Introducing My Spring Relationship Series Kick-Off

 

I'm so excited to launch my new relationship series!  My spring relationship series will include a little bit of everything for everyone.  I've been studying some of the most intense relationships over the past year (including my own failed attempt), and some of what I've learned has been shocking!!! My firmest and most concrete understanding of all that I’ve learned is this: God is Love! He wants what is best for each of us in every single situation and it’s really just that simple.  When something doesn’t feel right instinctually, 9 out of 10 God isn’t involved in it at all. Our culture has seemingly fallen asleep and in its slumber has found ways to shut out God’s Love and even worse to ignore it.  I’ve discovered that for most people it’s easier to fall victim to our more natural sinful nature then to put in the hard work and effort that it takes to do what’s right. Building character submerged in integrity in a world that’s built on lies isn’t always an easy feat. Across the board I’m finding that relationships that are built on the Word of God, in Honor, in Truth, in Commitment, in Loyalty and in Love are the ones that have the most endurance and the greatest chance of survival.  All relationships in general require an unbelievable amount of physical and mental patience and perseverance.  Living with and adjusting to your mate’s personality, beliefs, customs and character traits, won’t be easy all of the time.  It would be impossible for anyone to think that marriage is some sort of constant joy ride on the back of a truck filled with haystacks.  It’s not!  The couples that learn to lean on God’s understanding versus their own understanding will always have an advantage to overcome the adversity of normal bickering.

 These couples are enlightened with the knowledge to understand that only God’s unfailing Love can sustain their union. A minister from California, Patricia Ashley, puts it this way, “God Loves your mate more than you do”. “God will work it out.” These principles can apply to singles that are looking for love as well.   Singles need to be aware that even in times of loneliness, despair, and struggle; God is preparing someone special to love, care and to protect your heart.  With careful observation these are some of the conclusions that I’ve come to but it’s taken me some time. For some additional guidance with this I advise both men and women to read Ephesians 5 in the Bible, which offers a spiritual guide to relationships. I found additional support for healthy relationships in the Book of Titus.   What I think you’ll find most interesting is the wealth of information that I’ve collected on a whole for this series.  I had to have conversations that were extremely uncomfortable, listen to music that makes me cringe and really try to get to the root of what is tearing us away from finding spiritual long-lasting Love in a very cold and evil world.  Instagram, Reality Television, Facebook, Online-Dating sites, Over-zealous rappers (degrading women in every sense of the word), Women compromising their morals with jobs that are defiling, are just some of the outlets to name a few that are actively working against our favor. Let’s take this journey together so that I can fully dissect everything that I encountered carefully.  I ‘m hoping that once we get through the mud we can start working on the solutions to some of what I see as being our biggest issues in a divorce centered culture. Spring is a season of cleansing and renewal and I've always felt that way.  I hope that by bringing some of these issues to the forefront we can move forward in positive unison.

Our culture is still harboring harsh opinions about homosexuality. I've discovered how this is backfiring and spilling over into some of our seemingly heterosexual relationships. Men that are uncomfortable with fully coming out of the closet are actually getting involved with heterosexual women and in some instances even marrying and having babies with these women. This down-low lifestyle is being used as a means to cover-up their gay reality and is a major contributing factor in spreading STI's.  This month I'll be interviewing Author B. Styliz Ortiz who wrote the book, "Pretty Boy With The House in Virginia".  This writer from Brooklyn, speaks candidly in his book about struggling with HIV and the dangers of promiscuity. B. Styliz Ortiz also has a blogsite that you can read on wordpress, at: http://prettyboywithhiv.wordpress.com. Before ever learning of B's story on Twitter I was learning much of this little dirty secret world from my own friends and it was quite shocking to me! Awareness is my biggest, biggest goal for Summer 2013 and I can't emphasize that enough.  The culture that we live in today focuses so much on oneness and independence that it's easy to lose sight on the importance of Love and interdependence in the midst of it all. Singer Pink has this great song out now featuring Nate Ruess called, "Just Give Me a Reason", and it offers so much hope for couples that have hit that ugly brick wall that seems so impossible to climb over.  This is the Hope that so many of us have lost in our loves and this season I pray earnestly that we get it back! Every relationship isn't meant to be left flat or to just walk away from.  Some relationships are truly Blessings from God that we just have to work through a tiny bit.  When the name of another person is written on your heart, why just walk away?   We can learn to love again if we just realize that, "We're not broken, just bent".  I'm so optimistic this season and I so want to be here every step of the way to answer your questions and to offer you the best possible advice I can.  
I promise in the midst of this series I will post a live video message for my readers.  I'll check to see where we're at with the series and you'll get a little inside view of my life as a writer.  I'm excited to begin this journey with you!  I decided to start the series with, "After The Booty Call", which is already posted.  I want to bring light to the darkest areas first so that we can shift into the light of healthy love.  I'm excited!!!

Let's Talk About It...

Much Luv,

After The Booty Call

This Spring I’d like to kick off a new relationship series.  I want to touch upon the good, the bad, and whatever else is in between.  It’s been a while since I’ve done this and my intuition tells me that now is the time.  Many readers have been here since I've started this crazy journey that I call my life nearly 3 years ago.  For that I'm humbly grateful and I have to truly send all of you my sincerest thanks. I've been very open with these pages and that will never change about me.  Through my ups and my downs, my highs and my lows, you have been here and that amazes me.  It's been an uphill battle filled with lots of growing pains, lots of tears, lots of shame and learning, yet lots of joy & plenty of God's Love. The positive feedback that I receive from the majority of you is what always keeps me coming back. I’d like to give way to this new series and extend my hand to those that need it the most. What I want all of you to know before we begin is that any relationship that isn’t deeply rooted in the Love of God is destined for disaster.  For my Ladies, this Spring I want to encourage you to have standards, set limits and know your boundaries.  Even more so, I want to encourage you to have high standards; the type of standards that demand a man’s respect and don’t give way to the social media traps that society has set us up for. Fellas, I challenge you to find that amazing woman that makes you want to give her your absolute best!  A Lady that makes giving her your best the most amazing feeling ever! I'm gonna dig really deep with this one.  Some of the content will be uncomfortable but we'll work through it together.  Enjoy…

I decided to write this post in an attempt to reach out to my young sisters.  Not insinuating that my older sisters aren’t still struggling with this one but I realize its way harder to teach an old dog new tricks.  Let me start out by saying that my booty call days are long behind me.  When God’s Grace touches the heart of a woman there’s an amazing transformation that begins to take place.  Sinful nature is avoided at all costs and God’s Love replaces self-hatred.  Situations that I would have compromised my soul for are no longer nor will they ever be options for my life.  I had a vision earlier today and I remembered my own booty call days and the emptiness that always followed immediately after.  There was definitely instant gratification that came from being in the company of and held by a man for one-night, a few weeks or in some instances a few months but the scars of emptiness left behind with these temporary relationships was never worth the pain.  Thinking back I can remember waiting anxiously for that after phone call or text message. Just something to wash away the shame and feeling of guilt that lingered that following day.  Realizing that I was sleeping with someone that refused to make a monogamous commitment to me as if I was on probation and they had to observe if I was worth the price.  Looking back I wish I had just one positively strong female in my life that would have said, “Baby, you are not a loaner vehicle to be driven around until this man decides if he wants to keep you or not”.

Being a writer gives me the opportunity to speak to so many women from so many different backgrounds. I get to hear their perspective of what a booty call is to them. It saddens me that across the board many women often try to sell me on the convenience of these short-term rendezvous.  “It’s convenient for me because I’m not looking for anything serious at this time.” is what I hear the most.   My thoughts are always like, “Huh, what in the hell is convenient about letting a man into your personal space, to defile your body, and then leave you emotionally malnourished with inconsistent communication, which often times is initiated at his leisure?”  My last booty call was the worse and was the “eye-opener”, or so to speak for me.  The young man was very much my junior in age and he had this youthful spontaneous energy that one just doesn’t have when one is a responsible adult holding down a home, a car, bills and most importantly children.  I admired his carefree way of being and his ability to completely abandon any emotional attachment to our situation.  On one particular evening we broke the entire frame of my bed and I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous, and this needs to end”.  This was the type of intimate and physical relationship that I’d want to have with my future husband not a man that’s leaving me completely unsatisfied emotionally when he walks out the door.

Why would I compromise my standards?  Why was I ok with doing what everyone else around me was doing? Women tend to be nurturing and caring beings by birthright.  We’ll see one of our best girlfriend’s about to hit a brick wall and instead of slapping her with a dose of tough love reality we’ll play the devil’s advocate and say things like, “Girl, you have that young man sprung”, or even more dreadful, “Girl you still got it!”  To make matters even worse, we’ll pick-up the phone shortly after and tell another girlfriend how stupid we think the first girlfriend is.  Foolish encouraging words of self-destruction circulate around our friendships that aren’t submerged in truth.  Thankfully, I’ve learned to become my own best-friend in these instances and I found a lovely 25 year-old young lady to introduce to that particular young man.  I removed myself completely from the situation because in addition to selling myself out, I was also defiling my temple; the beautiful body that God has given me to share with a man that I’m fully committed to in God’s image of Love. The Bible sums it up very nicely in 2 Timothy 2:22 “Run from anything that stimulates youthful lusts. Instead, pursue righteous living, faithfulness, love and peace.

In this new age of Instagram and Facebook, I see how easy social media steers my young sisters toward soul-selling.  We take pictures of our every movement throughout the course of our day and in most instances we get feedback from men that are attracted to the physical assets we readily put on display.  How many, “likes” a young woman gets in an hour begins to become her validation of self.  How many men will want to link up with her based solely on her publically displayed sex appeal, image (or lack thereof), and the idea that her Instagram Love doesn’t cost a damn thing. This is where some of the most un-meaningful relationships will begin. We have set new lows for women in our society; talk of God and of the church becomes that of the radical Christian that no one wants to be associated with.  It’s way easier to do what everyone else is doing and continue selling out the one person that you need to rely on the most...yourself. One young lady in her late 20’s recently told me that her boyfriend, (whom she met on Instagram) actually “deserved” some sex from her after sending her flowers multiple times and taking her out on occasion. This is the mentally that we buy into when we refuse to pull out our pencil and paper and really reevaluate what our relationship goals are. In a society that is ravaged with the virus HIV how we’re not asking for a person status at the top of our goal list is simply absurd to me.

If the long-term goal is marriage or let’s say that the short-term goal is simply a committed relationship then I can promise you booty calls are not going to bring you any closer to either of the two.  Having sexual intercourse with a man is like allowing him an up-close and personal communion with your soul. Spirit to spirit contact is what leaves a woman feeling so empty after a booty call encounter.  The emptiness comes from the intertwinement of the two souls. We’re spiritual beings before anything else. Young men have become so desensitized to sex with young women that many times there is zero regard for any type of on-going communication after the initial encounter unless of course, it involves more sex. My analogy for this is just a sleeping subconscious that allows both parties to forget the true nature of what we were created as humans to do.  We were created to love one another. The sleepy state-of-mind that many of us are in prevents us from igniting that flame of God that lives right inside of our inner core.  I really need to start paving the pavement more often. I need to come up with a questionnaire for young couples that are participating in these non-contractual and dangerous sexcapades.  They’re unhealthy, unsafe, and in many cases they’re the root to why many of us have so many trust issues to begin with.

Finally, if you find yourself wondering what the next step is after the booty call. Then my advice to you would be to take matters into your own hands and make the next step. Ask God for the guidance that only he can offer and tell the young man that you’re involved with that you mistakenly lowered your standards but that moving forward you won’t be able to continue on that road.  You may have to simply sacrifice having anything with him altogether but I promise you that in the long-run nothing will feel better than having respect for yourself.  Let’s start spring off with the fresh renewal of Life that it represents.  Keep God’s Love first and you’ll always remember that His Love is all you need.  In times of loneliness, trust, lean on and talk to Him.  Remember that God wants you to have all the wonderful things that this life has to offer.  That includes a loving Husband to “protect”, “provide” and “profess” (Steve Harvey’s 3 P’s theory), his love for you. 

Wishing you colorful and passionate Love built on God’s rock this season!  I Love you all and want the absolute best for each and every one of you.  Let’s move toward love, marriage, family and stability. Let’s refrain from participating in booty calls. A season of building up versus spreading apart and tearing down!  Let's go Ladies...R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Much Luv,

222 And Me

For at least 5 years now, I can trace the trailing of the number 222 in my life. As peculiar as it may sound at first, this number has a way of following me.  I see it at the most random times on some of the most random things.  Often times, it’s the time on a digital clock or on my cell phone, but it’s also been the price that I pay for a particular item at a store, an address, the numbers on a license plate or as seen in the picture above, the time to return on a parking meter ticket.  It’s a number that speaks to me so much so that I mentioned it to my Aunt one day. I was trying to figure out if there was any type of family linage to the number.  I thought I came close, when I realized that both my cousin and my grandfather died on the 2^nd day of a month but more recently I came up with a much better understanding. I was blessed when a friend was honest in sharing his similar peculiar occurrences with the number 444. He did some internet research and came up with a way better explanation than I had for my number sequence.  I’ve always associated numbers with the Bible and therefore numbers have a very spiritual significance to me.  So when my friend mentioned that he had discovered that 444 was actually his Angel Number I was profoundly intrigued.  He directed me to a blog that he discovered in connection with his number sequence. I was able to read all about the significance of his numbers and how they apply to his life.  I decided to delve further and investigate my own number and I plugged in 222 to the site search engine.  222, has felt like it belongs to me since it has been with me.  I have a personal attachment that I am unable to quite explain with words to this number.  When something personal is going on in my life and I see those three 2’s pop up, I know that there’s something I should or shouldn’t do.  Almost as if the numbers are trying to tell me something or even possibly confirm or deny something.  If this has ever happened to you then please continue reading because you too may discover the meaning of a number sequence in your life.

The blog I was led to belongs to a woman by the name of Joanne.  The site, called Joanne’s Sacred Scribes can be found right here on Blogspot at: www.sacredscribesangelnumbers.blogspot.com. From the moment I logged onto her blog to read about my friend’s numbers I knew there was something very legitimately spiritual about the explanation in bold print before my eyes.  Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t relate to his numbers but as I continued to read I was very eager to see how my own numbers would be defined. I had previously heard of spirit guides and I believe very much in guardian angels so the text was nothing that I struggled with on a spiritual level.  Realistically, I would imagine that the Loving God that I serve “appoints” a guide or an angel to protect me and to help me along on my journey.  Life is difficult in so many ways and many times we don’t know which way to turn when we are faced with one particular situation or another.  What I didn’t realize was that these guardian angels and/or spiritual guides could reach us in such a prominent way with such purposeful intent.   Joanne’s detailed explanations immediately reminded me of the prophet Daniel in the Bible.  In the Book of Daniel, he was often called upon to interpret visions and dreams for King Nebuchadnezzar. He was able to do so in such a detailed way that none of the fortune tellers, astrologers or magicians could do.  Joanne’s writing in all of its simplicity seemed to be deeply rooted and touched by God. I was in awe as I read how precise her explanation of my number sequence seemed in parallel to all areas of my life.

In this past year I’ve learned so much about the power of prayer.  I’ve also learned so much about the power of believing in those prayers.  Most people lose their belief in their petitions before God can ever answer them.  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t pray with the type of fervor that the Bible speaks of. That type of fervor that gets answers from God and waits on guidance from the Holy Spirit. When we listen to God’s Word; God listens to our petitions in return.  The Book of 1 John 3:22 says this regarding prayer, (NLT), “²² And we will receive from Him whatever we ask because we obey Him and do the things that please Him”. There’s a dual partnership between the petitioner and God in regard to prayer.  One that requires the petitioner to uphold the Word of God and to walk in a way that is pleasing to our Heavenly Father. What stood out most to me when I read Joanne’s blog was her mention that my petitions were being heard yet patience was being required on my behalf by my Angels.  That was so deep for me and something I very much needed to hear as I continue to grow in my relationship of Faith and Hope with God.  I often pray for things with haste and when I don’t see a quick remedy I move on and start praying for something else.  I completely let go of the importance of the original petition and that’s why hence it’s never answered. To read that my petitions were being heard was so awesome to me.  The life that I have imagined for myself as a successful writer has never withered.  Writing from my heart motivated by the Spirit of God that lives inside of me has always been my hope. I’ve never doubted that he hears me yet reading it bought about additional reassurance that felt really good.

Bold light, and a life directed by God’s Grace, is what many of us are searching and longing for.  My biggest desire through my work and my writing is to please God.  There is nothing more important to me during my journey here...nothing.  I want to encourage, uplift and motivate my readers to live their best lives!  I want to be of service to each of you, yet I need my Creator to look down and to be pleased.  Many people are surprised when I tell them that I’m born in the 7^th month, of 1977, and that the numbers of the day in which I was born the 25^th, equal 7 if added like this, (2 + 5 =7).  I’ve heard people say the number 7777, will equal great miracles in a person’s life.  I intend to do my part and be adherent those miracles.  At this very moment without anything concrete to support my theory, I know that my writing and the words of The B.C. Chronicles will extend throughout the world.  I know that children will be touched by my work although I am not exactly sure how. A day will come when I will pass out colorful writing journals and pens to small children. I will encourage them to write whatever comes to their innocent minds.  They can write about their best day at school or at home, their favorite teacher or pet or about what they want to be when they grow up. My motivation will be that they never stop writing.   The free-spirits of this world need encouragement to share their talents. I believe the world is truly a better place with those unique and talented individuals that may not have always fit in, made friends easily, or that were never really accepted by the majority.  To know that each of us have Angels in our corner that want us to succeed, to be fruitful and that want to help guide us keenly from the spiritual realm is awesome!

If only one of my readers connect with this post and get to find the meaning of a number sequence that has been following them; I will be immensely happy!  When we share our truth with one another we grow as human beings.  For some, this concept will be difficult to grasp because it doesn’t fall under the school of logic.  I never did too well in that school J

Wishing you Blessings, Love, Hope and Peace as always; God Bless you all.

Much Luv,