Hannah's Heartstrings

Dear Music, Magazines, Celebrities, Advertisements, Movies, and anything having to do with American culture...

Dear World-as-we-know-it...

Please stop.

Please stop telling people, especially the young ones, that drugs, tobacco and alcohol are okay. Because they aren't. I'm so tired of seeing the lives of the people I love ruined, or at the very least, damaged by these addictive substances. You keep playing it all up as the cool thing to do. You give them a sparkling fantasy, a fun way to bond with friends, something to numb whatever feelings they don't want at the moment. You give them an answer, but you don't even know the question.

Please stop telling people that its okay to have sex with whomever suits your fancy. Stop saying that its okay to do it casually, that its just a natural part of life and should be treated with no more reverence than a handshake. You are ruining the real beauty, and leaving people even more heartbroken than they were. Quit making beautiful things like sex so common.

Why do you hurt everything that is good? You take something good and innocent, and you twist it into a dark, perverted mass that can no longer enjoy the real beauty.

All you do is lie. You tell them that its all okay, its all good, enjoy, have fun. And then they tell me that I have to be okay with their choices. I'm not. I will never stop loving them, but I will never be okay with your lies which they have accepted as truth.

My heart is breaking. And its all your fault.

Every once in a while I go back and read blog posts, comments, diary pages, emails, etc., that I’ve written over the past four or five years. Okay, even the past year.

It is an incredibly embarrassing, aggravating, insightful, and ultimately humbling experience.

“I believe this about true Christian courtship.” WHACK! “I heard God’s voice in my head.” WHACK! “I’ve learned how to be perfectly content.” WHACK! “Homeschoolers are better than any other people.” WHACK WHACK!!

Oh dear , the things I really thought for sure I knew! How smart I thought I was. How confident I was in things I truly was just dipping my toes into. And oh, how much I have learned in such a short time!

There are a lot of things I wish I could erase, because I simply don’t think the same now, or what I wrote was done in a hasty flurry of emotion and what seemed right at the time. But I wouldn’t be a very good writer if I did that. Embarrassment, ridicule, the questioning of our true motives and values…it’s the price one pays for speaking one’s mind.

People change, for better or worse. We grow and learn. And the more we talk about our opinions, likes, dislikes, convictions, beliefs and feelings, the more we are likely to be humbled by them at a later point in time. Our words will come back to bite us if we don’t watch out.

So forgive me when I seem to contradict myself as the years go by. Its not that I am floating around with every wind of doctrine. Its only that I am learning, growing, becoming. And from time to time, I am just plain WRONG.

Thank goodness that Humble Stick isn’t too hard.