PURE LOVE

Last night and all day today, a few of my best friends and I went to the Youth for Truth conference. On our way there, we were kind of hoping that it wouldn't be the same as all the chastity talks we'd already heard... Little did we know that we would be blown away by how much new stuff we would learn and how much we would be influenced by all the talks. Throughout the weekend, we heard talks from Sara Sheerin, Chelsea Schmidt, Chris Walters, and Kyle Kuckelman, Alli Donohue, Molly Sanborn (aka The Cheeseball Chick), and the legendary Jason Evert. AMAAAAAZINGGG.

So, let's start with Jason's talk: "Finding Love in a World of Lust." This guy is absolutely hilarious. He talked all about how everything and everyone in our world pressure us to live unchaste lives, and they tell us that if you don't give into society's temptations, that you're the weird one. But Jason says that amidst our lustful society, it really is possible to find true, pure love. If we live out the virtue of chastity by saving ourselves for our future spouses, we are actually gaining freedom, not giving it up like many people think. We gain the freedom to have the most beautiful, Christ-filled love once we find the person God planned for us to be with forever. We have to be patient and wait it out so we don't miss that person, though. This idea led to my favorite quote of the entire weekend from Jason, "High school isn't for finding your husband. It's for finding your bridesmaids." This is the time in our lives that we should be forming friendships that will last for years and years and years. Jason also focused on the idea that we can always be forgiven in Christ for what we've done. We can't just cram our feelings down and put on masks for people to think we're just fine. He said, "If anything comes up, down just stuff it back down; push it up even further to the Lord." Offer everything up to Him. Another thing that I really took away from this talk is the idea of writing letters to my future husband. Any time you're tempted to do something, or any time you think there's no chance for love, write a letter to your future spouse. Pray for them, know they're out there somewhere. God's just waiting for the pefect opportunity for you two to meet.

Another talk of the weekend was Chris and Kyle's "Manimal: The Call of Duty." This talk was hysterical, mostly because it was Kyle and Chris. But these guys actually know a lot about the way guys think and the "call of duty" (haha duty....) that God wants all of us to answer. Chris started it off with a fantastic quote from Blessed John Paul II: "The duty of every man is to protect the dignity of every woman." Holy shnikeys. That pretty much sums it all up right there. Kyle and C-Dub used the analogy that guys can be like vikings or knights. The vikings just go around taking whatever they want and dumping it once it isn't useful to them anymore. Then there are the knights who would stand up for their beautiful princess, protect her, and even die for her. Kyle told all of us girls, "Every single one of you girls are princesses, and you deserve absolutely nothing less than a knight." Kind of amazing. Chris then went on to say that we need to protect ourselves from the vikings out there, but that we can't over-guard our hearts. He says "a guy can't be your knight in shining armor if you're the one wearing all the armor." True that, true that.

The next great talk was Sara, Chelsea, and Alli's "You are More than a Victoria's Secret Model." These ladies split this talk into three main sections: Beauty, strength, and mystery. For the beauty part, Alli focused on how dressing modestly is more attractive than those Victoria's Secret models who wear pretty close to nothing. Dressing modestly shows guys that we want them to look inside us at our personalities, not just our bodies on the outside. Then Chelsea talked about mystery. She said our bodies are beautifully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God, and that God wants us to share ourselves with only one person once we're married. We can't be flaunting ourselves like those Victoria's Secret models, because where's the mystery in that? What is going to be left for our future husbands if we've already shown all that to the rest of the world? We are special, and can't let anyone tell us differently. Then Sara focused on strength. She talked about how we have to be strong in our decisions of living chastity, but even more importantly, we have to be strong in letting the men be men. Many people say that chivalry has died in our society, but Sara says that's because we ladies killed it. We live in a society that tells us we need to be indepent and that we should do everything ourselves. But we need to let the guys answer the call of duty. Sara said, "If the guys want to be that knight on on their little white cartoon horse, let them."

The last talk was Molly's "Lies About Guys." This is what every girl hears all the time. All the lies that we hear about he we have to act and what will make us more beautiful. The lies that Molly dicussed were: 1. If he doesn't glace, get some tighter pants. LIE. Dressing modestly will attract the kind of attention you want -- a guy who won't just look at you, but look into your personality. 2) If you're not making out, you're missing out. LIE. There are so many better things we can be doing with our high school years than hooking up. Am I right? And 3) You need a boy to have joy. LIE. No guy will ever be able to complete us and make us fully happy. Only Jesus can do that. He's kind of a big deal... And my favorite thing about Molly is her motto: "Spreading joy to the world one cheese ball at a time."

This was a FANTASTIC weekend full of love, learning, and life lessons. If strongggggly suggest going next year, if you missed this one. I pinky promise it will rock your world, and get you thinking about pure love.

So for chastity, cheeseballs, and true love... GOD IS GREAT.