The most common question I get when people find out I went to the “Embracing God’s Design for Sexuality” conference at the Ark Encounter is “Did you get any good sex tips?”

For a conference on sex, the speakers actually said very little about sex. Even when they talked about sex within a heterosexual marriage, it was almost exclusively about things not to do (pornography, bondage, swinging).

The closest thing to a sex tip I noted throughout the entire conference was during the panel session, when Phylicia Masonheimer (who was a lesbian and is now married to a man) was asked “How do you deal with images from past sexual encounters that pop up during intimacy with your husband?” Phylicia answered that everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, should pray over their marriage bed with their husband[1] both before and after sex.

This was not something I had heard of before, so I asked some other participants at the conference if they did this, and what they pray for/about. They answered that it’s kind of like saying grace, you ask God to bless the gift you are about to receive. The resulting image that popped into my head was this:

I know I’m going to be accused of picking a ridiculous prayer for that cartoon, but the “common table prayer” is what I associate with grace due to my vaguely Lutheran upbringing. Furthermore, I am yet to find any prayer that you can substitute into that last panel that doesn’t make me laugh. In fact, since the conference I’ve been stifling laughter every time I hear anyone say grace. To demonstrate the problem, here are some more possible endings to that panel created from modifying prayers I found by googling “how to say grace” to be about sex.

[1] It was a women’s conference, so assuming that everyone in the audience was a woman was reasonable. And she doesn’t believe anyone should be having sex with someone of the same gender. So specifying husband while saying “everyone” wasn’t that weird.