#3. An Indestructible Spirit
Picture your heart as a container for your values and self identity. Feel it beating in your chest. Picture yourself filling your heart with everything you love, everything you deeply care about, all your hopes and dreams, all your uniquness — all the qualities that make you special. Picture all those things contained in your heart….
Now, how are you going to protect those things?
Some people don’t protect them at all; they go out into the world and their still-developing values get crushed by the first mild pressure they encounter. Some people become self-destructive and actively try to rip out, destroy, and starve-to-death each and every last piece of goodness and nobility within them.
Some people hold tight to their values, one by one, and defend them individually against outside pressures. Some values make it through the battles. Others are weakened or killed.
People that wait until marriage take a different approach. They make a vow to themselves that represents the bulk of their core values, and then they reinforce that vow every single day of their life.
Waiting till marriage starts out as just a decision about sex. But it becomes so much more. If you choose this path, it becomes the unspoken core and protector of everything you hold dear in yourself. As long as you maintain your virginity (original or re-claimed) the values and character that come with it will remain alive as well, because every day that you — consciously or not — reaffirm your status as waiting, you reaffirm your values as well. Most people do not do this daily re-affirmation of their values; for those that wait it is built-in, and that’s what makes them so strong.
You may destroy and remake the rest of yourself a dozen times during your journey though young-adulthood, but this piece of you…held deep down…stays intact. And this is one of the greatest benefits of waiting till marriage: you will keep the important parts of yourself alive even as you destroy or change everything else.
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