An article in the local paper caught my attention this morning.  According to a federal study, 1/4 teen girls between 14-19 has contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD).    The article does a good job explaining the problem and crunching the numbers.  But the recommendation by “U.S. health officials” is more telling.  The recommendation?   “Better screening, vaccination and prevention.”

Sex has become an area of life like life itself.  Rather than asking why it is there, we jump in and indulge.  Science asks some questions, but is too satisfied with the superficial answers and misses the question. 

It’s clear that human suffering is bad.  It’s clear that STDs are a form of suffering and are bad for us.  Like science’s bent on evolution, it observes and takes note of species mutations, then sidesteps the profound inquiry of the child, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”  Science traces a line back in time past the chicken, past the egg, and then fading into obscurity as time and matter and chance simmer into primordial goop.  It misses again on why human languages differ, sidestepping the basics of Babel and appealing to ape dialectics.

chicken-egg.jpg 

But maybe in the end STDs aren’t a result of inadequate screening or vaccination.  Maybe if we taught and saw and felt that long ago we turned away from God to create our lives and ended up under his curse, we might get further than if we put a screening facility in every high school and vaccinated every child.  Maybe we’d identify the result of depression and disease and a thousand other anomalies resulting from plundering the prize of sex from the trophy house of marriage to the squalor of the slums.  Maybe, just maybe, if we taught and ackowledged that sex outside of marriage should be opposed as the desire to murder and rape and steal, we might find a backbone to fight it and reduce the devestations of STDs and abortions.  There is to sex the creative force that tells us we were ourselves created and are ourselves accountable for our creating.  And Jesus is the creator of us and sex and the one to heal and clean us from any sexual sin, if only we would acknowledge to him our sin and struggles- that we can never vaccinate or screen or prevent enough- having made such a pollution of his gifts, and ask for him to teach us who he is and who we are and to follow his prescribed limits for his gifts.