You Can Live the Life You’ve Dreamed

My senior year of high school was one of the best years of my life, but it didn’t begin that way. I struggled with deciding what college to attend, what major to choose, and what to do with the rest of my life. I feared that if I made the wrong decision about any of these matters, my life would be a disaster. After many weeks of trying to figure out what to do, I remember just giving up. I was sick of trying to do everything on my own, so I decided to turn to God for guidance.

Getting into a good college and selecting an appropriate major was important to me, but I learned God was more concerned about my life beyond college. He wanted me to focus on being a good woman. I turned to Matthew 22:37-39 to learn three ways I could do this. I discovered the main responsibilities of a Christian woman should be to love God, herself, and others.

1. Loving God. How many people do you know would willingly offer up their only child to be beaten, tortured, and killed to save someone else? I don’t know of any. But there is a God who would. And He did. John 3:16 says it was God’s love for us that made Him do that. Since God loves us that much, I think the least we could do is just to love Him back. The first way we show our love for God is by surrendering our lives to Him. But we can’t stop there. We must cultivate the relationship by spending time alone with Him in prayer and by studying the Bible to find out what he says about living life.
   
2. Loving Yourself. The scripture from Matthew says you should “love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, you must love yourself before you can love other people. For many women, this is hard to do. We see images portrayed in the media of how a woman should look and act, and when we look in the mirror, we find we don’t measure up to those images. You may look in the mirror and say to yourself, “I’m not the right size, height, or race. If I could change those things, then I could love myself.” However, this is not how God sees us (1 Samuel 16:7). Living for God requires that you love and accept yourself just the way you are right now.
   
3. Loving Others. Now that you know what it means to love God and yourself, you are ready to love others. Loving others simply means to serve them. And by serving others, you are also serving and loving God (Matthew 25:40). As women, our duty to the “least of these” includes simply being kind and extending a helping hand to those in need whenever we can do so.

As you apply these principles of loving God, yourself, and others, you will be well on your way to tackling the tough issues in your life and living the life you dreamed.