What's your first memory of Christ? It doesn't matter if you're a practicing Christian, atheist, or agnostic. Was it a good memory? Was it a VBS song? Was this memory responsible for your current place in faith? For me, I can easily pinpoint my first memory of Christ, and faith in general. When I was four, my family and I were at Christmas Eve service. I looked over to the manger scene that was displayed and said with all my four-year-old knowledge of theology, "Mommy why would they put the Son of God in dirt?"

As an 18-year-old, my knowledge of Christianity and my relationship with God has thankfully expanded beyond the manger scene episode of 2002. As I grew up, I began to notice how Christian girls -- while having high standards and good intentions -- would continue to fall for mean boys, get their hearts broken and wonder where they went wrong.

A girl who has a relationship with God understands what true love is and oftentimes loves too hard, making the people in her life become intimidated or turn away. She knows what true love is because she knows what Christ did on the cross for her 2,000 years ago: the purest display of love humanity has known. She knows how to love people well and thoroughly because she's seen the blessings that have come down from above.

She also knows what true forgiveness and grace look like, because Christ shows her grace and forgives her a thousand times everyday. She might experience pain from this, because she'll give people second, third and fourth chances in the way Christ gave her second, third and fourth chances. But as we all know, humans mess up and sometimes she'll make herself too vulnerable.

When a girl has a relationship in her life as solid as the one with Christ is, she bases everything on it and gets confused and sad when the earthly relationships can't measure up to that degree. This is where her heartbreak comes in. She sees everything on Earth as simply a blimp in time, only to be lived quickly. Because she's been living her life with an eye to existence in essence to be lived in heaven.

As humans that have been tainted by the dirt and demands of this earth, we can't always return the true love we subconsciously know we need. We crave this sort of love because we have Christ living inside us and we know it exists, just not on this earth. But because as Christians, we know our home is in heaven, and we spend our whole lives chasing after this example of perfect love we've seen from the Cross.

God bless and go Rebs,

MJS