Value

I love this picture of Victoria. It's from her 6th birthday last winter. I keep it in my bible, not just because it's a great picture of my daughter, but more because of what the picture speaks to me.

Look at my daughter. She really thinks she's something special, you can see it in her eyes, and in her pose. She has her crown perched on her head and you can tell she believes she is a princess. I love that. I think we should all feel that way.

I don't mean I think we should walk around full of ourselves, but in humility, I do wish every one of us could walk around remembering we are loved by our Father the King. I wish we would never lose that sense of beauty and uniqueness we each have because we were carefully created by THE Creator of the universe, in love and tender care for a good plan and purpose.

Today I was surfin' the net and during a news quiz I take weekly I learned about a young woman named (pseudo-named) Natalie Dylan. Even the fact that she's using an assumed name speaks volumes about the truth of what she's doing.

She is a beautiful young woman who has made a decision to, via Howard Stern's radio show, auction off her virginity to the highest bidder. What in the world has this world come to? In the course of my perusing it was revealed that she hopes to raise a million dollars to pay for her post-graduate education in this way.

It makes me sad. It makes me sad that she thinks her purity is only worth a million dollars. I realize that may sound very strange, but the truth of the matter is she should see herself as priceless. I can't help but wonder if there wasn't a time in her life that she felt about herself the way it appears Victoria does in the picture above.

The truth of the matter is a lot of young women in the world today are "selling themselves short." They may not be offering their bodies for cash, but still they walk around like they have a price tag on, and often it says "bargain basement." Many of our young women today label themselves as "clearance" by the way they dress, or by the way they speak; they portray themselves in such a way that makes it so others don't value or respect them either.

One of my greatest hopes as a mom is to foster the perception of self-value my daughter displays in the picture above. I hope she always sees herself as so special that she would never devalue herself, or give up a part of herself by the way she acts, dresses or behaves. I hope she thinks so highly of her beauty that she dresses it in modesty, and values her purity so greatly that she guards her virginity till the day she's married and her sexual purity all her life. (Because even once we have lost our virginity our purity can and should stay intact in marriage.)

I pray that God would give me many opportunities to share this message to a lot of young women, to know their great value, their preciousness and about the God who determined it so. If only someone were there to share it with Natalie Dylan.