Becca's Blog
When I found out that we’d be teaching “Sex Education” this month, my first reaction was “Um… this is not what I signed up for!”. However, I knew that God had put us in this situation for a purpose and that He desired to use us to communicate to the students of Guatemala an extremely important message about sex, dating, and God’s design for marriage.
If you don’t know me very well, it’s important to understand that sex is a topic that makes me very uncomfortable and we’re pretty seriously considering adoption because the whole idea of pregnancy totally freaks me out. (This is coming from a married person, I know!) I’m not exactly sure where this feeling came from, but I feel like I’ve grown up in a culture that “educates” young people about sex through entertainment, the internet, and other media at way too young of an age. So if society has “screwed it up” so much, what message could I possibly share with students that would leave them with the information needed to survive in the sex-crazed culture we live in, yet give them hope for abstinence and a future relationship built on the foundation of God?
Fortunately, as we began the planning process for our lessons, I feel like we had a really great curriculum to work with. Each week, each staff member and volunteer from Nueva Generacion (I think there are about 8 in total) ministers to approximately 400+ students through teaching the Valores(Values) curriculum in the classroom. Lessons range from hygiene to family roles to financial responsibility to dating and healthy relationships.
The first lesson we taught discussed with the students the three “stages” of dating. I’ll share with you a little bit about each so you can get the idea of what we taught.
- The first was called “Falling in Love”, and talked about the physical and emotional reactions we go through when we’re attracted to someone of the opposite sex. As you can imagine, there was a lot of giggling, but the students could totally relate to this stage.
- The second was called “The First Fight”, which my team members portrayed through a short skit accompanied by explanation of what it feels like to be hurt by the other person, usually a result of lack of communication or a difference in priorities. We also discussed situations in which it would be important to break up or ask for help, such as a physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive relationship, or infidelity.
- The third was called “The Commitment”. Honestly, this stage was harder for me to talk about with this age of students, especially the youngest ones. One thing I talked about was how ‘commitment’ did not mean a sexual commitment. We also talked about setting boundaries and God’s desire for sex in marriage. In some of the villages, several students shared with us about their inability to commit to one person and the general trend of promiscuity in the area.
The second lesson we taught went a little more in depth with dating and God’s design for it. We ended up splitting this lesson in half and used our second class period as an informal question-answer session with separated gender groups.
This lesson started out with introducing two purposes of dating.
- The first purpose was “to get to know each other”. We started out the class with playing our own version of “The Dating Game”, where one person would ask three people of the opposite sex a “get to know each other” question, and then eventually, they would choose which person’s answers they liked the most. We then talked about the importance of asking both the easy and the hard questions in dating.
- The second purpose for dating is to prepare for marriage. Being the only married person on our team, I had the honor of talking about God’s design for marriage. I tried many different ways to best communicate this, and found that it really depended on the age group. For the youngest ones, I literally had my teammates act out the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis and talked about God’s perfect match. For the older ones, I addressed the fact that God did not intend women to merely be baby makers… that men and women are intended to walk side by side and that we need to be whole people with God before we can be in a healthy relationship with other people.
The second part of the lesson talked about God’s design for sex in marriage and the consequences of lack of sexual control. This included discussions on STDs, Pregnancy, and Abortion.
Every day was different. Every class was different. Sometimes we had 20 minutes, other times we had 55 minutes. This month I learned how to trust the Lord and to trust my team members. It was incredibly freeing to work with a group of people that trusted you to do your thing, and you could trust them to do theirs and it just worked. Thank you to Luis, our ministry contact and our new friend. Thank you to my “Extreme Discipleship” team, Gabe, Erin, Elizabeth, and Joan. My prayer is that this experience brought the students more than just another “Sex Ed.” class, but left the students with a lasting impression of God’s beautiful design for relationship and marriage.
