Tips for the Future

1. Don't wait until you're intoxicated to tell someone you care. The old adage about "a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts" may hold true. However, it doesn't feel good for the person to whom you're sharing your thoughts. Inadvertently you're communicating the message that they aren't worth talking to when your wits are about you.

2. Get on with your life instead of waiting around ruefully for someone to contact you (especially if you know that they won't).

3. Call your friends if you're lonely. Do not assume that indiscriminate longing means you miss a particular person. Calling that particular person with the purpose of trying to ease your loneliness makes him/her feel used and inconsequential.

4. Say what you mean; don't placate. Sometimes you gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure, babe.

5. If someone doesn't want to maintain a relationship, you can't make them. Just let him/her go off and do what he/she really wants to do. Who wants to be in a relationship (friendship or otherwise) when it consists of 100%/0%? I guess that may be the definition of a non-relationship.

6. Don't build your life around a person: friend, child, significant other, etc. People will let you down. Trust God... He's the only one worth building your life around, and He can't let you down. He's God.

7. People don't change for people (not permanently, anyways). I suppose we can all pretend for a season, but people were not meant to compartmentalize. Only the Lord, Himself, can change a person's heart.

8. If you're in your late 20's, 30's, or older and unmarried, there's NOTHING WRONG with you. You are not half of a person. It doesn't matter that your friends and younger relatives are getting married. Let them, but don't feel inferior because you don't have someone to wash the dishes with after dinner. Piggybacking on that last thought: Learn to cook on your own. No one wants to marry a needy person. It's a partnership, not an adoption.

9. Dreaming and planning are wonderful, but don't include someone in those plans if you know those plans are an impossibility. So, only make promises you will keep.

10. If you get the choice between picking up the crumbs off the floor and eating cake, for Heaven's sake: TAKE THE CAKE, IDIOT! The trouble is, we want to hold onto the measly crumbs thinking that they're the best we'll ever get. God has something better, you just can't see it yet.