Every sinner has a chance to repent. I was a sinner, and I didn’t even know it. I lived every day of my life thinking that if I just tried to do what was right and didn’t murder or steal I was probably an okay person. It took a kind man with a gentle voice to show me the way to my own salvation. I don’t know his name, but I think of him as an apostle of Jesus himself. But to the rest of the world, he is the man who called me a whore on Bruinwalk, in the view of hundreds of other people, as I walked towards my evolutionary biology class.
When he screamed at me, his beard trembling in the wind, and the fury of God etched in his face, I stopped and my body filled with something I had never known it was capable of feeling. Guilt. Guilt that only a sinner can feel. I fell to my knees and looked up at the heavens. I had lived for eighteen years on this Earth without submitting myself to God, the almighty. The only thing that could save me was a kind word of a loving stranger, the cry of “whore”, that rang through my ears, delivering me from my sinful existence.
Of course I was a whore. I was wearing yoga pants. I was attending a secular university that distributed condoms at school events. I was taking a class on evolution! I was literally the textbook definition of a whore, and it was only because of His grace and divine will that I was able to realize the truth about myself. I begged forgiveness and asked the stranger how I could repent. He told me that I could attend his church and pay a weekly tithe to maintain the house of the Lord, and that I could restructure my entire life to fit the Lord’s vision.
I began going to church and reading the Bible. I burned my yoga pants and joined a pious Christian university. I only speak to men my priest deems worthy of speaking to. I spend my free time throwing things at Planned Parenthood clinics and protesting the inclusion of evolution in school curricula. Truly, I live a life of virtue and decency, content in the knowledge that I have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. So, if a stranger calls you a whore on Bruinwalk, heed his words and repent, for he is a messenger of God.
It is never too late to burn your yoga pants.