Few people are born with the traits we find attractive in them. No matter what their marital state, individuals who want to be healthy and whole usually must work at developing characteristics that will lead to that goal. Here are seven “lively virtues”—lively because they are full of life and growing; virtues because they are active, powerful qualities. I will share four of them today, and three more tomorrow.
♦ Purposefulness. A single person can defeat much loneliness or boredom simply by doing what needs to be done! It’s all too easy for the person living alone to get lazy to some degree in the absence of outside pressure to tidy up the house, do the laundry, and keep the refrigerator stocked with something besides Coke and sandwich meat. It’s all too easy to slip into the habit of requiring noise: the TV, radio, CD player, or computer.
Establish purpose in your life by setting and striving toward realistic, meaningful goals—or else, as time goes by, there is nothing to show for it but advanced age and a little accumulated experience! Some people are accustomed to goal-setting as part of life at work or school, but it is a new concept to a lot of people. To them I would say: Develop a plan of action to encourage the growth of your inner self. Decide on some long-term goals too. Seriously and prayerfully, what would you like to do before your life is over? Earn $100,000 a year? Live near the ocean or the mountains? Write a book or learn to play an instrument? Complete your college education? Serve God and the church in some significant way? Determine what steps you will have to take to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, and commit yourself to taking those steps, one at a time
♦ Constancy. This firmness of mind can be described in a number of ways: faithfulness, consistency, dependability, commitment. I don’t have to tell you that this is a Scriptural quality. But we are not born with it, and I’m sorry to tell you that God doesn’t just zap us with it either! It is instilled by training or discipline. Develop firm habits of prayer, Bible-reading, meditating on the Word, attendance at public worship. Try other classic disciplines too as a means of discovering grace (not obtaining grace): Silence, simplicity, fasting, giving, study, journaling, and others.
♦ Honesty. This is openness, guilelessness, candor. The most serious byproduct of dishonestly is that the “game” becomes more real than reality, and then the player himself/herself becomes unable to trust anyone. Honesty takes courage, but to experience others’ acceptance of you as you really are is an important and enormously warming human experience—worth the risk. The acceptance has to come from within yourself first, then from those around you who deserve you at your best—open, sensitive, and genuine.
♦ Sexual Purity. Many people have come to believe that abstinence is just not possible in today’s world. It does appear that the gap between sexual activity and genuine relationship is becoming wider and wider. More of the very young are becoming sexually active, while at the same time, many grownups have intimate relationships but delay marriage in order to finish their education or become established in their careers. Is it asking too much to say, ”Wait for marriage”? God says it is not. And because He invented sex, He gets the last word. Such a stand may seem out-dated and even quaint, but here is His Word on the matter. “There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, ‘The two become one.’ Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never ‘become one.’ There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for ‘becoming one’ with another.” (I Corinthians 6:15-18) Although any sin is sin in the eyes of God, the effect of sexual sin on our present lives is more serious; it damages in a way that, say, theft or lying or anger, do not.
Delayed gratification is a valuable tool in dealing with all of life, and it works in sexual matters too. It produces purity and no bad memories. No relationship is completely devoid of sexual overtones, so get your sexuality in clear perspective: It is a basic ingredient of being human. Julia Duin, author of Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger (1988) and presently the religion editor for the Washington Times, says, “Unlike food, sex can be subjected to a long-term, even permanent fast. . . Abstinence from sex, like abstinence from sugar, results in a disciplined ability to do without it altogether. Abstinence becomes habit.”
This celibacy does not mean you are a sexless creature. You can develop your feminine or masculine energies in other ways, giving you the freedom to have deep friendships with the understanding that they won’t result in actions you will regret. It gives a deeper sense of your own value, knowing that you are worth God’s best, whether that is a mate or God alone. One further thought from Julia: “One major stand Christians can take that will make people stop and take notice of us is our refusal to indulge in casual sex that our secular generation considers to be a moral right.”
MaryMartha
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Thanks to Julia for permission to quote from her book. Scripture quotation is taken from The Message. Copyright © 2003 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com
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