Sexual Imprinting
In his YMIS lecture on Sexuality and Young People, Paul Wegner made the comment that for young people their sexuality is like wet concrete. The experiences they have as young people and young adults shape how their sexuality forms. So a person can become gay under certain circumstances, and they can become just about anything sexually under the wrong circumstances. Once their sexual concrete sets, then it is very difficult to change.
Our minds are like photographic film – and when sexual events take place in our lives, their is a flash and something imprints in our minds and becomes “set.” So for a young man who experiments with homosexual things – he is making it easier and easier to become gay. Some people may be abused as children by men or women and because there is pain as well as pleasure – their minds get “set” in certain ways.
When a baby duckling is born the first thing it sees imprints on its mind and becomes it’s mother. There are examples of this on the net including some interesting pictures. So if a human being is present (like some researchers were) when the eggs hatch, they are imprinted on the ducklings mind and the human becomes the mother. The baby ducklings will follow the person around and think that this is perfectly normal.
This “sexual imprinting” takes place in the minds of young people in our culture. They have certains experiences and find pleasure in them and this “sets in their mind” and they now think that this is normal behaviour.
God has created men and women and sex is a beautiful act between them, and marriage is the proper place for sex to take place. Whenever sex happens outside of this beautiful place, and especially in a young person, it imprints in their mind so that they somehow change. This is why the Bible says that when a person commits adultery “they sin against their body.”
When a young man and young women are able to abstain until they marry, they will imprint on each other and love each other more fully - and it will be a beautiful thing.
For people who have somehow been caught in other circumstances – Christ is the healer, and He is the only place to go. Begin with Him.
