Love is an ability, not an emotion.

Last night was Sex & Dating night at FLOCK (where we talk about, but don't actually do either of those two things).  It's probably one of the most highly anticipated FLOCK nights of the year. Pretty legit. So of course, it was fantastic. But what I loved is that we talked about it from a totally different perspective than we ever have before - that you have to know yourself and what you want before you can ever even think about finding and giving yourself to someone else. So obviously there was a game to go with this idea of "knowing more about ourselves." And during this game, we learned that Justin has gotten a speeding ticket in the last year, that Sara has peed her pants from laughing too hard, that Mike blames his farts on his dog (even though he doesn't have a dog?), and so many more ridiculous things about our fellow FLOCKers...

So all fun and games right? Sure. Until Aaron, Sara, and Mike got up and shared with us some of their actual dating experiences. Can you say, "We have the greatest youth ministers ever?" I can. We have the greatest youth ministers ever. For real. Just that they were willing to get up there in front of all of us and tell us about things that they've been through is super duper awesome. And we learned a lot from, at least I did. But my favorite quote of the night was when Mike was talking about love. "Love is an ability, not an emotion." Then he eplained how that "perfect person" isn't going to be standing right there in the moonlight with all the stars twinkling all perfectly and whatnot (and there were some pretty hilarious actions to go along with that...). But his point was: When you take away all the emotions and great feelings that love give you, you have to ask yourself, "Why am I dating this person? Because I just want to say that I have a boyfriend or girlfriend? Or because this other person and I seriously have common goals and help eachother grow and be the best people we can be?" Obviously we want to strive for the second answer, but that's the whole challenge that we all face in today's society. We can fall into today's popular trends of dating just to date, or we can wait (like Brian did so he could get 10 bucks instead of one...) and be patient and let God decide when we're ready for that someone to be a part of our lives. The key is: knowing who we are, what we want, and not settling for anything less than what God wants for us.

Alright. "Operation Trust in God" is a GO. We can do this (with His help of course). :]