Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 266

Top Ten Posts for June

I haven’t done a Top Ten post in ages, and I liked those! So I thought I’d write the top 10 posts for last month. But I’m going to mix it up a little, because the top posts on my blog tend consistently to be certain older ones that get “pinned” a lot. So I’ll do the top 5 posts by traffic last month, regardless of when they were written, and then the top 5 posts that were actually written in June. Make sure you didn’t miss any of these good ones!

Top 5 Posts from Last Month

1. 16 Ways to Flirt with Your Husband. My most popular post, hands down!

2. The 50 Most Important Bible Verses to Memorize. I love this list! It would be a great one to work on as a family this summer.

3. 29 Days to Great Sex: The Act of Marriage. It’s Day One of the 29 Days to Great Sex! If you haven’t worked through it with your husband, why not start now?

4. 14 Ways to Play as a Couple. Another fun one that gets pinned a lot!

5. How to Have an Orgasm. Okay, this one isn’t pinned (people don’t like to share it), but it’s still really popular!

Top 5 Posts Written in June

1. 50 Shades of Grey is Bad for Your Marriage. Yes, it is.

2. How to Spice Things Up Without 50 Shades of Grey

3. A Summer Dress Code (I have to admit I liked this one! I thought it was funny).

4. That One Perfect Person (don’t believe the fairytale!)

5. The 21-Day Marriage Challenge: Pick a Habit. Did you do this? I think it’s a great idea, that can be life changing!

There you go! My top 10 posts from last month. Do me a favour? If you particularly like any of these, share one on Facebook or Pinterest for me? Thanks!

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Wifey Wednesday: Magic Mike, Marriage, and Women’s Libido

It’s Wednesday, when we talk marriage! I write a post, and then you all can link up one of your marriage posts to the linky below!

First, let me say a big “Happy 4th of July” to all my American readers! I hope you’re able to relax and have a wonderful day with family and friends celebrating! And I’m thinking of all those who have had major natural disasters lately–to those in Colorado scared of forest fires, those in Florida with the flooding, and those in the northeast with no power and electricity, I hope all is back to normal for this holiday!

Now, some marriage thoughts.

Have you heard of the movie Magic Mike? A ton of readers have been emailing me and writing on my Facebook Page asking my opinion. So I thought I had better chime in!

Magic Mike is about a bunch of male strippers who are being trained to give women exactly what they want. It’s based roughly on Channum Tating’s real life, I guess, and it’s just a raunchy “fun” movie (that’s how it’s being described). Women apparently are all ready to flock to see it.

So what do I think?

Let’s go backwards just for a moment and look at how our culture ended up here.

For the last hundred years or so there’s been a concerted effort to get rid of morality–and God. People wanted to be free to do what they wanted without being burdened by having to do what’s right, or having God tell them what to do. They didn’t want guilt. They wanted humanism.

But what stood in their way? The family. Marriage. Marriage and the family are profoundly moral institutions. They rely on things like commitment, and love, and selflessness. And having children within marriage also relies on chastity outside of marriage. None of that was seen as a good thing. That was all holding us back–holding women back, because marriage and family hurt our career aspirations, and holding all of us back because we couldn’t focus on happiness, but we had to focus on duty.

So it was necessary to get rid of marriage. And our society has almost done that. Divorce is rampant. Cohabitation is commonplace, almost the default today. And single parenthood is normal.

But there’s one stubborn thing that is preventing the wholesale rejection of marriage, and that’s women’s stubborn need to see sex as something more than physical. As we’ve talked about before, and as I go into length about in The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, for women, sex is largely relational. When a woman takes her shirt off at the end of the day, her husband immediately starts thinking sexy thoughts. When a man takes his shirt off, a woman tends to think, “Is he going to put that in the laundry hamper?” We don’t tend to think, to the same extent, “Oh, come get me, hubba hubba.” It’s not that we NEVER want to be taken; it’s just that our sex drive is far more caught up in feeling safe, and feeling cherished, and feeling loved, than it is in pure visual stimuli.

That’s a problem for our culture, because a woman who wants a stable, committed, long-term relationship to have great sex isn’t going to be happy with our hooking up society. So we have to ignore this side of women, and promote instead the idea that women’s sex drives are the same as men’s are. So we create shows like Sex and the City which show women on the prowl. We write magazines like Cosmo which are dedicated to women having sex with as many men as possible, and portraying that as glamorous. And now we have this movie.

(By the way, none of this is to say that men DON’T need committed relationships. They absolutely do. It’s just that their sex drives are far more caught up in the basic than ours are (which does not mean we’re better, we’re just different). To them, the need for love and relationship is just as great, but it manifests itself in different ways. For us, the way you see it most is in our sex drives. That’s what’s going on here.)

Now, if women were truly aroused primarily by anonymous sex or by visual stimuli, then Playgirl, back in the 1970s, would have been as popular as Playboy. But it never was, and eventually it was mostly bought by gay men. If women were as aroused by visual stimuli as men, then male strip clubs would be just as common as female strip clubs. But they’re not. Because we fundamentally don’t work the same way.

That does not mean, though, that we can’t be pushed in that direction. And that’s exactly what’s happening. The more our culture portrays women as having the exact same sex drives as men, the more we start to internalize that message. I hear 13-year-old girls all the time commenting on how “hot” some guy is, or noticing his “6-pack abs”. I do not remember ANY of that from when I was 13. We talked about guys being “cute”, but never “hot”. We were thinking more that his hair was cute, not that he had great abs. Our culture is starting to affect us.

So now 30% of porn users are female. We’re being drawn to this stuff, because the arousal centres in our brains are starting to get activated by things that didn’t used to activate them before. And thus we’re literally rewiring our brains (porn has this same effect on men, by the way).

Why is this movie hitting a nerve with women? Because its message is “celebrate your sexuality! Have fun! Want to have sex!” And most of us do want to be sexual beings. We do want to just have sex with abandon. We do yearn for that. At our hearts, we yearn for it within a marriage relationship, but that yearning is still there. And this movie promises to tap into that.

Interestingly, the whole “male stripper” phenomenon tends to be something that women do WITH FRIENDS. It’s social for us, it’s not solitary like it often is for men. The movie wouldn’t work if women were going in there predominantly on their own; it works because they’re in a group. It’s seen as something fun we’re doing to validate our own sexuality.

That’s the whole background. Here’s my take away: this sort of thing, many moons ago, would have seemed bizarre to most women. Now it is seen as mainstream. That’s because our culture has subtly but relentlessly been feeding us this message that “women need to throw off the shackles! You’re sexual beings! So go out and claim it!” But we were not created to be sexual beings in isolation, hopping from one man to the next, becoming aroused simply by the idea of having sexual power. Our sexual power is most unleashed in marriage (which is why married women have a far easier time achieving orgasm when they make love).

So please, steer clear of this movie. It may look fun, but it honestly is doing damage to women’s sex drives. I am not a man. I do not want to think like a man, or become aroused like a man. I love the fact that what is sexy to me is love and relationship. Besides, how would you feel if your husband went to a movie about female strippers? You’d be incensed. Somehow we think this is different because at heart we know that women don’t work the same way. So if we see a movie like this, it’s to make us excited about sex! It’s to make us feel more in tune with our desires! And that has benefits for our husbands, right? No. Not any more than 50 Shades of Grey does. It’s going to change you from the way you were made to be. It’s going to make sex LESS about your husband and MORE about only the physical. That’s not good.

There is nothing wrong with being aroused by the male form. But fundamentally God created women to yearn to be aroused by being chased and cherished. That’s our half of the equation of how marriage mirrors God’s relationship with the church. And that’s what marriage is for. The more we dabble in things like this, the more we create problems for ourselves responding sexually within marriage. The more we turn sex into something that is purely physical, and not emotionally or spiritually intimate.

That’s my take. What do you think?

If you want to learn how to create a really passionate and fun sex life within a marriage, The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex is for you!

Do you have a marriage post you’d like to share with us? Just enter the URL below! And remember to link up to Wifey Wednesday so your readers can read other marriage advice here, too!

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Summer’s Here!

I love summer! I love writing out on my deck with an ice cold glass of Diet Pepsi beside me (don’t tell me aspartame is bad for me. You must not burst my bubble!).

I love taking hikes with my husband and my kids.

I love berries and whip cream and angel food cake.

I love camping.

I love vacations.

I love the one time of year when I can devour novel after novel without feeling guilty that I’m neglecting work.

What’s not to love?

And so it is that I’d like a little bit of time to slow down this summer. I find that if we don’t have time to rejuvenate regularly, we lose steam. And if we have nothing inside of us, we have nothing left to give.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to cut down my blogging until September to three days a week. It may end up being more than that if something strikes my fancy and I just HAVE to write a post (I do that a lot), but you can expect Monday-Wednesday (Wifey Wednesday!)-Friday columns for the next two months, with some Reader Questions of the Week thrown in on the weekends.

I just need a bit of a break!

But now’s a good time to remind you that you can get caught up on some reading, if you miss me blogging everyday! I get a ton of email questions about marriage, and honestly, most of them are answered in The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. I know I write tons on this blog, but I sum it all up better, and go into greater depth, in the book. So if you haven’t read it yet, buy it! And it makes a great wedding shower gift, too.

And if you and your husband never did the 29 Days to Great Sex, today’s the day to start! It will take you right through July. So go for it!

Now tell me: how are you rejuvenating this summer?

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Training Up Children in the Way THEY Should Go

Proverbs 22:6 says:

Train up a child in the way he should go, And even when he is old he will not depart from it.

What does that verse mean? Sometimes we read it totally in a moral framework: if we train him in the way he SHOULD go, then he will learn right and wrong, and he’ll obey that when he’s old.

But what if you can read it an alternate way, too? What if you could also read it like this:

Train up a child in the way HE (or SHE) should go.

In other words, what if it means that one of the purposes of parenting is to help a child discover his or her gifts and callings? What if one of our jobs as parents is not to dictate to a child what we think the best route for them to take is, but to see how God is calling and equipping them?

I’ve always known this, and yet I made a huge mistake with my oldest child this year. She’s been taking some post-secondary courses online, and as we all sat down and looked at what program she could go into, we steered her towards a balanced program which had an emphasis on Science.

For the last few months, she has struggled in a variety of areas. I have wondered at the cause, and have prayed quite a bit, yelled at her a little too much, and gotten very frustrated with her.

But in a heart to heart with her last week, the truth was revealed. She simply hates what she’s doing. It’s not that she CAN’T do it; she’s actually getting good marks. But she hates it with every fibre of her being.

And so we have switched her major. Five minutes after we made that decision she sat down at the piano and began to play a really complicated piece she hasn’t touched in six months. It’s as if life came back to her again.

I had depressed and exasperated my daughter by pushing her in a direction she should not go. It was good advice; what my husband and I were saying made sense. But it only made sense in general; it did not make sense for her specifically. And each child is an individual.

My mother, who is a career counselor, made the observation that it is better to be the best, even in a very large and overpopulated field, than to be just mediocre in a smaller and more in-demand field. The best will always be in demand.

My younger daughter spends a lot of time at skating, and shares ice with some competitive figure skaters. Katie skates for the pure love of the sport, though she doesn’t compete. She just loves to learn. But she is often flabbergasted by how many skaters she talks to on the ice who absolutely hate being there. They may skate well, but they are only skating because their parents want them to. They would rather be anywhere else.

I never thought I would be a parent like that, and yet I became one without noticing. I am very glad that we were only off course for about six months, and we have since corrected. I have now encouraged my daughter to pursue the things that she genuinely loves and is gifted at.

This whole episode is a reminder to me that our dreams for our kids are often rooted too much in this earth–this makes sense for him, and he’ll be successful!–rather than in the next, looking at how God has equipped them for service. And it’s a reminder that we should never take pride in thinking we have it all together, because quite often we don’t.

Be careful about dreaming big dreams for your kids, and then pressuring them to fulfill them. Let God dream the dreams for your children, and let Him impress them upon your kids. Yes, kids need to be responsible, and they need to support themselves. But ultimately God has a plan for them, and it may not be to be the richest or the most successful. And as parents, we need to be okay with that.

Related posts:

Stressing Out our Children
Preparing Children for Courtship
Don’t Let Media Steal Your Children

Happy Canada Day! With an Adorable Video

Happy Canada Day! And even my non-Canadian fans will appreciate this. Pampers makes awesome commercials:

Related posts:

A Contest, A Video, and a Round-Up!
Sunday Afternoon Enjoyment
Should We Celebrate the Modern Family?

Reader Question of the Week: What Touch Means

Every weekend I like to throw up a question someone sends in and let you readers have a go at it. This week’s question is about .

One thing I’ve noticed is that many women give up on non-sexual touch because their husbands think touching needs to lead somewhere. I think that’s too bad on so many levels, but one of the problems is that touch is so important to our well-being. And when we do touch, we feel closer (which makes us more inclined to want something else!).

Ladies, today, can we switch up the Reader Question of the Week? Instead of me asking you for your answers to a question, I’d like to ask you to write to men and just try to explain to them what it means for your husband to touch you. And what do you want more of? A casual touch whenever you pass each other? A backrub? A kiss? A neck rub? What makes you feel close to your husband, and then try to explain why (without bashing any men, please!).

What do you think?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Don’t forget this summer: The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex makes a great gift for any woman about to get married!

Related posts:

Reader Question of the Week: Can Things Get Better?
Reader Question of the Week: Ready for the Wedding Night
Reader Question of the Week: Is it Trust or Accountability?

The Curse of the Calendar

Welcome Naked Truth listeners! This is the place to come for The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, or for 29 Days to Great Sex!

Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Here’s this week’s on the correlation between birth month and success in school and sports.

Hoping to get pregnant soon? Just want to let you know that for the sake of your baby, your window for 2013 is rapidly closing. That’s because if you want your child to excel at sports or at college, you really want that child born in the first four months of the year.

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and here’s an interesting story he tells. Back in the 1980s, sociologist Roger Barnsley was attending a Lethbridge hockey game with his family when his wife drew his attention to the team’s roster. “Look when these kids were born,” she said. He did, and he noticed something strange. Almost all the players were born in January, February and March. So he began looking into other teams and he found the same thing. What about the NHL? Yep. Most players were born in the first few months of the year.

Does this mean that January babies are naturally better athletes? No, not at all. It’s just that when you have a team of 6-year-olds, those born in January will tend to be a lot bigger than those born in December. So when rep teams are chosen, the bigger kids will tend to be picked. These kids will then get even more practice and better coaching, which will further cement the difference.

I was curious about this so I looked up the only three hockey players I could name off of the top of my head: Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe. Their birthdays? The Great One was born in January. The other two were born in March.

It reminded me of a study recently done by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which found that children referred to pediatricians for ADD were predominantly born at the end of the school year. When my husband and I ran the numbers from his pediatric database, we found the same thing. Hardly any January babies, but a ton of December babies. Now those who were actually diagnosed with ADD tended to be randomly distributed, because it is biologically based. But those who were referred for it were clustered at the end of the year, meaning that many teachers and parents were mistaking immaturity for inattention.

This effect seems to hold true across a variety of measures. November and December babies are 12% less likely to go on to university, and more likely to end up in poverty, likely because they fall behind in school more often. It’s not a case of innate capabilities; it’s simply that the world is built for the average, not for those on either end. Therefore, on one end you have major benefits, but on the other end you could have major problems.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is, except to stop grouping people solely by year of birth. Yet what other option do we have? Skill level? How do you assess that in young children? Height/weight? How would that work, since children go through such tremendous, and sporadic, growth spurts? Or we could go to the opposite extreme and group people even more by age. If schools have two grade one classes, for example, one could be January-June and one could be July-December.

Maybe there is no good solution except to realize that we are not truly a meritorious society. We think that we operate solely based on merit and skill; the smart and the athletic will always rise to the top. Yet sometimes they won’t. Some people will simply have to work harder to get ahead.

Perhaps, in the end, it’s just an early lesson that life isn’t always fair.

UPDATE: This column has been amended to include additional research information.

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Related posts:

The Curse of Low Expectations for Teens
A Spry Grandma
September Resolutions

Parents Don’t Have to Be Perfect

It’s time for a pep talk today!

Last week I wrote my column on the benefit of having young grandparents, urging people to consider having kids at a younger age. An interesting discussion started in the comments, and one woman said that she and her husband have hesitated to have children because every parent they know complains constantly about their children. The reader says: says:

Most of my siblings and friends already have children, which is why kids are not on our radar just yet. We aren’t even sure we want them after hearing time and time again, “I love my kids, BUT…” To me, it often sounds like children are more trouble than they’re worth. To date, we have 7 wonderful nieces and nephews that we can love…and send home.

Those she knows with kids aren’t exactly advertisements for parenting. That’s a lesson to those of us who are parents to speak more carefully about our kids.

But I think there’s more going on here. WHY do parents feel so inclined to complain? Maybe parenting has gotten too big. Now, it’s basic economics that the more expensive you make something, the less you will have of it. On the other hand, the easier that you make something, the more you will get of it.

So I’m honestly wondering: are we making parenting too expensive? I’m not talking about just the money—although I did read a study that it now costs about $240,000 per child. I think it’s that we’ve made parenting require too much effort.

A few years ago I was asked to write an article on how to keep your children busy when the weather’s lousy. I came up with some various ideas, from a board game tournament, to making a fort in the living room, to getting out the video camera and taking tapes of kids singing little songs. I sent it in. I thought it was good.

Then the editor called. She wanted to take the video tape idea one step further. What if I were to host an indoor Olympics, inviting all the neighbourhood kids over? You could play shot put in the hall, and have an obstacle race in the basement, and then you could have the parents in for a medal ceremony and hand out commemorative DVDs of the day!

I thought the editor was off her meds. Because no one is going to want strange kids in playing shot put in their hall.

But that is now what we think mothering is. It is huge. We have to chauffeur our kids to every activity. Every spare moment must be spent reading to our kids and playing with our kids and talking with our kids. They must now consume every bit of our lives.

That’s the expectation.

No wonder parenting is so hard! We do it largely in isolation. We expect our kids to excel at everything. And so they take up all our energy. We have no time to ourselves. And we expect ourselves to be perfect, because we know that if our kids are messed up it will be our fault.

What if that’s making parenting too big? Here are just a few thoughts I have:

1. It’s okay to enforce a bedtime so you have evenings to yourself.

Sure, it means a few nights of lots of tears if kids aren’t used to going to bed at a decent hour, or are used to you lying down with them. But it is okay to want “Mommy Daddy time”. And that goes for when the kids are teens, too. It’s okay to say, “be in your room at 10. We want the house to ourselves.”

2. It’s okay to not have your kids in every activity under the sun.

It’s okay to keep control of your schedule. It’s okay to say no to hockey, even if everybody else is in hockey. It’s okay to say “we don’t have the money for that right now”, or “I just want to have time as a family.” It is okay to not live your life in a car pool.

3. It’s okay to live in an apartment.

Kids do not need their own rooms. They do not need a ton of toys, and they do not need a ton of space. Think of how small the post-war houses were, and many families lived there with four kids. It’s okay to live small.

4. It’s okay to not throw huge birthday parties

There is no law saying that you have to invite your child’s entire class to a birthday party (and if that is the rule at your school, then don’t throw a birthday party!). It’s okay to invite one or two special friends and just do something low-key and fun. Come to think of it, you don’t need to do anything big at Christmas, either. It’s more important to spend time together and have fun than it is to spend a ton of money.

5. It’s okay to insist that kids clean up after themselves

You were not put on this earth to do endless laundry. You were not put on this earth to clean up after everybody else. It is okay to insist that people learn how to clean up after themselves at an early age. My kids started chores at 4. They can now be left for a weekend on their own and they will be able to cook their own meals and do the laundry (they’re in their mid-teens). You are not a slave.

6. It’s okay to leave your kids sometimes

Your children do not need you with them 100% of the time. Will they be sad if you go away for a night and they have a baby-sitter? Perhaps. But it’s okay to be sad occasionally. This will not scar your child for life. And it is okay to need to still do adult things. It’s okay to take some time to yourself.

7. It’s okay to not be perfect

Finally, here’s the most important one: It is okay to not be perfect. I messed up with my oldest daughter in a big way this year. I’ll be sharing about that on Monday. We laugh about it now and I say to her, “When you’re a speaker and writer when you’re older, just think of the fodder I’ve given you now for how tough life can be!”. I have made mistakes. Big ones. And the kids know it.

But I’ve also done a lot of things right. And in the end, what the kids remember is how much you loved them, and how you tried to live authentically and godly, even if you didn’t always succeed in getting everything right. Kids are far more forgiving towards us than we are towards ourselves.

Perhaps if we gave ourselves more grace, and allowed ourselves to still have adult time, and still have fun, and not break the bank parenting, we’d have less to complain about and more to laugh about.

So let’s go, people! Parenting is wonderful; it’s only the expectations on parenting that have become ridiculous. Let’s lower those expectations, and then maybe fewer people would see parenting as a dead-end trap.

Related posts:

Practice Makes Perfect
The Perfect Laundry Tag
Our Perfect Christmas Tree

Wifey Wednesday: Beautifully Imperfect

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for a marriage post and link-up party! I’ll write a post about marriage, and then you all can link up one of your own below! I’ve been a little busy speaking lately, so I’m going to post an older Wifey Wednesday from 2009 that I think most of you missed.

Today I’d just like to let this video speak for itself (watch past the ad, it’s worth it):

How is your husband beautifully imperfect?

Now, do you have any marriage thoughts for us today? Just link up a marriage post in the linky tools below! And be sure to link back here so others can read some great marriage advice, too!

Related posts:

Wifey Wednesday: Beautifully Imperfect
Wifey Wednesday: Why Marriage Matters
Wifey Wednesday: My Husband Never Wants to Spend Time with Me

Women: Let’s Stop Feeling Badly About our Bodies!

Back in February I wrote the 29 Days to Great Sex here on this blog. If you didn’t participate, it’s not too late to start now! Just go back to day one, and work through everyday’s challenges. They’re fun!

But many people had a lot of problems with one challenge that I thought was rather tame. Compared to the ones that actually had to do with the physical side of sex, this one wasn’t so bad. I simply asked women to name five things they like about their bodies. After all, we’re so quick to list off the things that we hate about our bodies, but what do we actually like?

So I said to the women: if you can figure out what parts you like, you’ll feel more confident. Play them up! See the effect they have on your husband. Instead of always reciting to yourself your litany of physical flaws, start telling yourself your good features.

Women couldn’t do it.

They wrote comments, and sent emails, saying “this is too hard.”

What has society done to us that we can’t even find five things that we accept about our bodies? We don’t have to be supermodels; we just have to say, I think this is attractive.

Last week author Jennifer K. Hale wrote a post talking about my challenge, noting how much difficulty she had with it, too. And Jennifer, to me, looks like a lovely woman. She says:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

We’ve heard it and said it a zillion times.

We talk about how important it is for all people, not just Christians, to keep from judging one another. We live in a world of political correctness where all are supposed to be equal. We fight for respect and acceptance.

But not for ourselves. It seems we can’t grant ourselves the very thing we fight to give everyone else.

Why is it that we can train ourselves to refrain from judging others, but when it comes to what we see in the mirror, we’re our own worst critics?

And then she admits that the challenge stumped her, too.

Ladies, we really need to stop this. We are letting our culture tell us that only a very narrow range of body shapes and hair types are attractive. Anything that falls outside of those parameters is ugly. But it isn’t true!

When we feel ugly, we hide. Jennifer says,

Some women turn into recluses, covering themselves from head to toe, hiding. They over-compensate for their looks by drawing attention away from them–covering up, or on the other side, distracting from their looks with funny faces, wild personalities, crazy antics. Then there are those who take matters into their own hands and seek medical correction for the “flaws” they see. Still others, try to “correct” their problems with too much exercise and too little food.

Don’t get me wrong– I think being healthy is incredibly important.

But I don’t think any of these actions are healthy.

I think healthy begins with acceptance.

She’s right. We all know she’s right. But that doesn’t make it easy, does it?

I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to give the impression to my daughters that our worth is based in our bodies. I don’t want to always feel like I’m inadequate, that I’m not exercising enough, that I shouldn’t enjoy food. God created food! And it’s good.

I want to be able to enjoy my body. I want to have fun in my skin. I want to feel like I can get excited by it. I want to look forward to my body experiencing pleasure. I want to rejoice in what my body can do–from running errands to swimming to make my husband happy.

Look, ladies: our bodies are amazing gifts from God to us. Are we going to see them as gifts, or are we going to live our lives in guilt because we’re not thinner?

I’m thinking of a particular woman I know in her early 60s. She has cancer right now, and is wasting away. But for the last twenty years that I’ve known her, she’s been pleasantly plump. Maybe she hasn’t been happy with her body; I don’t know. But what I do know is that she has been a model of a wonderful woman of God. She has mentored so many young women. When her husband was alive, she stood side by side him in his ministry, taking over a lot of it after he passed away. She was a prayer warrior. She cared about her grandkids. She was always, always on the move, and she always gave the impression that she loved life.

She could have spent an hour at the gym everyday instead. But she didn’t. And honestly, I think her time was well-spent. She devoted her life to God and to others, and she radiated joy and confidence, even without a perfect body.

I think what we often forget is that having a perfect body takes a LOT–and I mean a LOT–of work. Some people will choose to do that work. Some people will say, I can’t do it. I honestly don’t have the time. And I honestly think that’s okay.

The problem is that we make that decision–I honestly don’t have the time–but we still feel guilty for it. Let’s stop that! I am here to proudly say that I have tried, off and on, to go to the gym regularly, and I have realized I never will. I don’t have it in me. And so I am rejoicing that I know that about myself, and I am concentrating on the things that I do feel that God has called me to do.

Will you do the same thing? Sure, maybe some of us can jog for an hour everyday. That’s wonderful. But if you’ve decided you can’t, that’s okay. It really is.

Now, embrace that decision, and start thinking of what you are doing instead. And realize that  you do not have to live your life by other people’s standards. Go to God, set your own, and then be at peace with it. Embrace what you have. It really is okay. And don’t condemn yourself–and your husband–to a life of guilt and little joy because you feel like you don’t measure up to what’s on a magazine.

It’s time for this to stop. Let’s take joy in ourselves, and our bodies, once again! As Julie Sibert said on her guest post that day, sexy is as sexy does. Good advice. Now go out and DO sexy, don’t wait to BE sexy!

Related posts:

Why Sex for Women is All in Her Head
Why Women Aren’t Like Slow Cookers
Wifey Wednesday: Women Are Not Like Slow Cookers