COLOSSIANS 3:20
When I was a junior in high school, my family moved to Tennessee. This meant that my boyfriend and I had to have a long distance relationship. It was tough because my parents put a thirty minute per day limit on our phone calls, and my boyfriend lives about eight hours away, so I didn’t see him very often. My parents really wanted me to break off the relationship completely because we were both being consumed by it. For a while, we continued to talk on the phone, but pretty soon it just got too hard to constantly be pushing the limits my parents had set. We stopped talking to each other for a while, and it surprisingly turned out to be a good thing! We both learned more about who we are, individually, as people and in Christ. Eventually, with my parent’s permission, my boyfriend and I started talking again. We began e-mailing encouraging verses to each other and talked about how God had been working in our lives. We knew that making our relationship work was going to be hard, but we believed God had put us together for a reason. We began to put Christ first in our relationship and our relationship changed a bunch. This past summer we served as counselors together at a Christian camp, which was an amazing chance to work and serve together. Now that our parents support our relationship, it feels less like I am grounded in my own house and more like my parents are an incredible and wise part of my life.
Janelle Mitchell, 18, Siegel High School, Murfreesboro, TN
The older I get, Lord, the harder it is to listen
to my parents. Help me remember that they
know a lot and they want to help me.