I Love Eating Waffles for Dinner.

To add to that, I've just had an awesome day all around.

The salon was pretty busy, which is nice because 1) it makes up for the slow days, 2) I'm making money,  3) I'm building clientele, and 4) I'm honing my skills and making a difference in people's lives. On busy days I come away so encouraged because I see how what I can do affects my clients. I have so much freedom with the services I can provide, and my boss is a wonderful, talented Christian woman. I am SO blessed.

On top of the awesome day at the salon, I feel the most encouraging part of today was lunch with Dave. We met with our pastor (who will be marrying us) and had a really good conversation and hashed a lot of stuff out, including some aspects of Dave and I not having sex before marriage. I'm sorry if the word "sex" took you off guard, there really is no way to segue into it. I know it can be an awkward and taboo thing to talk about, but abstaining from sex before marriage is something I am passionate about and believe in and think is extremely important to talk about because it can change someone's life (or the course of their life). Nobody talked to me about waiting for marriage, and I obviously didn't. While my child is a blessing beyond belief, I endured much pain and heartache that came with the "single mom" label that could have possibly been avoided (again- NOT regretting my son in any way! God had a perfect plan for me :) All this, not to mention that statistically and from what I hear from friends who have waited, it builds trust in the relationship and just all around makes it better in the end. But I suppose I will be better equipped to explain that from experience in a couple month's time...

So back to our talk during lunch, our pastor recommended that we might try not even kissing from now until the wedding. I don't mean little hello and goodbye smooches, but kissing. You know.  :)  Before you think "WHAT?!" let me tell you... I think it would be much much much easier to avoid crossing holy boundaries and taking it too far if you're not making out for an hour. It will alleviate the stress of wondering if you're going to make out tonight, how far it's going to go, if the other person is on the same page, feeling disappointed if they're not, or vice versa and disappointing the other person. Plus, it makes it easier to keep your hands off each other, simply put. And when you are madly in love and about to get married and trying to stay pure in the meantime- that's a good thing. Since the wedding is getting so close now and there is still so much to do, I think we will be able to keep ourselves busy anyway. Our pastor also said he knows other couples who have done that and loved how fresh everything was at the wedding and during the honeymoon. I think the excitement of having such a fresh and new honeymoon sounds like more than a good enough reason to endure the wait beforehand. As Dave puts it, having sex before you're married would be like opening a Christmas present on December 1st- you will still have it on December 25th, but you won't having anything new to open, and the excitement is dramatically dulled.

Waiting has been difficult beyond belief, but it was definitely the hardest when Dave and I reached the point in our relationship where we were really falling in love and getting comfortable with each other and knew we wanted to marry each other, but were nowhere close to even getting engaged. THAT was definitely the hardest point. Our relationship now is definitely a grown and matured version of what it was at that point, but we are used to it being this way. This is how we function as an in-love engaged couple, and changing that by having sex before we are married would in many ways change who we are as a couple, and we are not ready for that until we are in a committed marriage and living together and totally relying on each other. Besides, we have made it this far it would be a crying shame to give in now, this close to the wedding.

So those are my thoughts for today... and on a toally unrelated note, why doesn't McDonald's serve hot dogs? Not that I would eat them anyway, just wondering.

Lindsay