Grade: Middle School, High School
Subject: Health, Elective, Adulting, etc.
Duration: ?currently 20+ days? {IN PROGRESS}
This is a subject where you're just going to read something I wanted to talk to you about each day. Don't check it off until you read the whole paragraph. Sometimes I will talk about something emotional, sometimes something physical, sometimes something practical. It will only take a few minutes each day! I love you so much! And on that note... for starters we're going to talk about what love really is (according to the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13) for 3 weeks. ♥
Day 1
Lesson: The world looks at a person's physical beauty and judges based on that. Based on whether you have symetrical features, a tiny waist (women), big muscles (men), a nice haircut, trendy eyebrows/makeup/nails, and expensive clothes. If a person is attractive to them by these things they "fall in love" with them. This is a shallow way to judge the worth of a person, especially someone you might spend the rest of your life married to. Don't be fooled into thinking just because someone or something LOOKS good or nice that it means they ARE good or nice. The world is full of handsome and beautiful people with evil rotten hearts who would do evil rotten things to you without feeling bad about it.
Day 2
Lesson: God looketh upon the heart. That means God doesn't judge whether someone is good or bad based on whether they're physically attractive. If you want true happiness in your life, you should pray that God gives you His discernment and wisdom to decide whether to like or trust people based on what HE sees in them, not on the things the world sees. When you choose a husband or wife, you want to choose someone who is beautiful INSIDE, and you want to cultivate beauty inside yourself (weed your garden) so that no matter what illness or injury mars your or their appearance, you will both still be clearly able to see the true beauty in one another's souls.
Day 3
Lesson: What is the most important quality to look for when choosing a spouse? Love. I don't mean are you "in love" with each other. Love is NOT something you trip and fall into by accident, it's an ongoing choice! I mean that the Bible tells us what love is and it's recognizable by actions. 1 Corinthians 13:1 says basically that even if we knew how to speak every language known to man, even if we spoke in languages known only to Heavenly beings, if our words aren't motivated by love then the impact we make on others is basically just empty annoying noise!
Day 4
Lesson: 1 Corinthians 13:2 says basically that even if we have the gift of prophecy, are so wise we can understand everything in the world, and have so much faith it could move a mountain, it's all worthless if we don't have LOVE in us. Relate this to choosing a spouse: if he or she is wise or smart but treats their friends, family, and strangers in a loveless way, then that wisdom and intelligence is useless to your future happiness. And if YOU have wisdom and intelligence but you're mean-spirited? Why would a godly husband or wife want to choose YOU? Cultivating wisdom and intelligence is a GOOD thing but cultivating love is the BEST thing. Choose a spouse who is wise, yes, but be sure not to choose one whose wisdom lacks love. If they can't properly love their family, friends, and strangers, then they can't properly love you.
Day 5
Lesson: Even if you do charitable things, give to the poor, or even die burned at the stake like Joan of Arc, it's pointless if you do it for your own glory instead of out of love. (1 Corinthians 13:3) You should try to find a person who is kind and generous but pray for discernment to know whether their actiuons are motivated by a loving heart or their own interests. Do not BE a person who is more concerned with the praise of humans for their good deeds, and do not attach yourself to such a person either.
Day 6
Lesson: {Forgiving} 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 is full of the kind of qualities you should look for in someone to marry if you want to be happy. We will spend this week looking at those things. Obviously first and foremost at the top of your list as a Christian should be that your future spouse loves the Lord God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second most important is that they "love their neighbor as themselves" and the evidence of that, the way we can tell someone has love in their heart, is in these verses. The first quality in verse 4 is "longsuffering" which is a key component to a happy marriage for everyone, whether Christian or not. That word means that they don't get impatient and give up quickly on someone who is being a pain - that they are /forgiving/. Your father is longsuffering because he has loved your mother for 22 years even when she was sick, grumpy, rude, or had a hard time being lovable. I (Mom) did so many things wrong but he has loved me always no matter what. That's the kind of person you want to BE and BE WITH. Not so you can get away with being a brat, but because we make mistakes and if you see evidence that the person you're considering as a spouse is longsuffering - forgiving. Not only should you be looking for someone who is forgiving, you should be trying to become someone who is forgiving.
✍ Begin a list of qualities you want in your future spouse. You can make a document in your computer, or you can write it in a journal or anywhere safe. When I was your age, mine was on a piece of notebook paper folded between the pages of my Bible. Quality #1 should always be that the person loves the Lord God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength (that they're a Christian for real and not just someone who says they are). From there, write down the qualities that you will NOT compromise on (Must-Have). On the lower third/quarter of the page you can start an Optional section for things that would be nice to have but if God has other plans for you that you won't mind not having them so that you can have God's idea of what's best for you instead of your own, such as if you'd like that he/she be involved in Youth Ministry, or that he/she likes animals, or he/she has (physical feature you are particularly attracted to), or that you would be able to stay living near your family after getting married. For TODAY, your mission is to start your list, with your future spouse's Salvation being the #1, and that they will be Longsuffering/Forgiving below that. Pray over the list every day, for the right person who will fulfill as much of the list is within God's will, and also that God would help you grow these qualities in yourself and bring the two of you together.
Day 7
Lesson: {Kind} Kindness is a fruit of the Spirit that is essential to a good marriage. Imagine marrying someone with a mean streak? They would make jokes at your expense, be passive-aggressive when they're upset with you, and be unforgiving. You don't want to marry someone who is not kind, and you do not want to BE someone who is unkind. Unkindness ruins relationships! All kinds of relationships. Friends, siblings, cousins... when you're unkind, the person you're unkind to isn't the only one who doesn't like it. When you see someone being unkind to others, does it make you want to be their friend? NO! You want to be friends with the person they were mean to instead, don't you? Nobody enjoys the company of mean people. Don't be one and don't marry one!
✍ Add Kindness to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 8
Lesson: {NOT Vain & Envious} The rest of verse 4 speaks of envy and vanity. Envy means being jealous. You don't want to be someone who is jealous and you don't want to marry someone who is jealous. Being jealous leads to being selfish and controlling, two things which are very bad for a marriage. Vanity means wanting others to be jealous of you or covet what you have. Envy is a sin, and Vanity wants others to sin for them. Not admirable. You don't want to be someone or to marry someone whose sense of self-worth is based on making (or imagining) others jealous or covetous of them. Our self-worth should be found in our status as the sons and daughters of the King, knowing that He praises being hummble and kind and loving our neighbor as ourselves, not feeding on our neighbor's jealousy like a parasite.
✋ Being puffed up and vain or envious leads to unseemly behavior because you start getting addicted to attention and will do foolish things for it. Things that will destroy your own virtue and reputation and break the hearts of those who love you. Make wise decisions based on Love and not on attention-seeking!
✍ Add Not Vain or Envious to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 9
Lesson: {Unselfish & Well-behaved} Verse 5 begins by saying that Love doesn't "behave... unseemly" which basically means the same thing as when modern people say "acting out" or misbehaving. It means if you love someone you wond find it okay to shame them by acting like a brat to them or to others. Even adults can sometimes be bratty. This is different than gentle teasing. The verse continues on to say love doesn't seek its own. When we say someone seeks their own, it means they only care about their own wants and needs and aren't considering anyone but themself. Basically, selfish. It means selfish. Don't be someone who acts like you don't love God/family or is selfish, and don't marry someone who acts like they don't love God/family or is selfish.
✋ More on Unseemly behavior. Unseemly behavior is like when my mother when she was a teenager, the daughter of a pastor, punished her father for not paying enough attention to her by having sex. She told me once that this was her actual reason and motive for doing it. Her behavior was a shame to her parents, to God, and was damaging and shameful to herself. She repeated this behavior when she grew up to shame her husband for not paying enough attention to her.
✍ Add Unselfish and Acts Like They Love and Respect God & Their Parents to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 10
Lesson: {Thinks Well of Others} The next half of verse 5 tells us some more evidence of love. A person who knows how to love won't be easily provoked/offended and doesn't think evil thoughts. Have you ever seen a story where there was a misunderstanding? Where someone thought someone else did something mean to them on purpose and got angry. Maybe they did something vengeful back to that person. But in the end it turned out that the other person didn't do it on purpose at all? In that story, someone was easily provoked and thought the other person was evil and thought about how to do something evil back to that person. That's not love. Imagine if you got married and the person did something wrong and you just immediately thought they were being mean on purpose so you tried to think of something evil to do to them to get even! Imagine if YOU made a mistake and they did that to YOU! Jumping straight to being mad and petty makes for a horrible marriage where everyone is sad and angry all the time!
✍ Add Not Easily Provoked and Thinketh No Evil to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 11
Lesson: Verse 6 tells us another example of love is {Celebrates Truth: Not Sin}. If you love your cousin or sibling or friend, you won't think it's fun or funny to do sinful things together. You won't want to encourage them to bully, tell lies, disrespect their parents, do unkind things, be destructive, or jump to conclusions because you LOVE them! You wouldn't rejoice (be happy) if they do something bad. You don't rejoice when they get in trouble! You wouldn't be pleased with yourself for doing bad things either, right? If you love someone, then being truthful and kind to them makes you happy, not seeing them wrecking their lives by fertilizing nasty weeds in their garden.
✍ Add Celebrates Truth: Not Sin to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 12
Lesson: {Bears, Believes, Hopes, Endures} When you're going through a tough time in your life, isn't the sweetest and most precious thing to you to have someone who is there to support you? Someone like that would want to bear your burden with you, believes you instead of believing your enemies, hopes for things to get better for you, and would endure it with you without giving up and leaving you to bear it alone! Being that kind of friend is critical to be a good husband or wife. You need to practice being that kind of person and you need to look for that kind of person to marry someday so that when other friends in your life move away or turn away, your spouse and you will always be each other's best and forever friends.
✍ Add Bears, Believes, Hopes, & Endures (A True Friend) to your Future Husband/Wife list!
Day 13
Lesson: Love can overcome everything. The greatest act of love ever was when God became human and died for us so that Death cannot keep us when we die. Our souls get to go to Heaven because of this, the greatest act of Love. Nothing else could overcome Death. Prophecies couldn't overcome it. Different languages couldn't. Knowledge couldn't. Only love didn't fail. Verse 8 says love never fails. Verses 9-12 tell us that on this earth we only know a little bit compared to God, bits and pieces that are hard to see, but someday we will be able to see so much more from Heaven, like how little babies only know a little bit but the older you get the more you know and understand.
✋ The point of love being able to overcome everything when talking about marriage is that marriage isn't easy. Loving isn't easy. My parents didn't keep choosing love, they kept choosing to do selfish and unseemly things. They didn't bear, believe, hope, and endure. They were unkind to each other and thought badly of each other. They did things to hurt each other on purpose, and then did things back to the other to get revenge and only stayed married because they felt they had to. A marriage based on revenge and obligation is a torment, not a blessing. If you want to live happily, you must BE loving and find someone who is loving. If my parents had reacted in LOVE instead, they would have been happy.
✍ As you continue to consider your Husband/Wife List, think about three categories: {Requirements}, Prayerful/Hopeful, and Optional. The first one we've been talking about in this 1 Corinthians 13 study is the Requirement category. These are things you absolutely will NOT compromise on. Things that are crucial to having a good marriage and being able to TRUST that person with your heart, and with the SOULS of your children. If you can't trust them to be a good parent (physically and spiritually) then you have NO BUSINESS having sex with them. And if you have no business having sex with them, then you certainly have no business MARRYING them! And if they are unmarriageable, then you should avoid all things that are lies by action: things that would lead them to believe you're interested in them as more than a platonic friend. (Platonic means without sexual interest.) The PURPOSE of dating or courting for a Christian should be to find out if this person a) fills the REQUIREMENTS you believe God wants you to hold to, and b) is also someone you are attracted to. And attraction doesn't just mean physical. Remember, attraction should never be the foundation of a relationship. It's not a sin to be physically attracted to someone but it is very dangerous and unwise to marry someone because you're attracted to them even though they don't show the Required qualities that would make them a good person to tie your heartstrings to until you die! Better to marry someone physically "ugly" with a beautiful soul than to marry someone physically "beautiful" who might abandon your marriage or lead your children away from God. If in the course of your Bible reading you find other things you believe God would NOT want you to marry someone if they didn't fulfill, you should add those to your Required list.
Day 14
Lesson: Verse 13 reminds us that, in our limited human understanding of things, we can't always know why things happen but we can know that the most important things to have in facing this fallen world and the life ahead of us are Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. How should we Love? Luke 10:27 says: "...Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself." And who is your neighbor? Jesus answered this by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. The thing you need to know is that the injured man's people and the the Samaritans were enemies. Jesus' point was that everyone is your "neighbor", even your enemies.
✍ As you continue to consider your Husband/Wife List, think about three categories: Requirements, {Prayerful/Hopeful}, and Optional. The Prayerful/Hopeful category is for things that are not Spiritual requirements. More like personal ones. This is not for things you can live without, and it's not for things you believe are God's requirements for a happy and healthy marriage. This is for things like compatibility with a personal calling. If you believe that teaching your own children is a Biblical mandate, then your spouse being 100% in favor of Homeschooling would go in Required, but if you don't believe it's a Biblical mandate but it's very important to you, you would put it in the Prayerful/Hopeful category and include it in your prayers that your future spouse would be in favor of this. If it's not that important to you that your spouse be against sending your children to be educated by a pagan government system, but it'd be cool if he was okay with homeschooling but you'd still marry him if he was anti-homeschooling, you would put that in the Optional section.
Day 15
Lesson: {Olders} The world will tell you that it's wrong for your spouse to be your best friend, that this is codependent and unhealthy and that you should be two separate people with your own interests and hobbies. The Bible says the world is totally wrong about this. Matthew 19:5 tells us that God designed marriage to make two people as close as if they were two halves of a whole. Everyone I know who has NEVER divorced says that their spouse is their best friend. Just because you are best friends and two halves of a whole does NOT mean your hobbies and interests get taken away from you or that you have to start liking everything your spouse likes. It means that you Love one another in all the ways we've been talking about from 1 Corinthians 13. Be that kind of person, and look for that kind of person.
{Youngers} Have I told you before about guarding your heart-strings? Imagine your heart has strings or ribbons on it and when you let yourself love someone in a husband and wife way, or do married things with them like kissing or touching, you are tying your imaginary ribbons to the other person's ribbons, as though each one of your ribbons is half of a beautiful bow. But when you decide not to be with that person anymore, you have to cut the ribbons to separate yourselves because these special ribbons are made by God to make bows that last forever. The only way to get them apart is to destroy them by cutting. Now each of you are left with very short, cut-off ribbons. You start loving a different person in a husband and wife way but your ribbons are short now and the love-bow is small. As soon as you have a disagreement, it pulls on your ribbons: you get further apart and your love bow shrinks. If you wind up pulling too hard, your bow will break off. Every time you cut or break your ribbons they are shorter and harder to tie. When the person God wants you to marry comes along, if your ribbons are uncut, they will make strong and beautiful love bows! If you have been cutting and breaking them shorter and shorter with other people all along though, it will be very hard to tie together with your husband or wife with your ribbon so short, and the love-bow it makes will have a hard time holding tight and strong. This is why God meant for us to only tie our heart strings to our husband or wife, and not to date lots of people first and keep cutting and breaking our ribbons.
✍ As you continue to consider your Husband/Wife List, think about three categories: Requirements, Prayerful/Hopeful, and {Optional}. I already told you the kinds of things that would go on the Optional part. When I was your age I had two things on that part. 1. He has to be homeschooled. 2. He has brown eyes. They bothered me. And bothered and bothered my conscience. What if I missed out on Mr. Right because I let myself get too hung up on Optionals? What if I found Mr. Right but later he found my old list and saw that I had wanted frivolous things that didn't match him? Would he be hurt? Would it make him feel like he wasn't good enough? If you feel that way about something on your list, you're better off taking that thing off. Better to just let go of it and then if God chooses to give it to you anyway, you can thank Him and tell your beloved that you love that about them.
Day 16
Lesson: Your Handwriting is a lovely way to present yourself well to others. When you write, sit up straight and hold your pen or pencil correctly! Try to make the letters clear and even. If you make a mistsake with pencil, erase it and re-write it. If you make a mistake with pen, use "correction fluid" which is like a little nailpolish bottle of white stuff you paint over your mistakes on paper. You let it dry and then write overtop of it. If you make a mistake on a legal document, you usually have to ask for a new paper and try again, but when you make a mistake in a letter or your schoolwork, you are allowed to use correction fluid. The most famous brand of correction fluid is called "White Out" but it's hard to find the liquid kind that you paint on nowadays. Now, they make it like a tape that comes in a colorful snail-shaped pen that you press and drag to apply over your mistakes. If you ever need to use the White Out, you should ask permission to borrow it from Mom.
Day 17
Lesson: When you print, you need to SLOW DOWN and make your letters readable. Make sure your i's and j's are dotted. Make sure your e's and o's and a's don't look too much like each other. Make sure your t's, T's, I's, and J's are crossed. Make sure your words have spaces between them! The person in our house who has the most handsome print writing is Alexander! I love to read his writing because I can always tell what all the letters are and he always remembers to put spaces between his words.
Day 18
Lesson: Cursive is much FASTER than printing, once you get used to using it! You're NOT allowed to use cursive when filling out forms, but there are times when it's BEST to use cursive. When you write a penpal letter, it's best to use cursive unless the person you're writing to can't read cursive. Cursive is much prettier than printing.
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Day 21
Lesson: {Youngers} There are tiny organisms that live in teeth. They make holes in your teeth. We call these holes "cavities." Cavities HURT because they make a hole in the outer layers of your tooth and the nerve inside it can feel the hot and cold and pressure and acid and sugar of foods and drinks. Just like when you make a hole in your skin, it hurts. Except your skin heals in a few days or a week, but cavities take months or years to heal in children and might not ever heal at all in adults. Food residue in your mouth, especially if it contains sugar, really makes the organismms that cause cavities make holes like crazy. You can brush and floss to get the food residue out of your mouth so that these organisms don't go crazy making cavities. Brush your teeth 2 or 3 times a day (after meals), and floss every day.
Day 22
Lesson: {Youngers} Mouthwash is designed to kill the organisms that cause cavities, but you can't really ever kill ALL of them so they will reproduce and make as many as before. You can only temporarily kill a lot of them with mouthwash. The problem is that mouthwash isn't very good for you either. It doesn't just kill the cavity bugs, but the good bacteria in your mouth too. It's best to brush your teeth 2 or 3 times a day (after meals), and floss every day. The most important brushing is after your last meal of the day, before you go to sleep, so that the organisms don't have a hole-making party in your mouth all night long while you sleep.
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