Abstinence

This is a bit of a follow-up to the link the other day about early marriage. I’m going to use an analogy to give my thoughts about abstinence-base sex education.

Suppose that nutrition classes were almost exclusively about how to avoid food poisoning while eating dessert. The result is kids end up eating a lot of dessert and getting obese. So other people start their own nutrition classes where they emphasize the importance of finishing your meal before eating dessert and only eating small desserts. But it’s still all about dessert, and kids still eat a lot of dessert (not always after meals) and getting fat, and they still don’t know anything about real nutrition.

As long as the instruction is all about sex and not about relationships and child bearing and child rearing and communication and respect and shared finances and all the other things that go into marriage, we can’t ever expect kids to get it right. Kids don’t need a negative message about sex, they need a positive message about marriage.

Another year

If someone had been giving me a playing card every year on my birthday, I’d have a complete deck now.

Marrying late

They had an article about the author in the Austin American-Statesman a week or two ago, and I thought then he was on the right track: The Case for Early Marriage.

Sarah, Chris, Daniel: read it.

(via Times and Seasons.)

I’m not THAT old

Today our Primary chorister had asked me to substitute for her (I felt like Dr. Seuss saying “Sister Brown is out of town.”) In Senior Primary the class doing sharing time did a presentation about previous church presidents, so after the meeting I asked a group of girls if they could guess who was president when I was in Primary. One of them looked right at me and said, “Lorenzo Snow.” I guess when you’re 10 it’s all ancient history.

Chris is home

For the first time in almost three years I don’t have a missionary son to write to on Sunday evening.

Chris’ plane was supposed to arrive at 8:10 p.m. Thursday but it was closer to 8:20 when we saw him coming down the stairs at the airport. Fortunately the kids’ school had a teacher work day on Friday, so we didn’t need to worry about getting people up early the next morning.

Sarah came home Friday afternoon and is staying until tomorrow, so everyone except Daniel was at church with us today.