Middle School: The gateway to freedom and the beginning of the struggle to find where you belong in a pool of polarizing cliques. If you’re anything like I was, you don’t know who you are or where you belong yet. Feelings and questions are bouncing all around inside you:Which guy will like me back? How can I get those girls to like me? What do my friends think of me? How do I impress these people? All of those questions consumed me during my middle school years and I made so many mistakes. I drove friends and family away from myself and fought for my own selfish ambitions. If I could go back, here’s what I would say to myself and what I would like to say to you:

1. Popularity DOES NOT matter.

Those girls, the ones that seem like they have it all, the looks, the guys, the status, they do not need to dictate how you live your life. You don’t need to change to try to replace a letter in their clique’s acronym that all the guys refer to them by. You don’t need to conform. You are beautifully YOU. God made you to be individual and unique and if people don’t think that’s “cool” then they have a shallow understanding of living a genuine life. You’ve heard that a billion times but it is SO true and I wished I had learned that so much earlier. Status is not worth the headache and the fake life it leads and in high school it only gets worse if you surround yourself with those lies.

2. Guard your heart.

I look back at my diary entries now from my 7th and 8th grade years and I laugh because I don’t understand how I managed to keep up with every guy I thought I liked. In the moment, they seemed like they were the most amazing Prince Charming or heartbreaking tragedy that had ever happened to me (seriously, I probably have like 60 poems that sound like melodramatic elegies to the dead about the boys I liked). I wish I hadn’t handed out pieces of my heart to them because those are pieces I won’t ever get back for my husband someday. You’re probably thinking, yeah but I’m not getting married anytime soon, let me tell you that your last years of school go by in a flash. If you don’t trust God now with the guys you let have your heart, it will lead to more bad choices when the stakes are higher and the damage is far greater. No boy is ever worth as much of the heartache as I subjected myself to and I know some of you have as well.

3. Choose your friends wisely. I cannot stress this enough. If you hang around people who lead you away from God, do not continue to let them influence you. Your years in middle school don’t have to define who you are forever, but they are a formative time in your life. Choose friends that will encourage you and are consistent, not just someone who will post about you or do a nice TBH for you (if that’s still a thing). I say this not because I had horrible friends in middle school, but because I had a lack of real friendships because I was selfish and rude and only cared about guys and popularity so hardly any girls at school wanted to be friends with me (thank you to my church girls who did stick it out through my early years). Friendship is a beautiful thing God intended for his people to lift one another up instead of tearing each other down.

4. Listen to your parents and RESPECT them.

It took me a loooong time to come to realize maybe my parents rules for me were actually a blessing. I grew up in a strict household and I hated every part of it and wanted to rebel all the time. Looking back on it now, the reasons my parents had those rules was to protect me. They wanted to preserve my heart, my mind, and my soul. Your mom and dad have lived longer and so they *might actually* know more than you do. Also, I’m tired of seeing girls, even at my age, being so disrespectful to their parents and elders. In other cultures, children would do ANYTHING to honor their father and mother. They even reject Christ in fear of their family’s disapproval while we claim to hate our parents for not letting us go somewhere with someone. I think this grieves Gods heart. The family unit is supposed to be a picture of how we are to honor God as our Heavenly Father. Yeah you may not always agree with them, but they deserve your respect after all they’ve done for you.

5. Flee from your generation’s expectations.

All anyone expects of you is to be the typical selfie consumed, loud mouthed, boy chasing, self absorbed millennial that you’ve been so often stereotyped as. Change their minds! Stop being so consumed with laziness! Get up and go change the world in little ways. Start a campus Bible study. Talk about things so much deeper than who is “talking” to whom and celebrities. Passionately pursue a career and the things God has for you. Stop worrying so much about your image you create for yourself on social media or how many likes you get. I still pay more attention to that than I wish I did! Your image should be a reflection of the living God, not yourself.

6. Pursue Christ. He is the only reason you live and the only reason to live for. If you learn to walk in His ways, everything will fall into place. He will give you fulfillment much more than popularity ever could, He will fill you with love before He places a man in your life to be a living reflection of himself, He will put other girls in your life to have genuine fellowship with, He will bless you for honoring your parents, and He will rise up a new generation of girls who know who they are and don’t need society to tell them. You are His daughter and the power of the God of the universe lives inside YOU through the Holy Spirit! Why don’t we have faith that we can move mountains with the knowledge of this power?

Be the difference and the light in a shallow generation.

You are loved. Please always remember this and hold fast to this truth.

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.” 1 Timothy 4:12

Love Alli