Alright. I am committed to doing 101 things in 1001 days. First of all, I need to figure out when that would make my last day.
Second of all, I have clearly not come up with all 101 things.. so I am taking suggestions, unless they’re from Bradley or they include deliberately awkward things. BRADLEY.
One of the things on my list was to read one book a month for a year. Today I finished reading Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye. ………I know, right?
This book has been in my life since the beginning of time, and by that I mean my sophomore year of high school. One of my closest friends read it and went crazy. Since then I’ve noticed a weird trend, where girls will read this book and become incredibly fanatical about some new faith ideology. It becomes a bit of a second-hand faith, in my opinion. While I do find the writing of others to be highly important, influential and intriguing (Madeleine L’Engle is my spiritual mentor, though I never met her and she is no longer alive) there is a point where we have to test what we’ve read against what we know, what we read in the Word, and what the Spirit is saying to us.
This does not discount Josh’s writing. In fact, I was surprised with how much of the book I agreed with. Not that I read the book expecting to fight with it, but I expected to have way more controversial stuff that completely transformed the minds of those girls I know. A lot of what is written makes complete sense. Guarding our hearts, protecting our purity, being marriage-minded but not with tunnel vision, avoiding premature intimacy……… things that are GOOD and RELEVANT and can help guide us into a more conscious place to engage in the opposite sex with.
One of my favorite quotes from the book came from the chapter about how to respond to people who respond poorly to the person’s decision to stop dating. It says
Don’t concern yourself with being right in others’ eyes. and don’t secretly hope that their lives will fall apart so that your opinion will be vindicated.
Chew on THAT for awhile.
Anyway. One book down, eleven more to go.
