Sex: What you are Missing - by Kimberley Rae Thigpen

You watch TV. You go to school. So you hear about it all the time. Sex. The I-know-about-it-and-you-don’t-so-you’re-a-loser word. It’s all over the place. You hear about it way more than your parents did when they were in school. Most of you even have classes about it.

But one place seems to be silent about sex: the church. You probably don’t hear about it in Sunday school, and if you do, it’s probably something like “Don’t do it” and that’s pretty much it. Even in my Christian high school, classmates talked about sex. Girls in my school got pregnant. Yeah, adults told us not to do it, but we never had an opportunity to ask any real questions.

About Me
But, despite all that, I was a virgin until I got married a year ago, and I’m proud of it! I had this incredibly precious gift that I had saved for only my husband, and I got to give it to him with God’s blessing.

Sounds fluffy, doesn’t it? The world doesn’t use words like precious or gift or wait when they talk about sex. They talk about wow and desire and what a rush. But sex is God’s creation, not the world’s. Is the world’s way of whoever, whenever, whatever as exciting and free as they say it is?

No way!

Let the Real You Shine Through - by Kimberly Rae Thigpen

He used to be so fascinated, but now you see his eyes drifting to the new girl in school. He called you every day for a week, but now he seems distracted. What is it that attracts a guy only for a short time before he moves on? How do some girls get a guy and keep him? What’s the secret?

Pick up any secular women’s magazine, and it will tell you to: Do this, try that, wear this outfit, put on this makeup. Commercials do the same thing. If you have this car, all the guys will want to be with you. People who drink this drink have great relationships. Chew this gum, and you’ll be popular.

OK, so we don’t believe all those things, but who’s going to tell us the real answer? Not the world, because the world doesn’t know!

“How you get him is how you must keep him.” That’s a quote from a guy who preached in chapel when I was in college. He made sense, and it changed the way I thought about getting and trying to keep a guy. We girls have lots of ways to get guys’ attention. Most of them work for attracting guys. Most of them don’t work for keeping a guy.

10 Healthy Ways to Lose or Maintain Your Weight - by Janetta Drake

Don’t diet. A key ingredient in this formula is to NEVER diet. Remove the word from your vocabulary! As a teen, your body is growing and changing rapidly. A strict diet at this stage in your life could be unhealthy. Now’s the time to learn how to eat right and then do so for the rest of your life.

Keep track. Make a food log for one week. Write down everything you eat — from regular meals to stolen bites of candy bars to high-calorie drinks like milkshakes or Cokes. Also make note of what time it was eaten.

Are Cybersecrets Infecting Your Life? - by Shannon Ethridge

Looking at Internet porn out of curiosity can’t hurt me. It’s not like I’m going to do that stuff.

Virtual relationships with chat room buddies are much more exciting than real ones.

I’m not addicted to Internet pornography or chat rooms. I can stop anytime.

Have you ever had these thoughts? Most people have accidentally stumbled across Internet pornography, but do you find yourself intentionally going back to inappropriate sites? Or do you find chat rooms too alluring to resist? If so, you’re not alone.