Protected

Both these occurrences were a few weeks ago, but I remembered both of them this morning, and I finally saw them in a different light.

I was sitting in a lecture a while ago, and most of my friends were talking, while I was off day-dreaming (as normal). When they all burst out laughing, I returned to Earth and asked in my normal nosy fashion what they were talking about. One of the guys was about to relate the joke to me, when my friend stopped him. I looked at him in surprise, and he could obviously see that in my face. So he said very carefully, "You don't want to hear this joke", and I could tell from the expression on his face exactly what kind of joke it had been. This guy is a good friend, one of the few other Christians in my course, and I trust his judgement (most of the time) but at the time I felt quite... well, babied - as if I wasn't responsible enough to make my own call on what I should hear. And also a bit of "Well who are you to have a say in what I listen to? You're not my boyfriend or my family."

Then a couple of weeks later, a similar thing happened. I was walking through one of the buildings on campus, when the guys I was walking with (who is normally VERY talkative) stopped talking, and said, "Kit, I just want you to look at me, and not at the walls". Yet again, my face must have said it all, because he explained straight away. "There's some new 'art' up that you probably don't want to see." Again, at the time I obeyed, but more out of humouring my friend than out of believing he was right. In fact, I think my thought at the time was "Oh, it's probably just pictures of naked people. That wouldn't bother me; I've studied anatomy."

This morning brought a whole new light on these incidents. Instead of feeling patronised or resentful, I started to feel thankful for what these guys had done for me. In a world that seems to do everything it can to strip young people of their purity, these guys had put themselves out to protect MY purity. Not their own, but mine. They cared enough about a sister (who didn't care herself) to step in and hold her back from harm. And while I know these certainly weren't horrific dangers to my purity, what means something to me is that they cared. Think about, sisters - true brothers will want to protect your purity, even as the world tries to take it away.