Sitting in the nail salon, a beautiful young woman comes over, “Oh, I want to see your nails and what you’re getting done.” I smiled and showed off my pink nails with black and white stripes and out of my mouth came the strangest thing, laughing I said, “You’re so beautiful! Look at you, all tan and pretty.” I don’t know why I said, it is so out of my character but here I sit and only God knows.
She answered, “Oh, you say that because you’re American. If you were Filipino you wouldn’t say that. I am too dark, plus I play sports in college and so I am outside a lot. You have no idea how many whitening creams I’ve tried. Nothing works. Americans all say they wished they had my skin but my mom says to cover up.”
“Are you kidding? Most people pay big bucks and never get your skin color. You are gorgeous!”
She smiled a great big smile.
Okay, now I know why I said what I said. Here stood this beautiful girl, early 20’s, I later find out, with the perfect body and long dark hair, great personality, outgoing and friendly and she needed a little nurture from a mom figure.
Daughters of the Most High King, who are you nurturing today?
I had a long drive yesterday to pick up tile to finish the fellowship hall. Flipping through radio stations, I stopped at the Oprah Channel and listened to a show with Dr. Laura Berman. The topic interested me because she was going to interview 20 something women on issues of sexuality.
It wasn’t long into the show before I was very saddened by what I was hearing. In modern-day sexuality of friends with benefits and one night stands, where does that leave a young women? I heard these young women make comments like, “All my other sexual partners…”, “How do I tell him that I find (fill in the blank) strange?”. It wasn’t that I was thinking they’d had so many partners, it was that I saw the discomfort. On the one hand, they are having sex, the most intimate thing you can do with a man, and they can’t talk about their feelings. One woman said she was able to have multiple partners because she was able to emotionally detach.
Yet, the thing the that blew me away was that sex wasn’t about pleasure for them. In the group only one woman had achieved an orgasm. Dr. Berman said this is typical and meets the studies. Although it wasn’t spoken, it sounded to me that it was more about expectation than it was about anything else.
While there are some who read this site that will think this isn’t a topic for Christian site, I disagree. I don’t think the women in the church do much better in this area, but if we keep quiet it will never get better. Teaching why something is the way it is makes it understandable. If we keep pointing to scripture without explanation it will never get better. I believe we have to explain why.
Sex sells, no doubt about it, from perfume to hamburgers we are inundated with sexual images in the media. When sex becomes casual and not profound then you begin to detach. When you unlock doors prematurely, with images brought on too early, desires awakening before they are understood, pressures from society that tell you sex is no big deal and love that awakens before it so desires, Song 2:7, 3:5, 8:4, through consent or through pain, then you begin to shut off emotionally. This is how we are able to emotionally detach. I don’t think these women were bad, I think these women are asking questions and trying to figure out where they fit in. I don’t think they understand the why of things any better than most.
God put sex in the confines of marriage because it is emotional. Sex is intimate, pleasurable, or should be, sacred and profound. It is not just for having babies, it’s for relationship with your spouse. I know that sounds old-fashioned but the purpose is to save us heartache. God didn’t put sex in marriage to punish us but to protect us. He made woman the last thing he put on earth because she was to be the crown of creation. She was the one who brought peace to man who had discovered there was no mate suitable for him. She was brought on the scene to be the finishing touch, the answer to his longing. Had she been brought on earlier she would have been abused by a man who didn’t understand her purpose, not because men are abusive but because he would not have known better. God brought woman to a man who understood her worth. I can’t imagine not being able to look at my husband in the eye and tell him my desires because we have intimacy and a bond that makes comfort possible.
Sex is a big deal. It’s leaving a part of you with someone else. God isn’t being punitive, he protecting his children from the misunderstandings of a great gift opened too early.
I once heard Dr. Laura Schlessinger say love is about 30% of a marriage. Being a romantic I thought surely it was more than that, but when you look at a marriage realistically, you find that Dr. Laura and the song by Patty Smyth are right, “Baby, sometimes love just ain’t enough”. You would think that in a second marriage we’d be a little wiser with our hearts but that really isn’t the case. The heart falls in love the same way it always does and the head needs to be the voice of reason. There are some good reasons to postpone or walk away from a potential partner even when you love them.
Look for the warning signals and listen to your gut. Are either of you too involved with ex’s? Be real here, where there are children involved, there are going to be conversations, I’m talking about being too involved. Does the ex have keys to the place? Are family dinners still taking place and are holidays still spent together? Having you come into the scene might be a really confusing thing to a child whose parent has moved out but everything else looks like a family to them. That will create a war with you and the child and it will not be pretty. Is the ex couple still at war? There are no wars when it’s not personal anymore.
Do you agree with parenting styles? This will be the number 1 debate in a second marriage. Do you agree with his parenting style? Does he agree with yours? Is he constantly in court fighting over custody? Ask yourself, do you want to be a part of that? Are you financially equipped to handle that? Does the amount of money it costs to raise the children going to be an issue for you? Will there be things one set of kids will be able to afford to do, say summer camps or luxury gifts, that the other set of kids will not be afforded the opportunity to do? How will this affect your household? Be honest!
Now look at the blame game. Is his divorce all his ex’s fault? Has he claimed to have no control over his life whatsoever? Did everything just happen to him without his participation? This is the mind of a victim thinker and you walk into this relationship knowing that fact. Then ask yourself if you have accepted your responsibility in the demise of your marriage as well? Are you playing the victim?
Often when we see someone who we feel is a victim we tend to think we can fix it for them. We think we can make it all better and they will love us forever for making it all go away. We neglect to think about what happens to the relationship, and the changes it will go through, once one or both of you become whole again.
A second marriage is different in that it brings on added stresses and realizations. This isn’t just about the usual questions of money, career and how many children you want to have. No, the issues in second marriages are even greater than that. I believe that most often we ignore all the other issues that go with a second marriage and we neglect that we are bringing with us baggage that just doesn’t exist in a first marriage.
In my honest opinion I don’t think anyone should go into a first marriage with someone who is on their second marriage, if there are children involved. It’s way too complicated and best left alone. The heartache I’ve experienced in these situations just are too much to bear.
What happens if you are reading this but you are already married and living out a nightmare? Can it be repaired? The great news is it can. It will require serious work. You’ll both have to get some therapy and go through a lot of self-examination, letting some dreams go, letting some control go and have a lot of patience and grace, as you wade through this. Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to do some changing? I’m praying that you are.
There is even a word for it. Entrepreneur Magazine in it’s March issue claims that this recession has hit men the hardest and for the first time in history unemployment rates are higher for men 10.2% than for women 8.2%. For the complete story click here.
I’m still processing what this means overall. I’m grateful that people are working and that the article itself was positive, stating women have made big strides in the marketplace, are creating jobs as they begin companies, and are contributing powerfully to the economy and the world. Still, I can’t help but wonder why more women are going to college than men these days, why there are so many absent fathers, and what the men are doing, what are their roles in society these days? What does this say overall about our culture, and where is our country heading over the next several years? As a woman there is so much pressure between her desires for family and her career that I can’t help but wonder if there is a breaking point where the pressure just becomes too much?
In a 2005 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the statistics show that 1 in 11 high school girls are victims of physical abuse. While other experts say this statistic is low and could be as high as 1 in 4. Reporting can be spotty since most girls keep it a secret. On the surface it’s hard to understand why a girl would go through this when she has her life ahead of her and her choices are endless. Only the problem with this type of thinking is that we forget to think like a teenage girl whose completely infatuated with love and having that cute boy at any cost.
As with adult women in abusive situations these men are often quite apologetic after their abuse. They cry, they send flowers or gifts, the promise that it will never happen again. They swear that if she hadn’t have angered him so much he wouldn’t have done it. If a grown woman falls for these lines time after time then what can we expect from our teenagers?
At TLC we are studying Fight Like A Girl by Lisa Bevere. It’s an excellent study and through the discussions we are tackling these very issues. What does it mean to fight like a girl? What does using our strength look like and if we as the women God has placed to lead our girls don’t know then how do we think they respond? A question I asked last week to our youth girls was, “What does showing your strength as a woman look like?”, it was met with blank stares. I then asked the women, “Why can’t the girls that we mentor answer this question confidently?” and it was boldly answered by one women, “Because we don’t know either”.
We must empower our girls to know that they are the Crown of Creation. There is a way to treat a woman and that must be taught. I know you are reading this and thinking we have to teach our sons but the fact of the matter is that you as a woman need to understand how you should be treated and not accept anything less than that. I have to admit I saw that we aren’t doing our job with our daughters when I heard a young woman of 17 say, “A woman shows her strength by being tough, showing a man she can do it by herself you know? They can’t hurt her.”
A woman doesn’t show her strength by being tough. We weren’t designed to be physically tough. We were designed after everything on the earth was created. God didn’t create anything else after he created us. We show our strength in our nurturing, we show our strength in our ability to be relational, we show our strength in our love. Teen girls are being abused because they don’t know their strength, they don’t know their worth, they don’t know their possibilities. So they think being abused is as good as it gets and that saying sorry fixes it. We need to elevate our worth to a higher standard.
Just because a male is good-looking, charming, popular, smart or a jock doesn’t mean he has character and integrity. A person can be smart but that doesn’t mean they are decent humans. Just because he says he is sorry doesn’t mean we take him back. We are worthy of so much more than this! How will our young women know these things though if we aren’t teaching it? How can we change these statistics unless we speak out and have dialogue? Stop for a moment as you read this and think about it. Have you talked to the young women in your life about abuse in dating? Are you watching for the signs?
We must learn that our strength is in our ability to think for ourselves. Our strength is holding ourselves to a high standard of morality and worth. Our strength is in not following the crowd. Our strength is in the ability to discern right from wrong. These things only happen when we are able to truly know who we were created to be.
Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
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From time to time, I hear the phrase “I was a mistake”. I just want to tell you today that you were not a mistake. You are God’s creation and he formed you, wrote your story, gave you your parents, knew the year you’d be born and gave you a mission to be fulfilled before the foundation of the earth. So before Genesis 1:1 you were created. The word says you were in God. Just as a thought is in our mind or a baby is in a mother’s womb, God has implanted in your DNA a memory of a future. God planned you. He breathed his plan into you as he was shaping you.
camille allen
Maybe your mom has always said she got pregnant accidentally or maybe your dad made hurtful statements about how he had to marry your mom but you were not for one moment a mistake. God knew your father would have sex with your mother, even if it were one time. That one time was your opportunity to make your entrance into the world. It’s true. There are no accidents and no coincidences in the your design and birth.
There is only one you. You were put here with a mission on your heart to fulfill. There is only one person in this whole world that has your fingerprints, your DNA, your personality, your talents, your attributes. No one else can fulfill your mission in this moment. You are the only one. If you don’t fulfill your mission then it goes unfinished in this time.
The reason why so many people cry out for Jesus’ return and the reason why he doesn’t answer that call is that the mission that we were sent to do has yet to come to pass. So it isn’t time yet. What has God given you to do? If you can’t remember you need only to sit down and ask him. Prayer, for those of you who don’t know how, is simply dialogue. So a simple, “God, I don’t know what my purpose is, can you begin to reveal it to me so that I can begin to walk it out?” Just with that prayer God will begin to let you know what you are called to do.
What happened to your dreams? Well remember when you were a child and you felt that there was nothing you couldn’t do? How many times did you tie a towel around your neck and pretend you were Wonder Woman, or maybe that was just me!
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How many times did you play school, house, store? How many times did you grab the hair brush and sing?
Well those dreams are still in your heart. They have however, been squashed by words spoken against you. “Quit being silly.” “Quit showing off.” “Wonder Woman is not real.” “Girls can’t be doctors.” “Would you please quit singing? You’re driving us nuts!” “You’re not pretty enough to be a model.” Those words spoken carelessly over your life were not from God and so they aren’t valid.
The fact is parents say some stupid things to their children. We all do and we all feel bad afterwards but the fact of the matter is we’re human and we all fall short of the goal sometimes. You though, you beautiful creation of God, you are masterpiece. You are more valuable than the most expensive thing on earth. God took his time with you. He made you perfectly, even though you look in the mirror and hate the shape of your ears, you have to just smile and think, ‘God made those’. You are not a mistake. You were fearfully and wonderfully made. So in this moment take a moment to hear those words that wounded you from your childhood and made you feel worthless for the last time. Hear them clearly and then ask God to make you forget them forever. They no longer define you. They no longer hold any meaning to you. You are supposed to be here. You are designed for this moment in time and there is none like you. There is an old song that we used to sing in church and we sing it to God. However, you are formed in his image so it also could apply to you. Today listen to God’s voice sing it to you. It goes,
There is none like you. No one else can touch my heart like you do. I could search for all eternity long and find there is none like you.
Pastor Susan 