Monday, March 28, 2011

Strength, Endurance, Peace

This whole year I have been working my butt off to do everything that is expected of me. I've kept my standards high and often been ridiculed about it, from my friends. I KNOW how hard it is to live so differently than other people and I know how much it hurts to be the one left out because others are intimidated by those standards. I know what it's like to have people who are supposed to make it easier for you to live the way you're supposed to wheedle away at your resolve and tell you, "It's not even that bad." It is to me. It's exasperating to have to keep repeating the same things over and over again. But I've endured. I have explained my standards countless times to those around me. And for the most part I've got some really awesome friends that accept it and accept me. True friends make it easier for me to live my standards...so how many do I really have?
7 months into the year, 7 months of picking the less popular choices in almost every aspect of life. And yet...still I'm torn down, made to look like a girl with low standards. Like I don't care about anything anymore; I throw myself at anything and everything that moves. I go out every weekend with a different guy. Playing the emotions of everyone in my life. It hurts so much to have people who know me say such horrible things about me. How can anyone who knows me think and say such horrible things about me? It's no secret, the things I believe in. I live my religion, even when it's not easy or popular.

Don't people understand that it would be SO easy for me to give in and see that movie with my friends on the weekend, it would be SO easy for me to say a curse word now or then (I have to hear them all the time anyway at school), it would be SO easy to just say "I can't do this anymore, it's too hard." But I don't. So what if it's easy? Who said this life was supposed to be easy? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. In no way shape or form was this life meant to be easy. The way I live my life simply makes it easier for me to feel the presence of my Father in Heaven and His Son, Jesus Christ. They cannot be with me when I'm choosing to make decisions that I know to be wrong. I need all the help I can get in life, I want Them to be with me always.

People don't understand why I live the way I do. Well here it is. I love the feeling I have in my life when I'm doing what I know is right. I love the peace. The happiness. The surety. I love knowing that I'll never have to worry about pictures of me totally out of it at a party surfacing. I love knowing that my mind is clean and I don't have to worry about images popping up unbidden when I'm sitting in church. I love knowing that I don't have to worry about hiding things from my parents. I love the respect I get when I choose better vocabulary than what most teens use. Although the standards to which I live my life are mocked by the media and the world today, portrayed as being totally unrealistic and whatnot, I am here to say that it is NOT! Sure it's not easy but it's sure worth it in the end. I promise.