A close friend of mine is getting married next weekend. To celebrate with her some friends threw her a bachelorette party. The party was being hosted by church people and they assured the guests that they were going to keep things classy. I had been to a couple of other bachelorette parties previously and was confident that it would not be more than I could handle. The party was on the clean side and nothing offensively vulgar. The part that caused me trouble was the opening of gifts. The bride received gifts for her honeymoon, and speculated about what that would be like.
After the party was over, I couldn't help but wish that I been receiving those gifts and wish that I would be enjoying those parts of marriage soon. For the next few days, I had sex on the brain and couldn't seem to get it out. I kept imagining and wondering about my honeymoon, and feeling very impatient.
Prayer: God, I pray that you will help me control my thoughts. Help me to have patience to save for marriage everything that is designed for marriage. Help me to make no compromises. Help me to pursue purity. Help me overcome temptation.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Engaged Life
Okay, so that's news! I've been engaged for a month now! :) It's a very exciting thing.
It's been too long since I've posted an update of my journey.
First of all, it seems like I've stopped being an "I" and more of a "we" lately. The "we" I refer to will be my fiance and me.
A while back we made a list of physical boundaries that we intended to maintain. Our goal was that we wanted to be in right relationship with God by not participating in sinful behavior. The other goal was to strengthen our relationship by not distracting ourselves from emotional growth by focusing on physical intimacy. Before becoming engaged we were fairly rigid in adhering to these boundaries except for 1 incident, which crossed some of the rules but not a great number of them.
After becoming engaged we spent so much of our time talking about what our future would be like, that it was hard to not just want to start those things now. It was confusing trying to mentally keep the physical intimacy in future. We recognized that we were getting too comfortable physically and had made small compromises. We decided that any compromise could lead to trouble and that we wanted to avoid trouble.
There was another time that my fiance and I spent all day planning our wedding and were getting very excited about the wedding. We gave in to our passions and broke our boundaries again.
In recent news, preparing for marriage got real. My fiance and I began to talk about differing lifestyle choices and how to work together in harmony. These conversations were more difficult than either of us had expected. We didn't seem to be reaching an agreement and it was frustrating. This situations caused a lot of fear for me. I was feeling afraid of not being able to work through these situations. Because of the fear and the difficulty in our relationship, I wanted to avoid the challenge and do something easy- like kissing. This happened two days in a row. After the first day we decided that we wanted to avoid temptation to stay out of trouble and not create bad habits. But then the second day came and we discussed more difficult topics. Wanting to have an enjoyable ending to a rough conversation we decided again to turn to kissing. This time we realized that we were using the physical aspect as a replacement for connection, which in-turn builds distance. We don't want to go back to how our relationship was before when it was full of fear and no real connection- just avoiding the truth.
Even though this seems like a lot of failure in the past month or so, we are learning a lot. With each failure causes us to learn why we want to choose differently next time. We are not creating bad habits. We have not fallen even close to where we were before we made our list of boundaries. We need to make sure that it stays that way.
It's been too long since I've posted an update of my journey.
First of all, it seems like I've stopped being an "I" and more of a "we" lately. The "we" I refer to will be my fiance and me.
A while back we made a list of physical boundaries that we intended to maintain. Our goal was that we wanted to be in right relationship with God by not participating in sinful behavior. The other goal was to strengthen our relationship by not distracting ourselves from emotional growth by focusing on physical intimacy. Before becoming engaged we were fairly rigid in adhering to these boundaries except for 1 incident, which crossed some of the rules but not a great number of them.
After becoming engaged we spent so much of our time talking about what our future would be like, that it was hard to not just want to start those things now. It was confusing trying to mentally keep the physical intimacy in future. We recognized that we were getting too comfortable physically and had made small compromises. We decided that any compromise could lead to trouble and that we wanted to avoid trouble.
There was another time that my fiance and I spent all day planning our wedding and were getting very excited about the wedding. We gave in to our passions and broke our boundaries again.
In recent news, preparing for marriage got real. My fiance and I began to talk about differing lifestyle choices and how to work together in harmony. These conversations were more difficult than either of us had expected. We didn't seem to be reaching an agreement and it was frustrating. This situations caused a lot of fear for me. I was feeling afraid of not being able to work through these situations. Because of the fear and the difficulty in our relationship, I wanted to avoid the challenge and do something easy- like kissing. This happened two days in a row. After the first day we decided that we wanted to avoid temptation to stay out of trouble and not create bad habits. But then the second day came and we discussed more difficult topics. Wanting to have an enjoyable ending to a rough conversation we decided again to turn to kissing. This time we realized that we were using the physical aspect as a replacement for connection, which in-turn builds distance. We don't want to go back to how our relationship was before when it was full of fear and no real connection- just avoiding the truth.
Even though this seems like a lot of failure in the past month or so, we are learning a lot. With each failure causes us to learn why we want to choose differently next time. We are not creating bad habits. We have not fallen even close to where we were before we made our list of boundaries. We need to make sure that it stays that way.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Temptation Up to My Eyeballs
Ughh. Right now I feel an overload of desire to make bad choices. I want to so badly. It feels tortuous. I pray for relief and that I will have endurance to overcome this temptation.
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