Society loves to watch good people fall.
Recently, I watched an episode of the show Preachers Daughters in order to make a social commentary on it in my women’s sessions. Lifetime Network got a handful of daughters of Christian preachers together and put them in a house exactly as you would see on The Real World. They were sent out under the guise of doing "mission work" with an organization in Mexico. There was no hiding the obvious intention of letting us watch these girls who come from very Christian families with good Christian values go nuts.
And indeed they did. The ugliness that ensued in the house is unwatchable. The network got exactly what they wanted...young Christian girls losing their minds drunk, going out to clubs in Mexico (of course they placed the girls in a country where the minimum age to go to clubs is 18), having wild parties at their house and hiring strippers, and screaming and throwing things at one another. They fell, possibly harder than the network had even hoped for or anticipated.
As I thought about this premise, I could only think of how this scenario plays out in the lives of many good, virtuous young people I know on a smaller scale. It is entirely reflective of what some young Catholics and Christians deal with on a regular basis.
You may be the good girl or the good guy that everyone knows is the good girl or guy in your family, school, community, or elsewhere. And you may very well have run across people who just want you to give in. You may have friends or acquaintances who pressure you to go against what you believe or try everything they can to set you up for it. Maybe you have heard the comments from one or dozens of people before...things like "I can't WAIT to see you drunk for the first time! We need to get you drunk!" and many, many more.
Choose virtue and there is a good chance you will run into someone or many people who will want to see you fall. They want you to go to a party or drink because they want to try to prove that it is impossible to have fun without doing so. They want you to have sex because they cannot handle the “archaic” notion that it is possible to value your body and your soul enough to abstain from sex until marriage. They want to try to justify their belief that there is no alternative to going with the flow.
Why else would someone have offered to pay any woman one million dollars to prove that Tim Tebow was lying about his virginity? He was the picture of a young man with great character and virtue and some people wanted to prove that it was impossible to maintain such integrity.
Choose a life of virtue and there is a great possibility you will run across people who bother you about it or pressure you to conform. Pay them no mind. It is okay to be different. It is incredibly worthwhile to be a young person of great integrity and faith.
Stand firm in what you believe and what you choose. And never, ever be afraid to show others by the way you live that there is an alternative to going with the flow.