Stay Off!

Take this time in your life to just rest and be with Christ.

Rest with Christ

Become HIS perfect girl!  Singleness is not some example of purgatory that we have to go through while we wait for that guy to come along. It is a beautiful gift to do things that you can’t do once you are married. Many women who are unhappy with being single later discover they are unsatisfied with being married because they didn’t do all the things they wanted to do while being single. Rejoice that God has placed you in this place, in this time, with this obstacle facing you. Whatever it is, He is preparing you for a magnificent future! We have such a sense of entitlement in our hearts. We believe we deserve a good man, which we do, but remember, a spouse is a gift from God. Do we deserve gifts? No. They are given to us out of His mercy and love for us. We need to switch our thoughts from ‘I’m a good Catholic woman. I go to Mass. I pray. I’m pursuing Christ! Why hasn’t this right man come into my life yet?’ to ‘Jesus, I desire You. I love You. If You decide to not bring a man into my life, then that is okay because You are enough for me.’ In the end, He is all you need. Be completely satisfied in Him.

So stay off the roller coaster

– Stop using your brothers to get emotional highs. Pray your Rosary to ask your Holy Mother for her intercession. She is the most beautiful woman who understood that God was the only man allowed in her deepest, most sacred chamber of her heart.  When you do find yourself day dreaming about that guy or you are tempted to check out his Facebook, pray a Hail Mary.  With our culture today, I know I have said it before, we are bombarded with images of what love is supposed to look like. That is NOT real love! Real love is based on sacrifice and selfless giving up of oneself for the good of the other. Dr Ted Sri said it best when he said, “Real love in marriage is not sitting there staring each other in the eyes saying, ‘Honey remember the time when we did this and this? Oh how I love you!’ It is the nitty-gritty life that doesn’t stop moving, and it’s the ‘Honey, I’m cleaning up vomit over here, could you change the baby’s diaper? Oh shoot and little Johnny had a runny nose!’ Real love is not the Titanic!” Real love is two people coming together for the good of another.  If you don’t practice that now, how can you begin to understand it when you are married?

Begin to think of your brothers with a pure mind; with real love – the love of Christ.

Jenne

References

Eric J. Keroack, M.D., FACOG and Dr. John R. Diggs Jr., M.D., “Bonding Imperative,” A Special Report from the Abstinence Medical Council.

Sarah Swafford, http://jamieleigh126.blogspot.com/2009/10/emotional-chastity-love-emotions-taylor.html

And amazing conversations with amazing FOCUS missionaries – men and women

Getting off the Ride

Getting off the ride is one of the hardest steps to take in fighting the battle for emotional chastity. 

  One thing to remember is that every man is a future spouse of someone, either one of your fellow sisters in Christ or the Church. How would she want the man she loves to be treated? How would you want your future husband to be treated? Treat them with the respect a man deserves.

  We, as women, have a huge desire to be understood. We crave it. We want someone to understand our hearts. There’s a hormone women have called oxytocin. This is particularly the one and only hormone I love to talk about! It’s so cool! Have you ever heard of the bonding hormone? Well, that’s oxytocin. This hormone is released in the brain during deep conversations, sex, labor, and breastfeeding. It is one of the beautiful gifts God has given women. It bonds us with the people we love. Have you ever heard of this situation? A girl wants love from a guy, so she gives herself to him through sex. When the guy dumps her a couple weeks later, she can’t recover. One girl who was in this situation a couple of years ago said, “I feel like he’s a part of me.” That is one reason why sex is meant for marriage. The hormone bonds a husband and a wife. When sex is taken outside of marriage, that bonding happens with a lot of different men. You wonder why the divorce rate is so high. Women who take sex outside of marriage have a decreased ability to bond with their spouse once they have married. Drs. John Diggs and Eric Keroack said, “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”

With that hormone in mind, think about this with me. In the Old Testament, the tabernacle is set up into layers, kind of like an onion. There was the Outer court where some people could go. Then the next layer was the Holy Place, where a select few could go. Even deeper than that was the Holy of Holies where only the priest could go. In that chamber of the tabernacle, God dwelled. In this same sense, a women’s heart was made in this way. Our Holy of Holies is meant to be kept for God and that one man that we are to be joined with in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.  In our culture today, we can’t wait for that right person, so we are tempted to rip open all the curtains all the way from the outer court to the Holy of Holies without a second thought. We desire to let someone into that holy place.

Take it to prayer. 

  The best way to start to get off the ride is by making the decision to stay off of it by not using the men in your life. What conversation topics would not be pure on my part to talk about with guys? What are my intentions behind revealing this information? Is it okay to be texting/facebook chatting this late at night? Keep your relationships in the light of Christ. Texting and online chatting has made it so easy for men to access ladies. Instead of calling, they can just send a quick text or message to us, and we respond. And texts can be left in the dark. No one else sees or hears the relationship you have in those little words. Plus the messages can be taken so many different ways than it would be if it was a face to face conversation.

 You need to keep Christ at the forefront of your intentions and thoughts.

He is the King of your heart; allow Him to take that place in your life.  The best advice I’ve ever heard on dating is this “Run towards Christ and live your life for Him. Don’t look  from side to side, and when the time is right and you feel strong in your faith and in your passionate love for Jesus, look to your side to see who is running with you.” 

                                                                                                                                Jenne

Emotional Roller Coasters

Say there is this young man. He is really sweet and cute.

  He says all the right things and ALWAYS makes you laugh. He’s a great Christian man who knows how to treat a lady right. You noticed him after Mass one day. While walking out of Mass, he turns and says, “Hi.” What do you do? You  think, “Oh gosh! He’s so cute! Does he like me? Will he ask me out?”………………. All he said was hi!

It’s okay. I’ve been there once before too. Soon you are properly introduced. You go home, find him on Facebook. And you begin to emotionally stalk him – looking at all his pictures, checking out his wall, wondering who that girl is that posted a smiley face, ‘Is that his girlfriend?’, he likes the same bands as you. He’s so funny in his status updates!

Congratulations!

   You have just stepped onto the Emotional Roller Coaster.  Fasten your seat belts. You’re in for a bumpy ride. We’ve all been there. He starts talking to you frequently. He texts you. You text back. Everything he says, you twist into being about you or being flirtatious. Soon you start physically stalking him. Okay, not like he needs to get a restraining order against you, but you want to be at the parties he’s at. You go out of your way to go to the coffee shop he works at because you just ‘happened to be in the neighborhood.’ One day he is this amazing guy you can’t get enough of. The next he’s the biggest jerk ever because he didn’t say hi to you at the BBQ. You go up. Then you come down, but wait, you’re starting up the incline again. It’s hard to take the step off the coaster. You get nauseous after awhile. You finally have ‘the talk’ –‘the defining the relationship talk’, a DTR. You ask him ‘What are we?’ And what does he say? He usually has no idea what is going on. He’s about as confused as you are. Then the tragic heart break comes. You begin questioning everything you’ve ever said or done. Could this have been prevented? Is he at fault?

   The Emotional Roller Coaster is a bad idea and a horrible way to grow in virtue and remain emotionally pure.

  It is a one way relationship. It is a way of using guys. It is emotional lusting.  Just like you would feel used and awful if you knew one of your guy friends thought of you in an unchaste way. The same is true for guys if you used him to give you butterflies and feed your ego of wanting to be desired. Blessed Pope John Paul II once said, “A person should never be used as a means to an end.” Disgusted? Are you ready to get off yet?

Jenne

In His hands

Understanding Our Hearts

Now we need to give our brothers a break here by understanding who they are and how they work.

     When you walk into a college men’s dorm room, what do you find? Usually, you’ll find guys playing video games, watching sports, but never really ‘talking’. Why is that? Men are visual beings. They can create beauty women can’t – Van Gogh, Michelangelo, some of the famous artists have created timeless masterpieces that people travel the world to see. Visual purity is a major issue for men. When women wear immodest clothing, it can be easy for men to think of her in an impure way. In our society today, sex is overly used – movies, advertizing, etc. Their visual purity is attacked all the time.  Men are also competitive and love winning. When men talk, they usually talk about a subject or object. Usually, men speak literally. There is no hidden meaning in what they say. You know when you are sitting there with a guy and you ask, “What are you thinking about?,” and he says, “Nothing”? He literally may be thinking of NOTHING! Guys’ brains need a break from interactions with others. Why do you think there are video games, ESPN, etc? It’s simple leisurely activity to give their brains a rest.  I am not saying they are stupid because they are not. They are just wired differently than us. They are a complete mystery, but would you rather have them figured out? Would that be fun? I don’t think so. The mystery is there to lead us into deeper communion with one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Now let’s compare. When you walk into a women’s dorm room, what do you find? Either it’s empty because they are all out making plans for the night, or you find a gaggle of girls talking in the living room, TV could be on, but no one is really paying too much attention to it. What are they talking about? You name it, who’s dating who, family, struggles with classes, something awesome that happened that day. The majority of the time we are talking about the relationships that surround our lives. We, as women, are relational beings. Why do you think women always go in groups to the bathroom?

Now that we understand a little bit of the differences between the two sexes, let’s focus on us and our hearts. Edith Stein once said, ‘Emotions occupy the center of her being.’  To understand emotional chastity, you must understand an important principle.

“Your body follows where your heart tends to go. Keeping your heart pure will allow and help you keep your body and mind pure.”

Jenne

Emotional Chastity

Tonight, I was painting my toes.

     I always go for the classic red color; you know the one, the classic deep red that screams, ‘Audrey Hepburn’. Please tell me you know who Audrey is. If you don’t, I’m doing two things: 1) I’m dating myself and 2) I’ve failed this generation in educating them on classic girl movies – not the chick flicks we have nowadays that start with a cute guy meeting a cute girl, a ‘love’ scene, the guy screwing up, the girl running off, but somehow miraculously they end up together in the end, you get the gist, but I digress.

So I was painting my toes when I noticed the name of the nail polish, “Honeymoon Red”. At first, I thought, ‘Hm…someday…I wonder where our honeymoon will be…’ but then I got a little irritated.  A bottle of nail polish just made me think of a day that’s years away, and I don’t even know who that guy will be and I’m already thinking about our favorite romantic spots we have yet to discover and how wonderful he will be. This little war going on in my heart for the purity of my emotions set me on an even deeper thought; I’ve been through my share of emotionally unchaste relationships with men. I’ve learned a lot, but our media and world screams at us to let our emotions rule our lives. The rush and butterflies HAVE to be there at all times.  That’s when I thought of you.

Before we venture on into the unnamed territories of our hearts, you have to understand one thing…Prince Charming, that idea of your dream guy…well, he doesn’t exist. NO guy is perfect. How can you expect the one you marry to be perfect if you yourself are not? You need to change the way you think to finding the person that is right for you.  When you begin to see your mistakes, it can get ugly. It is something you have to do in order to move forward. I know I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in the past, but God has always been there with open arms when I come running to Him. He will do the same for you, no matter how far gone you are.
Maybe for you it’s your physical purity that you want to mend, or maybe it is your emotional purity. Seeking chastity always starts with you. 

Jenne

Keep your eyes on Christ