BY FUNKE EGBEMODE

(egbemode3@gmail.com)

Not having sex before marriage ought to be good. Restraining yourself from all that tantalizing stuff is tough alright, but that is what the Bible says and we all (believers) know that God is always right. Uncle, no touching; aunty, no sneaking. Keep the marriage bed undefiled. All solid contents must be kept in the bra, in the boxers. You can look, even imagine (though that is a sin too) what is in there but you can’t weed or cultivate the land. You can salivate but you must not sip or suck before you say ‘I do’ and have been handed the license. Then and thereafter, can you start drilling and depositing, planting, harvesting, as the licensed owner of the rig and land.

The waiting time can be mean on both the body and the spirit. Christian courtship is hard but the wedding night and the sweetness thereafter is usually very rewarding. I remember a young bride who ran to the pastor two weeks after the wedding, distraught, confused.

“I can’t cope, pastor.”

“Cope with what, sister”

‘My husband wants sex every day. Is it food? I’m tired. I’m sore. I’m walking funny. I’m even afraid to go home after work. He is a Christian, why does he want sex every day? It is carnal, isn’t it?’

The pastor laughed and called in a female counsellor (you can guess who) who explained to the frightened bride the coping skills. One, her brand new groom is a dude, a raging bull who has been kept in check until he got his license to do as he pleases. He’s making up for lost time. Two, sex is food for all healthy male, Christian or not. A dude is a dude. He wants his woman all day, if possible. There are strategies to avoid wear, tear and bruises. Whenever the couple waited, God happily endorses all activities and everybody is happy.

Unfortunately, it is not always so. It has been discovered, so, so sadly, that there are now terrible, embarrassing ungodly complications to this ‘no-sex-before-marriage’ part of Christian courtship. What is ordinarily supposed to be a beautiful worthwhile wait has been found to bring the kind of torture and nightmare that is confounding and debilitating. Too many Christians are evil, too many courting couples a disgrace to both God and the body of Christ. In fact, I’m restraining myself from calling them murderers because what they bring into a Christian union after saying ‘I do’ before God and man is nothing short of marital terrorism.

A man who professes to be born-again, tongue-speaking, demon-binding Christian abstains from sex during courtship only for the bride to discover on their wedding night that the groom’s weapon is only for peeing! Yeah, he has only two legs. His third leg is virtually non-existent and divorce is not supported by the Bible except on grounds of infidelity and even then you are not allowed to remarry until your spouse dies. Someone help me out here. What if the person you divorced lives to be 100?

Unexpected pregnancies, By FUNKE EGBEMODE

Or this other scenario: the turban-wearing, no-earrings but beautiful sister insisted on keeping her body holy, the marriage bed undefiled. Three years after wedding and plenty of lies on why she was waiting on the Lord for the fruit of the womb, the real reasons for her childlessness came to light. Sister’s uterus was removed years ago after a tragic abortion in the university. She didn’t tell the man she professed to love. She didn’t confide in the pastor.

According to her, ‘I believe God will give me a new womb, a brand new beginning.’

Ah, faith is great. But what is wrong with letting the man you are going to marry into this great secret so he can decide whether he’s down with the arrangement or not? What is wrong in letting the guy know what he is getting himself into, what the total package is so he can join his faith to hers and they can have faith raised to power two (like faith2)?

The shocked husband recounted the horror of the heart-rending discovery this way: ‘She kept her on insisting on prayers instead of going to have ourselves checked in the hospital. She was moving from one prayer mountain to the other, doing vigil and fasting round the month. Yet we couldn’t conceive. On my own, I decided to go and run tests on my system. I got the all clear and that was when I became suspicious. I threatened to call the pastors, report her to the church marriage counselling unit, summon a family meeting, and finally I moved out. I told her I’d move back in only if she agreed to the tests. That was when she broke down and confessed. I was devastated.’

Now, how does a pastor deal with that, dissolve the marriage or remind the deceived husband that their marriage vows were ‘till death do them part’? Imagine you are a parent reading this, if the husband was your son, what would you do? How would you feel? This son of yours is 36, his wife is 32 and she has no womb! You are all members of a denomination where even breathing the word ‘divorce’ is almost a sin, will you happily accept your lot and wait for a new womb from your lying daughter-in-law or are you going to damn all consequences and tell your son to ‘throw the trash out and get a proper woman who will bear you children?’

Is the definition of unfaithfulness, infidelity, just about having sex with someone you are not married to? Is going into marriage knowing you are deceiving your partner in the worst possible way godly? How will the church stop their members from trying polygamy and extramarital affairs when the skeletons start dancing ‘shaku shaku’ outside the closet? How can the church stem the rate of failed marriages in the body of Christ when young men and women go into marriage for the wrong reason, wearing only barefaced lies as wedding garments?

Should the church just accept that this new trend of hiding very important details during courtship, as part of end-time turbulence or should pastors just remember that they are end-time shepherds who must do their jobs with wisdom?

Dear godly reader, imagine that it’s your daughter who ended up with the man whose third leg is incompetent, malformed or misshapen? That on the wedding night, your daughter who had kept her virginity till age 25 was the one who discovered that her husband’s manhood is the same size as her pinky, her smallest finger! The thing can pee but it can’t be put to work. It’s just there, like a toddler’s pecker. You spent millions of naira on the wedding ceremony, had high hopes for this marriage and here you are with a son-in-law who could not consummate the marriage. It’s not his fault that he was created with a weapon that can’t plunge or fire but it is what it is. Your daughter may have to resort to self-help at some point. Pastor, this is one member of our congregation that is most likely to look for sex outside marriage.

But Ariyike’s story is the most pathetic. She is the respected daughter of a respected pastor. She was even a youth pastor herself. So, of course, keeping her body as the temple of God was a given. Her husband is a petroleum engineer based in one of the South South states. The couple re- located there right after the wedding. Six months later, Ariyike called her parents that she was com- ing to visit in Lagos. Everyone had missed her, her parents were eager to hear the expected news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t but she looked different, subdued, withdrawn. One week became two weeks and Ariyike still refused to go back to her husband. After a long sermon, she told her parents she was not returning to her matrimonial home, ever. Was he beating her? That was the only question on everybody’s lips. It seemed the only reason a young bride would run back home, right? It wasn’t Ariyike’s reason. Her husband is so oversized, his manhood off-kilter, heavy duty, scary weapon that scared the poor girl shitless the first time he confronted her with it.

“I tried to cope but he’s just too big. He leaves me bleeding sore and crying the few times we tried. It’s scary, I can’t go back. It will kill me. You don’t understand what I’m talking about because you have not seen it. Please don’t make me go back otherwise, I’ll run away.”

What does a pastor do when confronted with a case like this? What do parents do when their daughters-in-law or sons-in-law are discovered to have covered up facts that are this important? True, it can’t be easy to fully disclose to anybody including your mother that you have deformities down there. Imagine all the beautiful girls with crazy cleavages out there with private pains deep inside them, the men with abnormalities they can’t talk about below their belts. I read that one out of 165 male births may reproduce a baby with micro-penis. There is penile torsion and scrotal transposition too. I read that many men “suffer” from penile torsion in various degrees – corkscrew – like third legs that are sometimes competing with a horse’s weapon built to scare. The scrotal transposition is where the scrotal sac is situated above the shaft making the equipment look like elephant ears. The women’s troubles are broadly termed Mullein duct abnormalities and they reach all the way in with all kinds of implications. I’m not a doctor, just a Christian and a mother worried about protecting these young ones from unfaithful spouses-to-be, hiding important details, from the ‘absent’ uterus to python or pinky-sized penises. Should we test all ‘spirits’ and see which is true or just fly blind in that direction? I’m just asking.

The Star