DEDICATION. SACRIFICE. GUTS. GLORY. says the Twitter homepage as the Olympic games are going on in London and while the whole world tunes in for the latest Olympic tweets.
The Michael Phelps episodes are now over and we can actually look for other Olympians who are also worth looking at. Enter: Lolo Jones.
30-year old Lolo Jones ranked 7th in the 2008 Beijing Olympics for Women’s 100m Hurdles and also ran this week in London in the same athletics category finishing up 4th in the finals. Like any other athlete competing in the Olympics, she has sacrificed many things and dedicated her life in training for a medal. Training for 12 years for a medal you’ll only compete for in less than a minute is no easy task for anyone—even for Lolo Jones.
But training for the Olympics wasn’t actually the hardest thing she’s ever done or doing for this matter: it’s saving sex for marriage.
“It’s just something, a gift that I want to give to my husband. But please understand this journey has been hard. If there’s virgins out there, I just want to let them know, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Harder than training for the Olympics, harder than graduating from college, has been to stay a virgin before marriage.” (Lolo Jones, Real Sports, 23 May 2012)
Think about this: You could actually save sex for many years and yet lose it all in 12 seconds—a few seconds of wrong choice. A few seconds of pleasure and then a lifetime of regret.
Purity is worth training for no matter how hard it may be. In the end, the pressures and distractions you face will be nothing compared to the reward of dedication and sacrifice in waiting.
“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run,
but only one gets the prize?
Run in such a way as to get the prize.
Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.
They do it to get a crown that will not last;
but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”
1 Corinthians 9:24-25
