Tightening My Chastity Belt: My Sixth Month into Celibacy.

If you were to have snuck inside my head just a few months ago, you might have overheard me hatching plan to return to indulgence, once my self-imposed year of celibacy was up. It would have sounded much like a man planning his first meal, once released from prison.

I was chomping at the bit: Counting down the months, days, weeks, hours until I could fly the lock on my chastity belt.

There was this nagging void in me that I thought sex and a man could fill, and I was missing out, damn it!!

But then a shift happened … slowly, then all at once.

It started when I decided to re-invest all this free time and energy that I now had (not being on Tinder) into getting involved in Church. After all, deepening my relationship with God was one of the two reasons that I decided to become celibate in the first place. (The other reason was to improve the filtering of men who were coming into my life, which you can read about it in the previous post.)

That decision first took the form of my signing up for a seven-week course, called Alpha. The course teaches about the basics of Christianity and allows participants to openly question their faith. The sessions take place after Church and consists of watching a video, followed by a round of group discussion. In the very first Alpha session, one of the lines in the video dared to suggest that a relationship with Jesus was just as or even more fulfilling than a relationship with a man or woman.

“Excuse me!!???,” I thought as I almost charged at the screen.

“Jesus is a Spirit. He can’t cuddle me or take me out to dinner…. What the heck do you mean ‘just as good as a romantic partnership’… I’ve been single for eight years and I know nothing can abate this emptiness,” I thought. Well, actually I didn’t use my inside voice. Ladies and gentlemen, I verbalised this to the group. They could probably see the anger and resentment I had been harbouring toward's God for having be single for so long, steaming out of the top of my head. But the facilitators were not fazed and my comment was put to the group for discussion, like any other.

Later that day I took a time-out to sit in quiet and reflect on my little outburst, when Jesus himself showed up. And He wasn’t mad. He just asked me the simplest, most powerful question of my life. “But Lisa, have you ever really tried to have a relationship with me?”

I melted. The truth was that despite all the answered alter calls and visits to Church, my relationship to Jesus himself was distant and shaky.

I actually wasn’t sure if I really believed in him.

My response came feebly, “You’re right. I haven’t … But shall we give it a go?”

That was all the invitation Jesus needed.

I took a step towards Him and he came rushing at me.

I got stuck into the Alpha course. I went to every single session for seven weeks. That meant that for the first time in my life, I was going to church every Sunday.

Around the same time, I decided to join a Connect group - Hillsong Church's term for an informal gathering of people who are of similar age group and place in life, on a regular basis. The first connect group I joined was not a fit – too many couples...arghh! But the second one was a hit. I was plonked into a group of thirty-something year-old professional Christian women, ninety percent of whom were single ... I had found my tribe. The fortnightly gatherings sashayed into dinners, parties, nights on the town and ultimately beautiful friendships.

I started to feel apart of something. Not surprisingly, it turned out that many of the girls in my Connect group had chosen to be celibate as well. I was no longer an anomaly.

Despite the buzz of my sanctified social life, I also managed to spend more time with Jesus, just talking to him. We had our official prayer time, but we also just chatted throughout the day, about little things and major dramas.

A few months into all this, I looked up and noticed that the void I had ben carrying in the middle of my heart was not there anymore. That gnawing emptiness, which propelled me into spending hours on dating sites, had kind of closed up. I had been thinking less and less about boys, dating and sex overall. I felt filled by something else. It is hard to describe what that “something” is exactly: a softness, the Holy Spirit itself perhaps. To condense it into one word, seems to not do it justice. But it feels like contentment, peace and a sense of being loved. It’s solid, good and consistent. I still do feel sadness or anxiety from time to time, as life continues to throw challenges at me. But the over-aching loneliness is gone. I suppose I’ve experienced a kind of healing.

In addition to faring better emotionally, more serendipity and miraculous 'coincidences' happen in my life. Things that I ask for as a passing thought, manifest. People offer me acts of kindness and are there just when I need them.

Here is great example. A few weeks ago I went on a camping trip with a friend. On the first night, we slept at a small campsite in the Myall Lakes National Park, three hours north of Sydney. In the morning we were to take a ferry to then drive another hour to the Yagon campsite at Seal Rocks, our true destination for the whole trip. We rose with the sun, packed up our campsite and re-loaded my Wrangler. But when I turned the key in the ignition, the car wouldn’t start. The battery had died from us using the headlights for ten minutes to quickly set up our campsite the night before. I don’t have jumper cables or membership with a roadside assistance service, so we were reliant on whatever help we could get from the two other groups of people at that little campsite.

Would you believe that in the tent next to us, there was a young mechanic with all the tools and the willingness to help. He had jumper cables but the battery was not revived with a simple jump-start. So he took the battery out of my car and put it into his van.

(Pictured above: My car getting a heart transplant.)

We pushed his car and it started, my dead batter revived via the charge in his cables. He then put it back into my car and the ignition fired up. I couldn't thank this angel enough. I'm sure he's never been hugged so hard by a black woman.

Within a few hours, we were at Seal Rocks beach with my Jeep purring again.

To have a mechanic in the tent beside you in the middle of a national park is not luck. I know that Jesus set that up for me, positioning help right beside me, even before I even knew that a problem would arise.

(Pictured above: Yaay - we ended up making it to Seal Rocks beach).

Miracles like that happen often to me now. I believe that it’s a result of my closer walk with Jesus, which started from that decision to sacrifice something for the sake of our relationship. God matched my sacrifice in one area, with abundance in others.

The intention and the process of my celibacy is functioning like a kind of spring-cleaning. It is creating space for God to move.

So six months into my one-year commitment, I am rather pleased with my celibate state. The changes in me are palpable. People say I’m softer, warmer and lighter. I feel calmer about life and am more grounded. So instead of planning how to break free, I’m actually thinking about keeping the lock on my chastity belt a little longer, till marriage perhaps ...What seemed a preposterous idea three months ago, is now not looking so bad from here.

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