Life's Role Models

From childhood to adulthood, women, like men, make lifestyle decisions. They plan a future, including a future as an adult. But as maturing adults, we use patterns we noticed in our culture. Patterns that set our lifestyle into action without our even knowing we are using patterns seen in the lives of persons who we know or observe. Let's discuss a few interesting points.
Choosing an abstract (summary) from a journal 'Advances in Life Course Research', below has good areas of reasonings on how women should re-think their 'lifestyle changes'. The author of the journal artice. Pamela Aronson. tells about what she terms as, 'life models'. She says 'life-models' is something or someone we'd like to pattern our own life after. Ms. Aronson also says that life models are important because we make positive choices when we watch what they do in their daily lives. We decide what's good or what's no so good by the behaviors of those we observe. 

 What is important here is what Ms. Aronson says about negative choices. She said we believe we are making our own path, "constructing" our own ways, without understanding that we really are modeled after either a positive or negative life model. 

 Therefore, though we construct believing we have put aside a negative behavior in reality we constructed a way that will only circle back around to being negative. And, possibly into what was seen in the 'role-model' pattern we seen as a 'goodness'. 

 When reading the bible, negative models are also written about. Because of Pamela Aronson assumption about how we pattern our future life, it's important to see that Jesus was illustrating mankind negative behaviors. So...think through what bible verses you read, and read again, and again, the consequences written of mankind's negative outcomes so that your lifestyle role-model will be one that lives a Christ-filled lifestyle.

 Abstract
"Growing up Alone: The Absence of Young Women's Positive Life Models."
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1040-2608(06)11003-5
by Pamela Aronson
This chapter brings together life course and role model research to develop the concept of "life models" during the transition to adulthood. Life models are important because they may illustrate possible choices that help to shape subsequent trajectories. Although many interviewees had people whom they admired, very few had positive life models (people whose life paths they wanted to emulate). In contrast, negative life models, or people whose life paths these women did not wish to follow, were much more common. Exhibiting a sense of agency, the interviewees viewed themselves as actively constructing their own paths rather than following the paths of others.
As new to the remodeling to a Christ-like person, we pray for truth and knowledge with wisdom and happiness. Help us to understand the difference between good models and not so good models. This in Jesus' name we pray. It is through the One God that all wisdom flows. Amen.
.... So that, if a man only abstains from doing evil in order to avoid punishment, Non pasces in cruce corvos, [Thou shalt not be hanged.], saith the Pagan; there, "thou hast thy reward." But even he will not allow such a harmless man as this to be so much as a good heathen. If, then, any man, from the same motive, viz., to avoid punishment, to avoid the loss of his friends, or his gain, or his reputation, should not only abstain from doing evil, but also do ever so much good; yea, and use all the means of grace; yet we could not with any propriety say, this man is even almost a Christian. If he has no better principle in his heart, he is only a hypocrite altogether.
- Dr. John Wesley

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