All the time my daughter was a little girl I was so filled with joy that I had the privilege of providing a sanctuary for this precious child of God. It was so wonderful to be God's vessel of His fatherly love, nurturing, protecting, and providing for all her needs. I never had a doubt about what my job was. It seemed to just automatically be a part of me. Of course it really was not part of my carnal nature, but instead was a fruit of the Holy Spirit of God living in me because I was a Christian. God had already spent years breaking me of self-confidence and replacing it with God-confidence. He had trained me through enough trials and tribulations to discipline myself to depend on the Holy Spirit to to use His Word the Bible to discern a lot of my thoughts and feelings so I could recognize those that were from Him and those that were not. And to put off those that were not of Him, and instead live by those that were of Him. So being a vessel of His father's heart toward my daughter was really Him manifesting Himself through me. But it seemed to just be there and flow through me so easily that I did not think about very much. It was just so obvious that I was supposed to be that for this precious child. After all I was a full grown adult trained and equipped and she was just a child. Now I say "she", and of course I "knew" she was a girl, and I knew that girl children were somewhat different than boy children so I raised her a little different than I probably would have raised a boy. I steered her a little more toward girl stuff and treated her a little more delicately, but I didn't make a very big issue about the difference. After all she had to survive out in the world just the same as a boy would have to. Life was good. I had everything properly categorized. I did not treat her the same as I would an adult, after all she was a child. The adult world is completely different than the world of children. Children don't have to deal with things like marriage and adult sexuality. The truth is I did not think about adult sexuality very much. What was there to think about? Woman bodies are meant to be desired by and given in marriage to men bodies, and vice-versa. I was happily married, devoted, and faithful to my wife, and she was to me. We happily satisfied each other. That also seemed so automatic. It was all part of the natural order of things. Then nature played a dirty trick on me. Suddenly, out of no-where, there was no longer a child standing before me. I mean, I knew this stranger resembled my little girl. But she was in someone else's body. Who was this..., this..., this adult female standing in front of me, with all the God given paraphernalia that God seemed to have provided in such a way as to cause men to want to marry her. Suddenly the world had become much more complicated and threatening. Males now were going to.., to.., to.. desire her. I was not prepared for this reality. My first response was to cover her up. I tried to get her to dress in a totally unrevealing manner. But, like her mother, she was too well figured for that to be possible. No matter how she dressed she was too obviously a beautiful woman. Yikes! Men would want her. The world had now changed from that secure place I provided for her into a wilderness full of..., of..., of.. predators. I began to wish I had been wise enough to have found the right family with the right boy child and arranged a good marriage for her ahead of time. But no, I certainly wanted marriage to be her choice. But if I had thought this matter through ahead of time I might have been able to line up enough good prospects that she would choose one of them. I realized that I did not have that much control over life. And I was thinking in terms of having her get married immediately! But the truth is that even though she was in an adult body she was still a child! And besides that God encouraged those who could receive it to remain single. What if God really wanted my daughter to remain single! That whole thing about remaining single in the Bible had always been over my head. I just really could not understand what that was all about. I had just figured that God created some people to not be interested in romance. But that was not my daughter. She was obviously noticing the boys. I really began to have trouble about God's wisdom in making females so obviously... female. So I began to earnestly talk to God about this problem. I could not help but chuckle and shake my head at myself when He answered me. He said "Why are you so worried ? Could it be that you did not deal with this whole topic all that well when you were her age?" Of course He already knew the answer. God is so merciful and longsuffering. I was not even a Christian when I was my daughter's age. I handled puberty with all the same frustrations and mistakes the rest of the unsaved world generally handled it with. After I became a Christian I got married before I had to think much about the challenges of being a single adult. And now I had been married so long that I had all but forgotten about this reality. Concerning this aspect of life I had never had to "grow up" spiritually. The answer was so simple and profound. As I said at the beginning, God had already trained me to understand the reality that as Christians we must fight to walk in the Spirit instead of the flesh. This means that as long as we are in these bodies of flesh we experience all the thoughts and feelings of the sinful flesh. But now that we are Christians God has also created us as new spiritual beings filled with the Holy Spirit. Therefore we also experience the thoughts and feelings that come from God. Our "work" then is to take our thoughts captive and guard our hearts by the power of God living in us. That means we endeavor to stop automatically believing what we are thinking and feeling and instead examine them to see if they line up with what God says in the Bible. We rely on the Holy Spirit living in us to use God's Word to discern our thoughts and feelings. Then we put off those that aren't from God and instead live by those that are from Him. My problem was that I had not yet been forced by life to do this much concerning the topic of sexual desire. God had provided me with the easier way of marriage. So, relying on the Holy Spirit to help me remember what the Bible says, I sought God's input. First I remembered that God owns our bodies no matter what age they are. They do not belong to us. Then I remembered that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Then I remembered that we are to rule over our flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit. Then I remembered that God is our protector. My daughter knew and believed all these principles, plus she understood, believed, and practiced walking in the Spirit. Unlike me when I was her age, she would recognize when her desire for romance was sinful and she would rule over her body and die to that desire in order to keep God's temple, her body, holy. She also would do the same if she thought God wanted her to remain single because of her devotion to God. And she would protect her temple from boys who did not do the same with their temples as she did with her's. All I had to do was stand beside her and be God's vessel to help her with this responsibility. It was so simple I had to chuckle with relief. Once again I saw that God had everything under control. And I understood that God made the difference between men and woman so obvious so that we would have another example to teach us the reality of our need to always depend on and obey God instead of do our own thing. So God blessed me by teaching me now, through my daughter, something I would have learned at her age if I had been a serious Christian then like she is. God did not let me be ripped off because I was not a Christian at her age. And he blessed me with a daughter I did not have to worry about because He blessed her with this maturity at her age. God is so wonderful!