A Return to Innocence, Awe, and Wonder

You might consider your sexual innocence permanently lost after all you’re seen or done (or had done to you). How can you unsee what you’ve seen? Or unknow what you know?

What’s more, the modern term “innocence” holds connotations of being faultless. But what if we are at fault in some area of our sexuality? We’ve done wrong and we feel wrong for having done it. Does that negate a return to innocence?

The good news is that God seems to hold a different definition of innocence. At one point, Jesus’ disciples chased off some children for getting too close to him. Jesus stopped the scene and brought a child right into their midst. “Unless you receive the kingdom of God like this child, you won’t get in” (paraphrase of Mark 10:15). That doesn’t leave much room for confusion. Because how do children receive anything if not with awe and wonder and exuberant excitement? In a word, they receive things with innocence.

Somewhere along the way we started to think of innocence as childish and something to outgrow. Yet Jesus makes clear that childlike wonder is the way he wants us to receive everything in life.

We all face the same temptation to forsake our innocence. What have you done with the lover within you? What have you done with his innocence, his sensuality, and his capacity to be awed at beauty? There’s a good chance you’ve disowned and exiled him.

Unfortunately, instead of sensuality and aliveness, many of us have settled for so much less. If you grew up in the church, you probably were told that purity is the goal of your sexuality. Purity culture, the Christian reaction to the sexual revolution, intended to instill a sexual ethic in young people. It may have started with a desire to hold the church to a standard of sexual holiness; purity culture is at least loosely connected with the biblical idea of pursuing holiness. But it failed miserably in practice. In reality, it damaged or destroyed the sensuality within so many men and women.

We need to dismantle that idea once and for all and rediscover a place where awe can take you that purity alone never can.

Dear Lord, what an amazing truth that You can bring me back to innocence, to a place of awe, wonder, and childlike exuberance. I am ready to go! Amen.

This reading plan is based on the book The Sex Talk You Never Got from Sam Jolman, MA LPC. Learn more by visiting SamJolman.com.