Dreams and fairy tales

Do you have a dream? I think we all do. Dreams of something... dreams for today, dreams for tomorrow, maybe dreams for five, ten years down the road.

Did you know without vision people perish. LIfe is not a fairy tale where it all works out okay in the end. A little fair dust and all is well. Nope, life is hard. Life is work. But life is worth it!

You have to know where you're going and how to get there. Make plans, set goals, otherwise life leads you were you don't want to go.

What are your goals? College, career, marriage, kids? What's your plan to get there? What if you're 30 before marriage comes. What if you never have children. What will your life be about? Will you just be sitting around, waiting.

I went to college because what if my future husband was a Senator or CEO? I wanted to be a wife who could contribute. I didn't want to be an arm ornament. "Meet my wife. She's dumb, but kinda pretty."

Beauty fades, remember that. You need more than pretty. And oh, please, have a sense of humor! It makes life so much easier.

Make choice that will enhance your goals and dreams. Take classes that challenge your intellect, cause you to strive to do better. Go beyond yourself.

Date guys that respect you as a woman, your choices and standards. Set you standards HIGH. If you set them low, you'll achieve even less.

And listen ladies, we really have no idea how guys think, we don't! Really. They confuse love and lust . We think all lust is love 'cause they "want" us. Does he really want you? He can wait.

Good things come to those who wait.

Back to the career thing. If you don't like the college idea, what about doing a stint with some service organization like Peace Corp or Youth with a Mission or something like that. Visit other countries. See how the rest of the world lives. Believe me, it will amaze you.

Volunteer at the local rest home, or the hospital. Give of yourself and your time. Learn to see others as God might see them.

But have goals and plans. Have a standard. Hold all choices up to those standards.

Touch Decisions

Dating... everyone's doing it. Dating's fine, but how committed do you have to be? I mean really... Rarely do we marry the guys we love when we're sixteen, but we live our life like we will. We stop hanging with our friends. Stop doing well in school. Stop listening to our parents. Stop pursing our life goals.

I guess it's true what they say - love is blind. Perhaps a better word is infatuation. Or lust. Lust is definitely blinding. If you don't know the difference between love and lust, LEARN it.

Girls always fall for lust as love. Guys disguise it to look real, to be sweet but really it's fake and bitter and painful. Worse, we are starting to think and behave like guys. Errrt! Wrong. If women are acting like men, especially sexually, who gets the honor and priviliage of acting like women. The power of being a woman is not in acting like a man, it's in acting like a woman. Another lie fed to us, courtesty of the NOW gang. Think of the "free" things in life you value. There aren't many.

Remember this: we have it, they want it. The power isn't in free sex, free love and giving it up. The power is in self control, keeping it guarded and holding on until the real deal.

Hint: Real deal includes engagement ring, wedding dress, church, family friends and the dude you love, wearing a tux, watching you walk down the aisle in white.

Can you think of anything valuable in life that is NOT guarded? Money, jewels, valuable treasures, antiques, your home, your car. Why do we treat our hearts and our bodies with so much less respect?

Look, if your guy is telling you to prove your love by "doing it." Runnnnn. Runnn now before you give in and he runnns on you. He will. If not, you will eventually and then it's just a memory, an experience with absolutely no value to your life. And honestly, it makes it easier to give in when the next guy comes along.

Say you give in and sleep with your first love, and you're sixteen. You date for a year, and if you're fortunate enough to not get pregnant, you break up in a year, older and wiser and move on. You work through the pain, lonliness, connect with your girlfriends, go shopping, go to the movies and eventually meet a new guy.

You start dating again. He wants to. You want to - naturally. (We are human.) And he's soooo cool, sooo cute, sooo sexy and well... you've been there already with the other guy - what's his name?

You date for six months, but then you've graduated from high school and off to college, so you break up. Ah, lots of cute, very cute men in college. And parties. You hook up. First one night stand. You never thought you, it seemed sleezy, but what the heck, it's college!

Now, you're eighteen or nineteen and you've already been with three men. And for all practical purposes, everyone they've ever been with.

All things being equal, by the time you graduate college you've been with two or three more guys. If you're not truly in love, (and how can you tell after all this) and engaged, you enter the work force ready for a career and hopeful to find Mr. Right. You date one or two duds, and since you've done it all ready, you sleep with them, too. You've learned to deal with the heartache. Numbed your emotions and natural dispostion to be modest and in control. Luckily, you never got pregnant and faced those decisions - aborition, adoption, keeping it.

So, you find him, the One, by the age of twenty-five. Fortunately. You were getting worried. But, he here is. By now, you've been with seven, eight guys. At what point are you "used"? At what point is it just not healthy spiritually, emotionally or physcially to sleep with every guy you like? Was every time "safe?" Whatever that means. Condoms are not the cure-all of what ails the world. They don't protect you from a thousand STDs, heartache and emotional searing.

By the way, what makes a man and woman "one" is not the marriage vows, or the marriage ceremony, or the lighting of a "unity" candle. It's the honeymoon. The consumation. The thing you did with eight guys previously.

It's not just a physical act born out of natural, hormonal desire. It's deeper. It's more. It comes with amazing power and value.

That's my point. Value yourself. And if the act you're doing with your boyfriend has the word sex in it, it's sex. Oral sex is sex. Get my meaning.

Take a look at your values, your standards. Are you selling yourself short? Are your standards too low. If they are low, you will achieve less. If they are high, you will achieve that and more.

Did you figure out the difference between lust and love? Lust takes. Love gives.

It's never too late to change.

Stand up! Be a forerunner

Gawd, I've had enough! How stoopid do we have to be before bonking ourselves on the head and go, "No! I'm not buying it." We are women, not objects.

Michelle Collins, 23, wanted to increase voter turn out among young people. She and her friends came up with www.votergasm.com. The idea is for young people to get out there and vote: One Day, One Vote, One Night Stand.

Is she kidding me? What is fresh and original about this? You mean you have to vote to have sex? Like people are going to follow those rules? What is even remotely responsible about this concept? "Go out, young people, be responsible and vote, then have a one night stand with someone you don't know."

Where's the voice of reason? Where's the voice of authority and accountability? Worse, magazines aimed at young women tout the glories of this concept. Is this really the end all of the women's movement? Where's the NOW gang? Where are the feminist crying "Out rage?" Is this what we've trained our young women to be? Whores? Sluts?

Yep. Whore is defined as someone who "considered as having compromised principles for personal gain; sexually promiscuous." Vote for sex. Vote for money. Same difference.

But sexual encounters don't always end nice, neat and fair. They end in broken hearts, diseases, spiritual and emotional wounds. One night stand? Ten year heartache. Too many one night stands and you're just used. Plan ole used. Something someone puts out on the table at a garage sale with a .50 cent tag.

No one likes used stuff. New is much better. Fresh is better than wilted any day. Would you wear someone's used, worn out underwear? Would you dig through someone's garbage for a slice of bread? No!

Ladies, listen! Stand up! Be a forerunner. Tell them you're not doing it. Not because you're scared, not because you're self righteous or holier than thou, but because you know a better way!

If the cast of Friends friends really slept with all the people the show depicted five of the six would be infested with veneral disease. In my college days, my friends had one night stands. And you know what? They never came back to the house and said, "Hey, lets order a pizza."

It happened to me. A one nighter. At first, I felt kinda cool. Like I accomplished something. But the truth is I wasn't allowing myself to feel anything. I didn't want to think of what I'd just done. I didn't want to imagine how I'd feel if he didn't call me the next day. I regret it cause the night lead to nothing. No emotional valuable, no physcial or spiritual valuable, not even a pleasant memory. But I spent a summer getting over him. Stoopid!

Value yourself. Value others. There are rights and wrongs. There are absolute truths. One of them is sexual actions reap spiritual and emotional consequences. Ladies, if you give away too much, there will be nothing left.

A great man said, "Sleeping around violates the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for "becoming one" with another."

Do you know when you sleep with someone you become "one" with them. Even the ancient Indians knew this. You get whatever they got: physically, emotionally, spritiually. You bond together. Ever hear of Fatal Attraction?

Every time you sleep around, you train yourself to detach emotionally. And we wonder why relationships don't last.

Stand up! Be a forerunner! Do it right and bring your friends along with you! If you messed up, start fresh, renew your committment and value yourself. Wait. Be of good courage. Wait.

Like the NOW (National Organization of Women) has been telling us for years, we aren't sexual objects, we're women. Let's not doop ourselves into acting like men. Women be women. Classy. Controlled. Smart. Savvy. Elegant.