor confused boy thought he was going to hell for freeing a slave, because that was what he had been taught. Church and government have often been hand in hand, and racism seemed to have been condoned by Christians at one point too. Which is just as atrocious as our current predicament. You would think we would learn that people are people, loved by God no matter what!

Finally, it’s such a prevalent issue NOW because it’s relevant now. When racism was abundant and black people were confined to separate bathrooms, busses and hospitals, I wouldn’t be a tad bit surprised if there weren’t churchgoers protesting the eradication of colour segregation. All one has to do is read The Help by Kathryn Stockett to get a good picture of that. But that’s history and now it seems foolish that black people and white people were ever separated at all.

That being said, the bible doesn’t say that being black is wrong. And yeah, times have changed, but whether you think it should or not, the bible doesn’t change. I’m not going to compromise my beliefs to be relevant, but I sure as heck am not gonna judge or condemn someone for being gay. Neither will I deny them basic human rights. I believe that gay people should have the right to marry each other. Who are we straight people to say what they can and cannot do? That’s just foolish. We are all people, equal, and worthy of love and respect. And, I might add, all needing Jesus.

Look, I don’t mean to bash on the institution of organized religion. The church is meant to be a body of believers, Christ’s bride. I love the church. I love the family, the community, and, despite my sarcastic comments, the genuine love and acceptance. We’re not all bad. Some of us get confused. Katherine 1 and 2 may never settle their differences, and I just have to live with my split personality. And from confusion can stem misguidedness, good intentions, and mistakes. We are still learning, and trying our very best to make sense of conflicting information from the world and the bible.

This post was just an analysis of the attitude of the modern church. And it’s just my opinion. I could have made all this stuff up. I’m not saying that all Christians think and act like the ones I described in my 3 reasons for condemnation. And I’m not saying that kind of behaviour is right. I’m just saying.

But I do believe that we’ll get better. We will get more tolerant. There’s a bright future for the church and homosexuality, I’m sure of it. God’s love is a powerful, all-consuming force. And his love for all His children is fierce. He’s reminding us of that right now. Keep your hopes up. :)

Peace and love! -Katherine

If you could ask God one question what would it be?

ONE question? Haha ahhh I have so many. They pass in and out of my head several times a week, and for some reason, I never think to write them down. Okay so here’s how I picture it: Right now, I’m a human, and I’m young human at that. Which means I have a mortal, finite view of space and time, which is by definition extremely limited. On top of that, as my mom says to me, “you can be as smart as you want, but until you have lived as long as I have, you will know nothing.” And it’s true, I’ve lived 19 years in a cute, white-picket-fence, sheltered, caucasion, north-american, privileged life. I know nothing!  So I picture me getting to heaven and it’s like my soul, that right now can only kind of taste the infinite, is completely freed of my brain and my emotions and my body and now I’m infinite, I’m free-floating, outside of space and time and none of the restrictions that bind me here on earth exist anymore. I’m part of infinity, I’m living in infinity and I can see everything. All of space and all of time, and I picture it as one huge “OHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!" moment. Suddenly you can see a gazillion and one connections between seemingly randomly events in your life, and you can see how a butterfly flapping their wings affects the death of a star on the other side of the universe, and you can see how a trivial choice someone made on the other side of the world generations before you affects your life. And you see, woven through everything, is God’s overriding, all-consuming, overwhelming love and grace. You can literally see his fingerprints in the planets and everything just clicks and you’re like “how did I never see this before?” And then I won’t have any of the questions I have now because I won’t be missing the pieces of information that my poor, human head is currently incapable of containing and comprehending. So it’s not like I’m waiting to see God so that I can ask him to explain this one mystery that’s been bugging me my whole life. However, I will share with you the latest mind-bender I was contemplating, just this morning. So there’s a theory that the curse of original sin is passed on through the father. Because Jesus had a human mother, but was conceived through the Holy Spirit. So He didn’t have a human father, and He was perfect and sinless so obviously, He wasn’t affected by the original sin curse like all other humans. And yet He was fully human and fully God. So I’m sitting there musing about this interesting idea and then I’m like, where did the other 23 chromosomes come from??  Like yeah, the immaculate conception was a miracle, but God uses science and nature as His tools, and Jesus was obviously a fully functional human, so He had to have 46 chromosomes…right? So what were they and where did they come from? Hmmmm. And I said to myself, I really will have to get God to explain that to me when I see Him. So there you go! :) Peace and love! -Katherine 

Layin' some truth on ya...

Jesus loves everyone. I mean everyone. Every single person on this planet.

“But what about ga..”

“What about divor…”

“Are you sure he likes trans…”

“Hey! What about prosti…”

“You can’t mean musl…”

And if you dare to call yourself a Christian you better love the crap out of EVERYONE too! No matter what.

Hands

What are God's hands like?

I imagine He could hold all the earth's oceans in his cupped hand.  I imagine His fist could blot out the sun.  I imagine that the whorls and ridges of His thumb could be all the world's mountains and valleys.  I imagine the rings of his fingerprints could be the age rings of trees.  I imagine His fingernail could be the moon. 

I think that those are the hands that affixed the stars in the vast expanse of the night sky.  I think those are the hands that designed the structures of space.  The hands that penned the story of time.  The hands that composed the melody of the universe. The hands that directed the dance of the planets.  The hands that plucked the strings of life itself, its chords awakening the earth.  The hands that can stop the spinning of the globe on its axis. The hands that sculpted my face.  The hands that formed my bones. The hands that knit the fibers of my DNA together.  

What do such powerful and tender hands look like?

God's hands have a pale, circular scar in the center of each palm. They're a reminder of the nails that held Him to the cross. Those scars are remnants of the torture He endured, inflicted by the people He came to save. Those scars represent the despair and desperation of Jesus when God the father turned His back on His son. The blemishes on His palm are not imperfections; they're symbolic of His perfect sacrifice. They are tokens of the blood price He paid for our freedom. The scars testify to His victory over the grave. They proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord of Life and Death! 

Also, upon close inspection, one might notice that the intricate network of lines on His hands are note creases like on our hands, but strings of very tiny letters. His entire hands are covered in minute writing. If you could read it, you would discover that it's an overwhelmingly long list of names, inscribed indelibly on God's hands. God has written your name, and my name, and the name of every single one of His children on His hands. He will never forget us because we are eternally inked on His palm.  

Therefore, God's hands are the ultimate expression of His character. They are literally covered in the evidence of His infinite love for us, and marked with proof of His unconditional grace. 

When you kneel to pray, and fold your own hands in front of you, stop to envision your Creator's hands, emblazoned with love and grace. 

I think they must be the most beautiful hands in the world.