Chapter 1: Introduction

Friday

Thirty-five year-old Leslie Gaye walked down the deserted school hallway towards the front office and her footsteps echoed in the long corridor. All classes were still in session except for hers. She had finished her last class of the day, Sex Education in the Modern World, and she felt strangely elated: she had been doing God’s work and her lesson had gone so much better than she expected. She felt an urge to skip and listen to the echo but she restrained herself: she knew that levity was an abomination in the eyes of the Lord and that she should resist the impulse.

She looked down at herself to check that she was neat and tidy. She always dressed conservatively: a white blouse, buttoned at the top, with long sleeves, earth tone skirts that came to her knee and two inch heel flat pumps. Sometimes she thought she looked like an old spinster but this is what the mega-church and her husband demanded of her and the Christian women of the congregation in their daily lives, even as they worked in the modern world. The way she dressed was a mark of her faith.

She opened the office door. “Hello, Mrs. Carpenter,” she smiled. Mrs Carpenter did not return her smile, but looked at her with a sense of self-importance: she was the school secretary and as such she ran the school office for Mrs Wright, the principal.

“Hello, Mrs Gaye. Mrs Wright is in a meeting at the moment but she will call you into her office when she is ready. In the meantime, please take a seat.”

“Thanks!” Leslie said politely, but Mrs Carpenter had already returned to her work.

Leslie sat down carefully, her back straight, her legs primly pressed together, and smoothed down her skirt. She wondered what the meeting was all about and an unexpected anxiety stirred in the pit of her stomach.

She had been employed by the school district since the beginning of the school year. She and her husband had moved here when her husband had taken a job as a lay minister for the evangelical church, White Redeemer Christian Church. The move had been on short notice: horrible untruthful rumors had begun to grow about her husband, that he was not having one affair, but three at the same time at their previous mega-church, one of them with the wife of the pastor, no less.

She of course didn’t believe it for a minute and understood when he explained that it was the work of the Devil, planting evil in people’s minds. She knew that her husband was a godly man, the sort of minister that any Christian church would be proud to have. She knew God would never allow something like an affair to happen with her husband. It was clearly a test: God was testing them, but she couldn’t work out why. Leslie tried to ignore it but the rumors would not go away until eventually, they packed up all their worldly possessions and drove to this new city where her husband had interviewed for a lay-minister’s job. He was one of twelve ministers who worked directly for the pastor.

They settled in quickly: she loved their new church, the White Redeemer. The church had a congregation of 10,000 worshipers which was way more than their old church. She enjoyed attending every Sunday even though worship services and Sunday school lasted pretty much all day. Pastor Charles Hurst, or Pastor Charlie as everybody called him, was an energetic speaker and could talk about any verse in the Bible for hours on end.

As a lay-minister’s wife she was required to hold coffees at her house once every three months as the coffee duty was rotated with the other wives. The other minister’s wives like Stephanie Hurst, Pastor Charlie’s wife, Carol Cabot the financial director, Denise Maday the youth director, and Irene Dack the activities coordinator. Women who were in church management positions and were considered pious and above reproach attended these coffees. It was a way for them reaffirm their love and personal belief in Jesus and his wisdom.

Leslie enjoyed this fellowship time with the other wives. In addition, every Sunday she had the responsibility of teaching God’s word to the children of these important women, children who attended the private church school, wore school uniforms, and said prayer before class. She taught these youngsters every Sunday but she felt unfulfilled and prayed for the Lord to guide her.

Leslie had been secretly disappointed that the church’s private school didn’t hire her at the start of the school year, she knew she would’ve been a good fit for the school, but they told her there were no positions available. Then several weeks before the start of public school, God answered her prayers. There was an advert for a teaching position at the public middle school. As soon as she saw it, she realized that this is what He had intended for her, to spread His teachings to the secular youth of the school, and she applied straight away.

The school district was looking to hire a teacher for fourteen year-old girls and boys in the ninth grade. However, there was one problem: the only position available was as a teacher of Sex Education. Leslie was disappointed as she had a teaching degree in Math and hoped to teach it, but more than that, the idea of teaching teens about sex made her feel very uncomfortable. The job description said the position would focus on a high level overview of sex and the modern world and she was relieved it didn’t get too deeply into anything controversial, but she still had doubts, realizing that she didn’t know much about “the modern world”.

From her teaching experience at her previous school, many teens seemed ungodly, where the girls dressed like prostitutes and the boys made lewd comments about females and stared at them with lust-filled eyes. She didn’t know if she could handle talking about a penis or a vagina or breasts, especially because of her beliefs.

From an early age, her father had lectured her about the sins of the flesh. Sex was given by God simply as a means of procreation, and not for pleasure. She remembered her fear as he described to her the lake of eternal fire, that was reserved for fornicators, masturbaters, adulterers, homosexuals. Her role as a woman, he taught, was to reject physical sin, obey her husband, and raise Godly Christian children. “Never give in to desire!” he had said, “and remember that the good Lord will always be watching you!”

She had taken his teaching to heart. She had only ever been with one man her whole life. She didn’t date in high school as she wanted to preserve her virginity for her wedding night. In college she didn’t participate in the weekend parties or spring breaks. Instead she associated with the local Christian church and their bible studies. She considered herself a pious woman. She dressed plainly, unaware that even at thirty-five, many thought she still had a knock out body with blonde hair, perky tits and curvy ass.

She met her husband the summer before her junior year of college at her local church as he was attending the local Christian seminary and after they both graduated they got married. They found out later that he was unable to father children and she was secretly disappointed with the news but knew that it was all part of God’s plan for her. He was testing her. And so she had settled into a life of celibacy, studying the bible and the lives of the saints and martyrs, praying in the morning and evening, and doing everything she could to serve God.

She asked her husband’s advice and guidance about the teaching position. They got on their knees in the living room and prayed and eventually decided that, with the economy in the dumps and her husband’s job as a lay-minister that didn’t pay very well, she should take whatever she could get.

“Have faith, the Lord has picked out a path for you and he will guide you,” her husband had said, and she recognized the wisdom of his words and accepted the job.

The first week was like a nightmare: the teenagers seemed to see right through her and asked her such dreadful things, filthy, disgusting sinful things, that she thought that in some strange way God was punishing her. She prayed night and day, throwing herself on his mercy, begging for a sign, but for the first time in her life, doubts began to creep into the recesses of her mind.

The sign came to her in a dream. She had been reading about Saint Cecelia, how she accepted martyrdom rather than allow her virginity to be taken by a pagan, and she dreamt that Cecelia appeared to her, reassuring her that if she obeyed God’s teaching, everything would be alright. When she woke, all her uncertainty had gone: she would teach God’s word as she had been taught it, that sex was for procreation and that pleasure was the instrument of the devil. She would teach the teens about sex, but only in the context of a loving and faithful marriage where a wife obeyed her husband. She would help the kids to understand sin and the torments that might await them.