Mary Slaney blamed it all on “Torn Between Two Lovers”. Her dissipation that is. MacGregor’s hit song came at a time when Mary was distrusting the old verities and here was another sweet-warbling Mary with a voice so pure that she sympathetically thought, “torn between two lovers…that can happen.”

Pop songs made love beyond the borders of marriage okay. There were no shortage of angelic-voiced innocents singing of shedded inhibitions. It was as if the radio were filling a need for Mary and Juice Newton was singing her song:

“I see no need to take me home,
I'm old enough to face the dawn.
Just call me angel of the morning, angel”

This was what she needed, reassurance that what she wasn’t doing anything wrong. And not from a guy, not some cad who’d say anything to get into her jeans. No, she wanted to hear it from a girlfriend, a girlfriend experienced but innocent.

College was easy, her sorority sisters comfortable in their skin and sin. “There’s nothing wrong with it Mary!” they said. Cross-wearing fornicators, they’d ask her to find another place to stay so they could entertain their men, even as the silver jewelry made fashionable by Madonna dangled from their necks. They said they loved Jesus and their life. They seemed to have married justice and mercy, their will and God’s.

And so began the long struggle for Mary, who took the long road to and from the wilderness, arriving at last back to her true home only to find a surprise waiting.

The surprise was to find that Christians are all cross-wearing fornicators in one way or another, and that all, in big ways or small, try to marry their will and God’s. And it struck her as she donned a cross necklace: "Can I wear this silver jewelry?"