Lukautim Yu Yet Long AIDS | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Lukautim Yu Yet Long AIDS | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lizzy Ainsworth
12/06/10
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Lukautim yu yet long AIDS!
The sign was everywhere, shouting a message which I, as a naïve 14 year old, did not really understand, nor care to. I must have been the most sexually uneducated girl in the country I was visiting: Papua New Guinea.
I was on a mission trip with my Dad and two married couples and we were going about teaching our Victorious Ministry Through Christ program in churches and villages all over Oro Province.
One couple on the trip seemed to have adopted a mission of their own: to track down all signs to do with AIDS to give a report back to their local doctor on the state of the disease in PNG. The family Dad and I were staying with happened to be very prominent in the AIDS prevention movement for the province, and plastered on his tailgate and doors were signs reading NO CONDOM, NO SEX and such other discreet messages. Of course, not realising the sensitivity of the issue, I had piped up in the middle of one of our team discussions with the question, ‘what is a condom?’ I was quickly told by Dad to shut up. On another occasion, a woman tearfully came up to me and clung to me begging me to pray with her about her husband who was involved in pornography, a matter which I referred to our team leader, more because I was uncomfortable with her weeping than from an understanding of what she was on about.
So I formed some opinions on the matter of sex; it being something to be associated with embarrassment and something that caused AIDS. So whatever it was could not be good. It was with such impressions that I returned home and entered into the scene of reading about dating and courtship, as a young man had rather dramatically appeared in my life.
Wonder of wonders these books said sex was a good gift, one that God had created, not just something that gave you AIDS, and moreover this was how you got pregnant. Goodness, I had thought you got pregnant by riding a motorbike with a man, and this was why parents were not impressed with the suggestion of romantic rides.
Well what to do with this new information? It was all very bewildering, confusing and most scary. I seemed to have ingrained in me the information that sex was bad, men were scary and that God must have made a mistake on this particular ‘gift’, and so I stumbled through my teen years, blushing and being embarrassed to the point of leaving the room when this particular topic was mentioned.
It was not until a few years later that I went back to a Victorious Ministry Through Christ training school in Australia, that I discovered this fear had much deeper roots than just a few sign posts and stickers in PNG.
I had been growing in my relationship with my boyfriend Stephen, and we believed that we were headed toward marriage, but neither of us could help but see that the topic of sex was plainly frightening to me, and it was worrying both of us. I was aware that there had been some sexual deviation in my family line a few generations back, but neither of us could see how badly it was affecting me.
The VMTC training school not only taught us how to pray for others, but also how to deal with issues in our own life and how through the application of prayer and scripture we could be set free from generational iniquities that were affecting our life. After four hours of prayer about this issue, I finally felt set free with no fear! For the first time in our relationship, I was physically attracted to Stephen, and while that brought about its own set of self control issues, it was a relief to be ‘normal’.
A year on from that life changing ministry time, I was in PNG again helping to run a VMTC training school. This time I was praying to see other people set free from both their own sins and generational sins, both sexual and otherwise, and this time I was the one teaching the young people how to stay away from AIDS. My message was loud and clear, NO MARRIAGE, NO SEX.
For more information on Victorious Ministry Through Christ, see my challenge article ‘The Spirit of the Coconut’ and www.vmtc.org.au

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