You Wear a ...... Skirt? (Part 4)

“Discovering the Difference”

Posted by Missy in April 2011

Part 4 of:  “You Wear a ….. Skirt?”


Throughout my 18th and 19th years, I started to really try to wear skirts again.  I just could not fight the feeling that it was something that shouldn’t be lost, even though I didn‘t yet know why.  My attempt to start wearing skirts again did not help my popularity levels to rise.  I started being picked on, and though I didn’t get teased very badly, it was enough, and it still hurt.  It caused me to go back and forth even more, still trying to keep a foot in each world.  Sometimes, I thought I would break.  

During my 19th year, I moved to North Carolina for just under six months.  That season of my life was a very lonely one, but it gave me a chance to step back from friends, and take a look at my life and where it was going.  While I was there, I thought a lot about
my friends and how different they were from the families that I always wanted to be like, and from the friends that I had made on that Christian website.  There was something so different about them and I wanted it.  The difference, I came to see more clearly within those six months of loneliness.  I began to realize that what I had come to admire in these people was an abundance of the fruits of the Spirit, and of the Godly love that is displayed in the Bible.


“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 
idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 
envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that
those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and
desires.  If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.  Let us not become
conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.” (Galations 5:19-26)   

I saw before my eyes people who, where not perfect, but had an understanding of what it
is to have, “Crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” and who were striving to
live out each of the fruits of the Spirit.  This attitude and the effect that it has on a
person’s character is far removed from what is seen in the lives of people, and even most
Christians of today.


“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”  (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

Those are powerful words and certainly are not something we can ever hope to live out in our own strength.   These are the characteristics in those families that had drawn and inspired me.  I had seen with my own eyes what it means to live out these passages in everyday life.


(Continued in Part 5)