Evangelical Baby, Part 2 (memoir)
The Finance Officer was creepy, no doubt, still he’d manage to make me feel guilty. As an evangelical Christian, I knew the rules. The Bible was clear about fornication and my boyfriend and I had been fornicating since the summer before. If I was serious about Christianity I needed to take the leap of faith and throw away the birth control pills. It felt as scary as scuba diving without an oxygen tank. And just like that scenario, without protection, you really are asking for trouble.
I guess I believed my faith, my commitment to Christ would protect me. What I hadn’t banked on was my heretic boyfriend. He wasn’t a noble, naive Adam to the temptress Eve. No, I’d have to say my boyfriend was more akin to the snake in the garden in that story. And he was a Mennonite for god’s sake. Maybe not a practicing one, only culturally, like being a secular Jew, but still, you’d think being surrounded and saturated with religion and religious teaching, at least one of us would have exerted more willpower.
What I found out was that neither faith nor willpower can trump hormones. Heavy and frustrated petting lasted a little while for us, until that time he took me back to show me the old cabin he was staying in on the edge of his father’s farm. It was there, on the floor next to the wood stove, our daughter was conceived.
