Well, she’s still alive and currently writing this blog for the whole multiply world to see.

Being a girl with the purity ring always branded me as “boring, initmidating and self-righteous” (direct quote!) in college and high school. A few people understood in high school, but in college it was as foreign as the hot guy on Slumdog Millionaire.

So I stopped talking about it. Now that I started working and have been immersed in the “real world”, I’ve gone through specific circumstances that made me reevaluate how impossible living with a purity ring can be, simply because people don’t get it and since they don’t get it, they don’t respect it.

Which is fine by me, at least I know which people to trust and which to stay away from.

It has made me disheartened because as I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries, is the sacrifice worth it? Is waiting for a man of God worth the pain of being rejected for that particular belief?

It’s truly a diverse world where people make different choices and my mind has opened but my values have not changed. I respect people who see things differently and even admire their courage but not enough for me to change my mind.

I am still that girl with a purity ring and I pray that God will give me the strength (I am human, after all) to live with that choice. But i’m no longer an idealist, one who fails to understand that nobody’s perfect and that not everyone makes the same choices you do.

It’s good that I was exposed to several rigid circumstances that has forced me to rethink my values, simply because I was refueled to fight for what I believed in.

When I made that choice eight years ago, it felt like I was making it because I had no choice. I was raised in a Christian home, with a set of rules that I barely understood. I thought it would be easy to live by that standards rather than that of the world’s.

But I’ve been thrown into the wildfire of life and realized, that although I don’t want to shout out this particular choice to lift me higher, but rather I share this as a testimony of how sufficient God’s grace is and has been in my life.

It’s through that gift that I can come back to this decision and realize, that at 20, it is still what I want and believe. I’m making this decision not because it was forced upon me but simply because this would be an easier, better path for me to take.

And if people don’t respect that, the way I respect the choices they’ve made then so be it.

It’s all about living and letting live. Cycle of life, you should try it sometime. Ciao!