I’ve been reading several of the stories on SunnyDayNew.com, and I have been so inspired and humbled by the true stories I’ve found here! Kudos to the ones who wrote down their experiences for us to read, hands down. They’re brightening our days out here, you guys. I’m not alone!! Thank goodness… 

I guess you could say I’ve always been a nudist. I’ve been ditching the stitch for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest childhood memories, in fact, is of my dad spanking me for not wearing underwear. 

Please let me take a minute to explain. I’m the second-oldest of four brothers (no sisters – some say I’m lucky and others say I’m missing out – I guess I’ll never know lol). My older brother is five years older than I am, and my younger brothers are three and four years younger than I am (1990, 1994, 1997, 1999). At that age (probably 6-ish, I don’t exactly recall… I think it was 2000), I and all three of my brothers wore oversized T-shirts as nightgowns, with nothing but tidy-whiteys underneath. I quickly discovered that a giant, loose-fitting garment just gets tangled up under my arms after the first couple of hours of sleep and so I ditched that first. Next, I began to realize that the underwear presented a similar (though to a lesser degree) comfortability problem, so I ditched that too. But another problem soon emerged: I didn’t like the underwear at all anymore. What was the point? It was uncomfortable and no one ever saw me without my “outer garments” on anyway, so why bother? Equipped with a new outlook on my clothing life, I stopped wearing underwear under my nightwear at a very early age. Well, my dad noticed and spanked me, and I put them on. But just for that one night – and I took them off to sleep. This became less of an event and more of a saga, until my parents finally convinced me that the discomfort of underwear was better than the spanking. It eventually became habit again, and I started wearing underwear all the time – but I kept on with sleeping naked. I was hooked.  

My favorite memory from this era of my journey into nudism/naturism is the time I went to bed in pajamas and woke up naked the next morning – to this day I don’t remember taking them off. I emerged from my bunk bed very refreshed and well-rested, and also completely buck nude. I still remember my older brother sitting up in his bed, shocked, and asking: “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” or something like that. I was already halfway down the ladder, and it hadn’t dawned on me in the least to get dressed. I don’t recall how I felt at the time, but there’s something very satisfying and inspiring that I didn’t really feel “naked” when I was naked, at least that morning. 

I grew up in a very, very Baptist household. What separates us from other Christian denominations is basically that we think you ought to be dunked in water by a Christian mentor when you convert into Christianity, and we take most things very seriously. Knowing the Southern Baptists as I do, we often take some things too seriously. 

Case in point: as I entered puberty, modesty became a hot topic in the youth group at church. Don’t ever let a girl see you without pants, and don’t ever look at a girl’s torso areas – ever! Understand? God will cut you some slack with your spouse someday, but don’t even think about seeing anybody else but him/her. I know it sounds all too familiar and homely and at the same time profoundly sad, but that’s what I was taught. And it was taught with such ferocity and passion and confidence that I assumed that my trusted church leaders had it right. I kept my pants on and I passionately expected my female peers to keep their sternums and shoulders covered up, lest I lust after them. I felt – and indeed, I was taught this very deliberately – that it was often girls’ own fault that guys had inappropriate sexy thoughts about them. After all, they’re the ones who didn’t cover up right, right? Of course, right. 

As Christians, we hold that the Bible is true and perfect, and that it’s been preserved to almost 100% accuracy of how it was originally written (this has actually been verified many times by archaeologists and historians). God says a lot of important things in the Bible, most of which I won’t get into here. Bottom line, as a Christian I trusted the Bible as a source of moral truth, so I went there for answers. My church leaders eagerly provided me with some choice quotes from the good old Holy Book and that was that. 

Until I turned seventeen. That was when I looked up one day and realized that I believed an awful lot of things, but I had little or no idea why I believed them. I began to list things out, and come to find out, I didn’t have any Bible content to fall back on if someone asked me, “Well, where does the Bible say that?” (While I am still a Christian, I have come to know that the Bible isn’t the only way someone discerns truth, and it’s certainly not the only reason someone should believe something. It’s my firm conviction that the Bible doesn’t say absolutely everything mankind needs to know, but also that what it does talk about, it’s 100% right about. But, back on point.) 

I happened to be spending a summer in Nicaragua at the time, and on the mission compound my mom and I were staying at, we had an old, run-down laptop with some Bible software on it. I had nothing else to do with most of my free time, when we weren’t spending time in the villages. When the sun sets in a third-world country, Americans need to seek shelter. Quickly. So I had two to four hours of complete boredom, every single day.  (This was actually my second time in the country, and my fond memories of that first trip made me confident that my mom and I would have a blast staying for three straight months that summer. We had come, in short, to tell people about Christianity and get them to convert. Since we believe that not believing in Jesus the way we do will send you to Hell, making converts is about the most ethical thing we can do. This trip was just me and my mom. My dad and brothers stayed in the states for work.) 

But I was anxious to begin my journey to base all my beliefs on real, hard facts anyway, and why not spend my free time on this? It was a very noble cause after all. The Bible was the only thing I knew of at the time to tell me things about my life in this way, so I went there – especially since it talked specifically about most of the things I was most concerned with basing on hard facts. Things like: Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Do human beings have free will or not? But these things seemed very deep and lofty, and I just didn’t feel equipped to tackle them just yet, so I went with something a little more straightforward: modesty. Everybody knows that being naked is a sin, right? That women should cover their breasts and such up so that men don’t see them and go all sex crazy? And if modesty was even half as central to human nature and morality as my church leaders made it sound, then the Bible would be dripping with it. 

Only it wasn’t. Not even a little. I looked up everywhere in the Bible where the words “naked” or “nakedness” occur (and I did it very quickly, thanks to the digital age of offline search engine desktop applications), and none of them were in commands. At least, not a command like: “Don’t be naked. Ever.” Nowhere. That was the first brick to my head. I was floored. How could we be so sure that this went against our Christian religion if the Bible didn’t actually say it was wrong, not even in passing, like, “God is the only God – oh, and by the way don’t ever let anyone see you naked – but as I was saying…” 

I wasn’t going all the way yet, though. All I realized at first was 1) the Bible didn’t command us to wear clothes or even what to cover, and 2) the Biblical words for “nakedness” in the original languages (long story) don’t even mean “nudity,” per se. So, even if some of the Bible’s mentions of “nakedness” were some kind of veiled warning against nudity, it was usually just the genitals it was worried about, depending on the specific words used in the original languages. 

Well, that didn’t go over with Mom very well… We had an argument that lasted who-knows-how-long, and to her amazement, I wouldn’t take back what I believed. The Bible was clearly unclear on this, and I was sticking to it. 

I spent almost every minute of the rest of the summer with no shirt on. I felt great, and thanks to getting the tan of my life in a tropical nation, I looked great too! 

After we got back to the States, however, my mind was inescapably drawn back to the topic of modesty, so I went back to searching. Only this time, it wasn’t just the Bible. I found all sorts of things being said about nudity, and even social nudity, and contrary to what my church leaders believed, it was actually good for you! And not only did it not cause people to have sexy thoughts, it made for a really healthy environment, with plenty of benefits to one’s mind, body and spirit. 

And that’s what really got me thinking. For a long time, my parents had instilled in me and my brothers that ultimately, when we sin it hurts us. When we lie or steal, people lose trust in us – not to mention it just naturally stresses people out to do these things. It goes beyond fear of getting caught. We just know it’s wrong. When we have sex with lots of people, we tend to get STD’s. The list goes on. Long story short: you reap what you sow. If you do bad things, bad things tend to happen to you as a result, and the same went for good things. If God created us to do good and not bad, then doing bad things would naturally work against us – almost like trying to use a car motor as a vacuum cleaner. Not only will it do a bad job of cleaning your floors, but after a while you’ll ruin the motor to boot, because it’s not what it was designed to do. So if sin is something we weren’t designed to do, it would by nature eat away at our wellbeing. That’s part of why basic standards of morality are so similar across cultures, I think – we can all see that doing these things hurts others and also ultimately hurts ourselves. 

So if nudists got almost nothing but good things out of social nudity, how bad could it be? I thought and prayed about that for a long, long time. 

After we got home that summer (2012), my parents got hired to be the speakers at a children’s week at a camp owned by an acquaintance of ours who let them park their RV at the back of the camp property whenever they were in town. Nice people, very friendly. I almost wish I hadn’t done what I’m about to tell you that I very truly did, but to say that I wish it hadn’t happened would be a lie. 

After all my studying, I concluded that the next logical step (having absorbed a lot of intellectual data) was to try it out for myself (and take in some experiential data and see how they compared). I asked permission to go for an afternoon hike in the old camp’s abandoned woods and my parents didn’t mind, so I went for it. I brought only my tennis shoes and a pair of running shorts. By now, of course, they were quite used to me not wearing a shirt – I just didn’t tell them that the rest was coming off today, too… 

I got out of sight and thought about going for it, but I couldn’t get my mind off of the possibility that there could be someone, anyone, out there in the woods with me somewhere, just waiting (metaphorically, of course – no one knew I was back there except my folks) to spot me and cause a stir. So I trekked all of the trails I could find, as quickly and extensively as I could. Then, after having hastily explored at least two acres of woods, I returned somewhere along the middle of the area I had cleared and told myself it was time. My heart was racing, and I was very, very nervous, but I did it. By golly, I did it. 

It was very weird. I got aroused instantly, even though my mind was definitely not focused on anything even remotely sexy. (My theory, looking back on it, was that my more sensitive areas were simply not accustomed to such free air movement, and didn’t know how else to react. Now that I’m a little more seasoned, I don’t have this problem anymore. Anyhow, that’s my theory on first-timers’ arousal.) 

My shorts securely in hand, I re-explored the woods, going everywhere I had already been. Obviously, I ran out of trails very quickly, much to my growing disappointment. But several things happened during that initial re-exploration: 1) My arousal dissipated, leaving me very calm, collected and relaxed, 2) I felt very comfortable in my own skin and couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the main camp, so 3) I went on and explored even more of the woods without bothering with my shorts. With every step, I was more comfortable and more convinced that this was about to become a permanently central part of my life. Several times, I heard something move in the underbrush and panicked, shoving my dirty shoes through my shorts as quickly as humanly possible, leaving dirt inside with nothing between me and the now gritty fabric (yet another reason to dislike clothes), but it was always either my imagination or some unseen critter. 

I returned and reluctantly donned my shorts, greeting my parents with all the excitement of a Galapagos tortoise, as if nothing spectacular had happened at all – which, of course, was the complete opposite of the truth. I couldn’t get my mind off of it. I had to go back. It was amazing. Incredible! I had never really been out in the sun and the wind like that before. (In hindsight, isn’t it kind of odd that it takes this long for this much of our skin to see the outside world?) I loved it! I went out again the very next day, and this time I brought my journal. I can still go back to that very journal and open it to the very page and read the very words I penned all those years ago, sitting naked in the woods behind that old camp. I have very fond, though admittedly vague, memories of those woods. 

While my mind needed to catch up just a smidge, my heart was in it. I was sold. From then on, I think it’s safe to say I was truly a nudist. 

I had read a lot on the issue, but I hadn’t really seen it. I wanted to go and experience nudism in a social setting for myself, since that seemed to be the best experience according to a lot of nudists – but I couldn’t. I didn’t have my own car, and I was not about to lie to my parents, especially not about the fact that I was taking their car to the number one place (at the time) they would least like to see me go. I couldn’t go and meet people, but I could still see them, thanks to the internet. Besides, looking at the pictures would help me get more used to not just being naked, but seeing naked people too. And besides, if I hoped to really go in person at some point, it would pay to be at least a little used to seeing nudity, right? 

(I’m not proud of this era of my nudism, but it served a greater purpose in the long run, I think. You’ll see.) 

As much as it had amazed me how quickly I had felt at ease being nude, it amazed me even more how easily I began to feel at ease seeing nudity. I realize that pictures and reality are very different, but it was still there. I began to compile my own set of pictures that I had found and felt were particularly inspiring or relevant to my goals of observing non-sexual nudism at work on the laptop that my parents let me use at the time. Smart, right? 

I was homeschooled my whole life, and my English major mother always made sure we were at least one step ahead of the public school kids – and we usually were. And the fact that we were so closely involved with our sizable church congregation meant that we were pretty social, in spite of our “reclusive” schooling. 

Long story short, I got caught. One day during my lessons, my dad happened to walk up behind me as I was scrolling through my nudist pictures. I saw him come up behind me, and I saw him bend over for a second take, but I didn’t budge. I knew by then, thank God, that the last thing you want to do is rush to cover something up if you want to look innocent. And I was innocent as far as I was concerned, so I wasn’t about to ruin it all by what? Faking guilt? Lol. 

“What’s this?” I think is what he asked. So I showed him, and I explained in full detail the pictures’ source and their purpose. He was quiet and unresponsive at first, and the big shock was when I powered down the laptop without modifying my files and put it in his hand. 

“If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. No, better yet – please look at all the pictures.” 

My dad didn’t open the computer for the next two weeks. I still don’t know what took him so long. Maybe he was nervous. He’s always been an avid textile, very skittish about nudity. He tells a story of a woman’s nipple slip in the inner city that once caused him to be unable to make proper human conversation. At the time, he never went barefoot and to this day the only time you’ll see his shoulders or back is if you catch him on a particularly free-feeling day – but only at the pool. 

I pestered him. After those first two weeks, I was ready to have that laptop back. I’ve been a writer since before this happened, so my fingers were type-twitching the whole time. I wanted to write, but my laptop was stuck in the stinking “master suite!” On top of that, I think I did enjoy poking fun at him a little, in my own way. 

Finally, he looked – somewhere, somehow, in secret. He brought the laptop back to me and told me he had looked at every picture. He also mentioned that while the utter shock of seeing completely naked people was at first a little overwhelming, after the second or third picture, it wore off entirely, and it was just a matter of thumbing through the photos and getting it over with. He didn’t have any problems with lust or anything like that. Just weirded him out a little. 

I powered the laptop up that afternoon, delighted to finally be able to write again! Out of curiosity, knowing I wouldn’t find them there, I went looking for my photos in my computer files, and to my complete and utter shock, they were still there!! I know he didn’t forget. He just… approved, in his own quiet, unspoken way. That delighted me to no end, and still does even now, years later, even when I know he’ll probably never join me. 

Now that I was somewhat used to it, the next thing on my agenda was full and complete defeat of any reason to think that this was okay. How could it be? Being naked was a sin – right? I figured, if it was really wrong, and as obviously wrong as I had been taught, then it should be pretty easy to talk myself out of, at least intellectually. I guess you could have called me a reluctant nudist. 

My parents aren’t like a lot of Christian parents. They know their stuff. So I asked them for every single argument they could possibly think of to disprove the idea that social nudity was okay. I didn’t tell them on the front end, of course, that I was really just lining up their arguments in order to shoot at them and see if they bled or not, but they gave me their arguments nonetheless. 

After only a short time of study and thought and prayer, I came to realize that the arguments they had presented were, in stark contrast to the formidable defense they carried for the Christian faith as a more general idea, really rather weak. Just because Jesus wore clothes while he was on planet Earth, I should wear clothes now? Just because the Bible describes impoverished nakedness in a world of deserts and thorns and blizzards in a negative way, I should wear clothes? Such were their arguments. 

announced eventually that I had defeated all of their arguments. At first, they didn’t think much of it. And then (after a few weeks of convincing) they read it. 

Here I’ll stop and mention something I should already have mentioned but don’t know where to stick it: somewhere during this process, the topic of nudity came up and my mom and I had another argument about it. She had had enough of this “naked talk,” and by golly, she was going to nip this in the bud – so she reasoned with me. She started listing off this and that, giving reasons why this was bad for me, but I quickly and easily refuted her claims with such clarity, accuracy and confidence that before long, I had almost effortlessly defeated her entire case. She promptly ended the conversation and forbade me to talk about it any further. In that moment I realized that if I, a stupid teenager, could defeat so easily every single argument my mother, the smartest and best-educated person I knew at the time, had to offer, then this had to be right. 

Of course, I talked with my younger siblings about it extensively. (There was no one else I trusted to not think I was stark crazy, pun intended.) So extensively and convincingly, apparently, that my parents felt their only recourse was to forbid me from mentioning it to my brothers again. They couldn’t put down the logic or the Bible knowledge, so it was all they could do. I couldn’t blame them – they honestly thought I was going to hurt their other kids, so what else could they do? 

I was the oldest still living at home. My one older brother had joined the Marines, so he was out of state most of the year. So whenever Mom and Dad left me in charge, I declared my babysitting times clothing-optional. This didn’t last long, but it did open up some interesting lines of dialogue. My dad and I started talking about naturism more and more in this time, and I put it to him that maybe sometime when Mom wasn’t around, I could even have official permission to take my clothes off in the house. He laughed at the idea, but then when I actually asked once, he let me do it! My little brother, thus far eagerly following in my footsteps into nudism, thought it was unfair that I got to be naked and he didn’t, so he insisted that he be allowed to shed his clothing, too. I advised him against this, since Dad was already kind of in culture shock with one naked son in the house. 

That night went well, I thought, until Dad never let us do it again. I don’t know what it was – maybe it was my little brother and maybe it was just me. Maybe I had pressed it on our dad a little too soon. 

My brother was eager to be as accepted as a nudist as I was by our parents (such was his perception – the truth was we had reached an uneasy truce on the subject), so he came to me for advice. “How did you do it?” How did I get them to see that they couldn’t change me, that this was good for me? I told him that over time, I had had frank conversations with both of our parents about it, but only when it came up on its own. I didn’t bring it up. That was a fast-track to crosshairs and verbal gunfire. Well, apparently he forgot the last part, because he arranged a big important talk with our dad and laid it all out for him. Dad shut him down pretty fast, and my brother came back to me very emotional and very disappointed. He quickly faded away from nudism and today is a dedicated textile. At the time, I was angry with both him and myself. I felt like I had failed him and that he had been stupid. Of course, he may have ended up a textile anyway – who knows? He says nowadays that he doesn’t think nudism is wrong, per se, just too risky for people like us. 

Now is a good time for me to explain this side of Southern Baptist culture. When we think something’s wrong as a sub-culture, we never, ever change our minds. To this day, you’ll find Baptists here in the South who think that it’s a black-hearted sin to sip wine or have a beer with friends – not lewd drunkenness, just tasting the stuff means you need to “repent of your wrongdoing” and “get right with Jesus.” This is purely traditional, as is modesty, but over generations, they’ve become convinced that these are very real, very Biblical beliefs. So, while Christianity itself is something easily provable and defensible, this particular breed of Christian doesn’t do a good job of it. They believe it because they believe it, and if you disagree, well then you’re a “heathurn.” 

So it wasn’t just odd for me to become a naturist here in the Baptist South, it was a regular scandal. In their eyes, I might as well have been having a torrid affair, or been a pedophile or a peeping tom. I was going to be not just extremely strange (and I do mean extreme – like, alien status), but wicked, a danger not only to myself but to everyone around me, most especially “the children.” Not only would I be a pedophile-peeping-tom-wicked-creep, but one who expected others to “convert” to his cause. So, needless to say, almost no one who lives near me knows I’m a naturist. It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve dared to tell even my closest friends because I finally feel like there’s enough mutual trust there (and there was – whew!) for me to share something so monumentally outlandish with them. 

(The oddest thing about all this is that you would get a similar reaction from these Christians whether you were a solitary nudist or a social nudist, I think. Why doesn’t it make a difference? I couldn’t tell you exactly. I’d have to talk to them about that to find out, and… yeah, anyway.) 

On a side note, you may notice that I tend to say “naturist” instead of “nudist” in my own case. There are several reasons I prefer the term naturist over nudist. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the word “nudist,” but there’s so much swinger stigma down here, you would not believe. As soon as the word nudist crosses your lips, orgies fill everyone’s horrified minds – because that’s the only nudism they know*. Horrifying? Yes. Sad? Absolutely. True? Unfortunately, also yes*. Stop me? Not even close! 

Another reason I prefer “naturist” is because I feel like there’s a lot more to me wanting to take my clothes off than being “nude.” It’s about nature for me, really. About feeling it, getting in touch with the earth and the water and the sky and the plants, just as God designed my body to do. He didn’t give us bodies to keep them shelled up in tidy little cocoons all the time! I know that doesn’t make “nudism” any less valid a term for anybody else, but for myself, I prefer “naturism.” 

It’s been years since I’ve had an opportunity to hike those old abandoned woods. Mostly because they’re not abandoned anymore. The camp had a huge expansion project a few years back, so now most of the woods I once traversed in quiet, secure nudity are now either gone completely or crisscrossed by so much foot traffic that it’s just not worth the risk, for the aforementioned reasons. 

But my parents have always had a plot of abandoned woods behind their property where nobody ever goes and does anything like ever, so I decided to do some exploring. Actually, it wasn’t my idea per se. My little brother who had a brief stint in naturism used to go exploring in those woods behind the property with a friend of his – nude! They had a blast, but they stopped years ago. 

My turn. 

I ventured out into the woods, but this time I didn’t bring shoes like at camp. I had spent the previous two or three years building up calluses on my feet, so now (and even to this day) one of my favorite things to do is hike with no shoes on – or clothes, of course, when I can manage it. All I brought was some shorts, two knives and my cell phone. In hindsight, I didn’t really need the phone, but hey, I had it. For those who think it’s ridiculous I brought two knives, let me explain. One was a very small knife for things you would typically use a pocketknife for, and the other was quite large, designed to do cutting jobs that were too big or tough for your average knife, but not big enough for something like a hatchet. I was intending to practice my newfound bushcraft skills I was learning, if I found the opportunity. As it turned out, I ended up spending so much time nude that the knives got left behind with everything else! 

The woods look really overgrown from the outside, but as soon as I ducked through the first few feet of underbrush it turned out to be pretty open and spacious. In fact, it was a little too open at the front, so I hiked farther in for better cover. Following my naturally cautious instincts, I didn’t want to strip off in a place I hadn’t walked extensively yet, so I explored basically the whole tract before getting comfortable enough to undress. I discovered a lot of strange things – everything from old tires to Mardi Gras drinking glasses to gasoline cans to car seats to old toilets and glass bottles. 

I also discovered quite a large drainage ditch that ran almost the whole length of the tract, leading down to the river. (My family’s plot is right on a state highway, and the only thing between our plot and the river is that stretch of woods. A few hundred yards in, and there’s about a fifteen or twenty foot steep bank with pretty good views of the river. Now, understand, it’s a Louisiana river, so it’s not much to look at – it’s muddy and murky and it’s got a bunch of rotten trees hanging into it and I’m pretty sure it smells bad most of the time. The reason I’m not sure is because that summer in Nicaragua my mother and I discovered that I’m about 75% noseblind – in other words, my sense of smell is almost completely useless. I have been to more than one restaurant in past years, not really realizing until leaving the building after the meal that I hadn’t smelled food at all throughout the evening – not even while I was eating it. Weird, right?) 

I had brought along a nice thick walking stick with me, so I used it to help steady myself as I climbed gingerly down one side of the drainage ditch – I guess you could even call it a creek? The bottom of it was very muddy and very clay-y, so not only was it mud up to your knees, but it was sticky mud up to your knees. The underbrush in this section of the plot was something of a maze, so I knew the fastest way through the section was probably straight down the course of the creek, unless I wanted to go home covered in scrapes and thorns – so I improvised. The sides of the creek were only about eight or ten feet apart, and while they were too steep for walking, they were slanted inward toward the creek like any other ditch, so I stepped up onto one side and pushed off of the other with my walking stick. Thus equipped and feeling a lot more like something from a Rambo movie than I’m sure I looked, I pressed on, sometimes walking where the mud was dry and hard enough, and stick-climbing (?) where it was wet.

Eventually, finally, I caught sight of the river down the creek a ways. The creek got deeper and deeper but also narrower and narrower as it got closer to the river. I climbed out since the underbrush wasn’t so bad along here, and got a closer look from above. There was a tree that had fallen across the top of the creek’s banks, at ground level for the rest of the woods, but was still perfectly alive. All of its branches had just bent over the years to point “sideways” instead of up, reaching straight up toward the sun. I crossed it just to say I did, and then climbed down to take a closer look. I made my way cautiously down to the water and given the number of alligators here in Louisiana, I prodded the river several times with as much of my stick as I could before I really stepped into the water. Anyone who’s seen Crocodile Dundee knows that they can be waiting just inches away in murky water, and you’ll have no idea until they bite your head off. I’m paranoid, I know. 

Anyways, I concluded that my life was in no danger, thanks to my handy dandy walking stick, and for the first time in a long time, I realized that I could actually do this. The brush had fallen out on either side of the creek’s opening into the river, providing a nice sort of fence around a still little pool created by a fallen tree in the river. I couldn’t resist. 

I made my way back to the living bridge and climbed up. After a final look around to make sure I didn’t see anyone with a shotgun, I took off what little I was wearing and jumped back down into the ditch. The drop was maybe seven feet, so it’s not something I would have done on concrete, at least not barefoot, but the mud was damp and soft, and it turned out to cushion my landing very nicely. I still remember that moment of hitting the mud with both hands and both feet and looking up over my shoulder to check my six one last time. My heart was racing – but I felt so alive! My body had nailed that jump, and I was convinced it was because for once I didn’t have six or seven separate garments impeding my body’s natural abilities. I can’t imagine a fish swimming around in a sock, so why would I run and jump with any wrappings on either? 

I went back to the water and looked around. This was by far the most open place I had ever done this in – at least, standing up in full view. The river was about thirty or forty yards across, and the bank on the opposite side was much taller and much more thickly wooded, so I knew anybody could be up there and I would never see them. There were no boats zooming by, and praying the whole time there were no horrified onlookers on the opposite bank, I stepped out into the muddy river and reclined in nature’s watery La-Z-Boy. I had underestimated how amazing it would feel to be back in the water with no suit on. It’s completely different – I can’t really describe it with words. It’s almost like the difference of hearing really great music with or without earplugs in, or seeing the world with or without dark sunglasses on. The difference is incredible! And there’s just no comparison. I would choose nude every single time, if the temperature and social setting are right – every time. 

This reminds me of one last funny story, and then I’ll be done with the story part. During my brothers’ brief stint into naturism with me (this would be late 2012, early 2013, when I was 17 and my younger brothers were around 13-14), we were back at that old camp, swimming in the swimming pool. Now you have to understand that the pool is literally the middle of the camp. No trees around, and it’s on top of a friggin’ hill. If someone wants to see what’s going on from anywhere in the camp, all you need is some binoculars or 20-20 vision, and you’ve got it. Well, we were swimming at a time when only the camp staff were at the camp. It had been a few days, so they had covered all the chores and get-ready-for-the-next-group tasks ages ago, so they pretty much just stayed up at the eastern side of the camp in all the buildings, leaving most of the camp vacant for us.  

Since no one was around, I convinced my little brothers to take their swimsuits off. I had already been swimming nude for a few minutes, and I couldn’t take all the fun. This was the very first time I ever skinny-dipped, and I was hooked a little deeper that day. It was just too good to deny. Anyway, the funny part: we were all naked by now, huddled around this giant inner tube thing, when one of the camp staff walked up and started talking to us through the fence. Luckily for us, he didn’t come any closer than that and it was all just pleasantries. Turns out he was just setting up a charcoal grill by the pool to grill up some… meat of some kind… I don’t remember what kind actually… for the other staff members. Another stroke of luck was the fact that he had set up the grill so that it faced toward the pool, meaning that every time he opened the grill to tend the meat, he had his back to us. We snatched the first opportunity we could and started shoving our trunks back on as quickly as we could. I’m pretty sure I actually had to swim to the bottom of the deep end to get mine, and put it on at the bottom of the pool for good measure. 

I don’t know what my brothers think about that day, but I think it’s pretty darn hilarious. 

So here I sit, now married with a baby, writing about the good ol’ days. I still haven’t been to a resort yet (you know, a place where you don’t have to look over your shoulder the whole time when you’re nude outside), but I’ve got my eye on one for this coming summer. If I go, I’ll be writing in again. I’m sure Sunny would love to post another first nudist park story. Mine might turn out to be either boring, because I’ve already done it so much, or really funny, because I’ve never actually done it in a social setting, with people I don’t know and especially not in the presence of any human females. We’ll see. 

As a final reach-out to the reader, I want to make some things clear. I’m a Christian and a nudist. A naturist. Whatever you want to call me. I believe Jesus is the Son of God, crucified for our sins and raised on the third day as a demonstration of God bringing us to heaven when we die, if we submit to him – and I like taking my clothes off outside, and I can’t wait to do so with other people, and my conscience is 100% clear. I’ve been praying about this for years, and God has answered my prayer. I’ve prayed that if this is wrong, then would he please: 1) Send me conclusive proof that it’s bad, and/or 2) Make me so miserable when I try to do it that I stop liking it. Well, neither has happened – never in the five years since I’ve become a naturist – and in fact I’ve only come to love it more, in spite of these prayers. So if you’re a Christian reading this, go and try it for yourself! But I’m warning you now: if you don’t want to get hooked and love it for all you’re worth, then stay away. Nature will rope you in, man. It’s like tasting candy for the first time. That first piece, and then you always want more. 

And if you’re a nudist/naturist out there, and you’ve been curious about Christianity, or wanting to know more, or even already wanting to become a Christian, but some Christians have made it seem like Christianity and nudism couldn’t be more against each other, so you’d have to give nudism up – know that that’s a lie. An unintentional lie, but still a lie. So just know that you can be both. Whichever side you’re on, you can be both. Trust me. 

Well, I hope that this has been at least somewhat enjoyable for someone somewhere, and maybe even a little inspiring. I know my story isn’t a whole lot, but it’s all true. I love my God and my Savior, I love my wife and my beautiful baby boy, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but I wouldn’t trade naturism either. It’s not something I do anymore… it’s part of me now. It is me. How could I give up a part of myself? And besides, what better way to get to know the Creator of nature than by enjoying nature?  

And now, per request from Sunny, let me add a bit on what my wife thinks of all this. Late 2013, I became convinced that a particular girl of my social circle was the one for me, so I started to think and pray more intentionally about her. January 2014, at an apologetics conference in New Orleans, I guess you’d say I fell in love with her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t bear to leave her side – but I was also terrified of being obvious. If she didn’t feel the same way, then this would only hurt our friendship, and more-than-friends or not, I didn’t want to lose her, so I kept it on the down-low. 

The week after we got home, though, I told her I wanted to marry her. May 2015, we did get married! And now we live outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a big, healthy, happy little 1-year old boy. He’s an adventure. 

Well, not long after we became “an item,” I decided that telling her I was a naturist would be better sooner rather than later. I’d rather risk the coming relationship than base the growing relationship on a false assumption of hers about me. I mean, in normal culture, we do tend to assume that others are textiles, right? She did, anyway, so it came as kind of a shock. My delivery didn’t help things (that’s a whole story in itself…), but while I didn’t take my clothes off in front of her or anything, it was still a big deal. We fell out of contact for a few weeks, and I thought I had killed our chances. 

Obviously, we got over it. I’m a naturist, but she isn’t, and we’re married. She’s okay with naturism for other people – she doesn’t think it’s a moral problem. But to her, it’s still a really, really strange concept that she has a hard time envisioning for her own experience in life. After almost two years of marriage, we’ve come to a point of letting me visit resorts on my own (we had originally intended for me to wait if/until she felt ready) but I think we both know she might never try it at this point. 

I think she does give naturism honest thought sometimes, and even visiting resorts, but she’s a long ways away from actually doing it. She’s not fond of going barefoot, she takes no real pleasure in wearing less around the house (she wears shirt, jeans, underwear, jewelry, the whole bit, even at home), and she thinks that naturism is, in a word: gross. She doesn’t think of it as unsanitary, per se, but as extremely awkward and… well, gross. I don’t see it that way, and I find that sort of thinking about naturism actually kind of funny, having done it myself now for a long time. But, having never really tried it herself, she can’t wrap her head around how normal and natural it really is, or even how freeing it is physically as well as psychologically. Your whole social interaction changes, too, when you’re nude with others. It’s different, but better. 

The thing I least understand about our situation is that she’s unwilling to test the waters – even to prove me wrong. She isn’t interested in really understanding it firsthand – she just wants to not do it and that’s the end of it for her, it seems. Being a natural adventurer, this boggles my mind. If someone offers me a new drink that I’m pretty sure I’ll hate, I’ll still taste it just to say I really did it. I try new things for two reasons: 1) If I hate it, I can speak from experience and rebut anyone who tries to tell me it’s great, and 2) I might actually find I like it. In this way, I actually look forward to being wrong sometimes… So when something has the potential to be the next great thing, even if it looks like I might hate it, I do it! It’s who I am. We don’t understand each other, but I think lots of couples have opposite traits they can’t relate to in their partners. 

We’re moving forward. We’re happy, we’re healthy, God’s providing our needs and he’s even making sure we’re comfortable and having fun. Life is good. 

END - Part 1