God, mental illness, and STDs

So I spent the morning rehabbing clients with psychological disorders and the afternoon teaching safe sex to a bunch of Senior citizens.

My life is so diverse.

Anyway, the same thing came up in both settings.

(First, let me explain something before I begin the stories: I am not comfortable in psychiatric facilities. It has nothing to do with the clients there, because I find them intriguing and usually nicer than people outside the facility. It's the fact that I struggle with mental illness myself and feel like a complete imposter sitting there as the nursing student learning to help them when I can't get my own brain under control half the time.)

So anyway, I'm already uncomfortable...just waiting for someone to realize I am on the wrong side of the medication cup...when one my clients metaphorically corners me by asking me to define "mental illness." My classmate was standing there but I knew that she was going to defer the question to me because of my BA in psych (oh yes, I have a bachelors in how screwed up I am, it's wonderful). But I panicked because of course I can give a textbook definition and pass the exam but that's not really what's he's looking for.
So I manage to stammer "Well, that's hard to define now isn't it? Why don't you tell me what it means to you?"

And he tells me that it's God's punishment.

To which I immediately have about a thousand bells and whistles going off in my head.
First of all that goes against everything I believe about God.
And secondly, he unknowingly just said I was being punished by God.

And we'll skip how I handled that because there was a lot of blubbering and me not knowing what I was "supposed" to say and protesting that it wasn't punishment...

Next I had a Senior announce that STDs were punishment for having sex.

Luckily I was not the person doing the actual lecture at the time so I didn't have to handle that and actually had time to think about it.

What I thought about was how STDs are not God's punishment for not following the Bible, but rather God gave us the instructions in the Bible because He understood STDs before the rest of us and didn't want us catching them and helping them become the nasty mutated buggers they are today.

And that was that.