Excerpt from 'Choosing Love in a Broken World'
Two years ago, Heidi Johnston (author; blog contributor at The Rabbit Room) wrote a book for young teenage girls on love. In Choosing Love in a Broken World, she explains to them not only how to love and who to love, but about 'the God who first chose to love us and the ways His incredible love can shape our own relationships.' However, she targets a specific topic of love in particular.
"If you were hoping for advice on when to date, how to date or even if you should date at all," Heidi writes, "it’s only fair to tell you now that we’re going to talk more about love and marriage than we are about dating."
Young readers may ask, 'Why?' in response to this. Heidi has a very simple answer prepared for them in the introductory chapter of the book. Read an excerpt from it below.
"Think about how often we start preparing for the future long before it happens. If you want to be an Olympic athlete, you start training when you are just a child. If you want to be a great musician, you spend hours and hours practising. Often before you are ready, you start to choose subjects at school that will help you with the career you might be interested in. The person we marry or the decision whether to get married at all will have a huge impact on our lives, yet we do very little to prepare ourselves. To me that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The reason we are not going to focus on dating is simple. It’s not because I’m trying to avoid the subject; I know that those conversations are important. It’s because I think it makes sense to decide where you are going before you decide how to get there. The kind of love you want to end up with will impact if, when and who you date along the way. My prayer is that, in God’s design for relationships, you will catch a glimpse of a love that so many people before you have missed. This love is so beautiful that it is worth working towards.
We live in a world where instant happiness seems more important than something better that is further down the road. What is easy often appears more desirable than what is good. If you believe the messages that will come at you from most movies, TV shows and adverts, and maybe even from some of your friends, you will be fooled into settling for love that is just a shadow of the real thing. To live in the twenty first century and pursue the kind of love God describes in the Bible takes enormous courage.
We’re going to look at lots of things together, including why other people matter so much to us, what it actually means to love someone (this one might be a bit surprising!), what you might want to look for in someone you are eventually going to marry and why sex was God’s idea all along. Through it all, I hope you will see that God is on your side. He created you, he understands you and he knows what you need even better than you do. The problem is that unless we allow him to teach us how to love and be loved, we will always settle for less. The love God wants for you, even when it takes courage, is better than anything you’ll find on your own."
Buy Choosing Love in a Broken World today for $6.99.
