Week 11 · Lesson 1
Understanding Sexual Responsibility and Consequences
Week 11 of 23 · Sexual Responsibility
Who taught you what a man is supposed to be with a woman?
Somebody did. Nobody arrives at this on their own.
Maybe it was watching how the men in your house treated the women in your house. Maybe it was older guys talking outside. Maybe it was a phone with no filter on it when you were eleven, which is where a lot of people in this room actually learned it.
Whoever taught you, they were not thinking about your life. This lesson is about looking at what you got handed and deciding if you want to keep it.
Key ConceptThe Arithmetic Is Longer Than Anybody Tells You
A decision that takes twenty minutes can attach you to somebody for eighteen years, and to a whole family you did not pick, and to a court schedule, and to a monthly number that follows you.
That is not a scare tactic. That is just the math, and nobody sits down and shows it to a sixteen year old.
And it is not only children. There is somebody else’s life sitting in it. Her body carries all of the risk and most of the consequence, and where you are from that gets treated like her problem. It is not her problem. It was two people, and one of them can walk.
A man is not measured by what he can get. He is measured by what he does with somebody who trusted him.
Journal Question
Where did you actually learn what to expect from a woman and what to give? Write who taught you and what they taught, and then write whether it has worked out for them.
Teaching PointFour Things Nobody Explains
Two people who have both learned everything they know from the same places, neither of whom will say what they actually want or do not want, both performing. Almost every bad situation starts there, and it starts before anybody touches anybody.
Pressure is not agreement. Somebody going along with it because it is easier than dealing with you saying no is not agreement. Somebody who cannot make a decision because of what they drank or took cannot agree at all, and the law does not care how it looked to you.
If you are ever telling yourself she probably wanted to, that sentence is the warning. A real yes does not need you to interpret it.
Some things you carry for a few weeks with a prescription. Some things you carry for life. And the person most likely to give you something is somebody who is certain they do not have anything, because they have never once been checked.
This is the part that never gets said. Treating people like they are interchangeable trains you to not feel anything, and that training does not stay in one part of your life. A man who has practiced not caring for years does not get to suddenly care when he meets somebody who matters.
Activity
Write what you would want for your daughter, if you have one or ever have one. Every standard, all of it. Then read your own list back and ask which of those things you have been to somebody.
ScenarioTwo Years Later
A kid is nineteen. There is a baby who is one. He is not with the mother, and it did not end well.
He is not a bad person and he is not running. He just does not know where to start, and every time he does show up there is an argument, and the arguments are not really about the baby, they are about everything that happened between the two of them before.
So he comes around less. Not because he stopped caring. Because every visit costs him something and he has nothing extra.
And that child is learning something already. Not from anything said. From the rhythm of who shows up.
Nobody in that story is evil. That is the point. Two people who got no instruction did the normal thing, and a third person is now the one paying for it, and that third person did not get a vote.
Spiritual Takeaway
He put Himself between a woman and the men holding rocks
They caught a woman in the act and dragged her into the middle of a crowd. The men who brought her had the law on their side and they were technically right about what it said.
Notice who was not dragged out. It takes two people to be caught in the act. Only one of them was standing there. Every man in that circle knew it and not one said anything.
Jesus bent down and wrote in the dirt. He did not argue the law with them. Then He stood up and said whoever has never done anything can throw first.
And they left. The oldest ones first, which tells you the ones who had lived the longest had the most to think about.
Then it was Him and her. And He said two things, and you have to hold both. He said I do not condemn you. And then He said go, and leave that life.
He did not pretend it was nothing. He also did not let anybody stone her over it. Everybody wants one of those sentences without the other. The soft crowd wants the first one alone and the hard crowd wants the second one alone, and He said both to the same person in the same breath.
That is what He offers you on this subject. Not a lecture and not a pass. Both sentences.
One conversation you have been avoiding. With her, with the mother of your child, or with somebody you owe an honest word to. Not a whole plan. One conversation, and you go first.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 11 Lesson