My 2008 desk calendar is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Everyday there is a different excerpt from the book. Honestly, most days I'm so oblivious to the calendar that I'm usually peeling of 2 weeks of pages to get to the current date...at any rate...I peeled off 2 weeks worth of pages this morning, and this is today's excerpt....
"Whenever love is given on a conditional basis, when someone has to earn love, what's being communicated to him is that they are not intrinsically valuable or lovable. Value does not lie inside them; it lies outside. It's in comparison with somebody else or against some expectation. And what happens to a young mind and heart, highly vulnerable, highly dependent upon support and emotional affirmation, in the face of conditional love? The child is molded, shaped, and programmed in the Win/Lose mentality."
Pardon me while I "soapbox" for a minute.....
This is deep! Could this be why we have so many of our young boys/men using the threat of losing relationship with them as a means to coerce our young girls/women into premarital sex? Is this gateway to low self-esteem the reason our young girls/women use sex as a means to WIN 'love' (which really isn't love at all, it's just attention) and 'face time' (this is the time I get to spend in your face--undivided attention) from males who 'say' that they love us, but they just want whatever we will give.
Somewhere along the span of time in our quest to do things 'better' than our parents did, we have lost the VALUABLE asset called MORALS and BIBLICAL PRINCIPLE and replaced it with convenience and/or the mindset of 'Eat, Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we die'. I remember growing up with friends whose parents weren't saved, but they lived according to a strong code of ethics...probably the Christian ethics and precepts taught to them by their parents and grandparents. They didn't go to church on Sunday, but they didn't gamble, cuss, or drink on Sunday's either. I said all this to say that in our quest to live the 'better' life, those things that we've streamlined were the essential components we need to strengthen and solidify the fabric of our black (or any nationality, really) families and community.
I was loved and affirmed as a young child and I would like to think that I have grown into a confidant woman. There was nothing a boy on the street could tell me about love that my father/mother had not already taught me. I didn't fall for the 'okey-doke'...I just chose to go along with it sometimes. When you train up a child... Men, take your daughters on dates, teach them what it feels like to BE a lady. Women, have your sons take you out on dates, teach them the joy and honor of treating a lady like a lady. When Christopher was young, we would go out on 'dates'. I would give him the money when we first got to the restaurant, that way when the check came he could pay. Now...well, every now and then when the sky has that chartreuse cloud with the purple polka-dot lining...when Christopher has money, he still offers to treat me to a dinner.
Love is a first-fruit. It's not to be won or lost but to be shared--given and received--unconditionally. Let real love be the first and continuing lesson we teach our young people; let it be the first and continuing lesson we share with our families/peers; let it be the epitaph or the legacy that we leave when we are gone. We have the power to change the moral fabric for generations to come!
22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. ...stepping down off my soapbox.
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