Greetings, friends! I will be trying to post every Saturday, but I apologize-this post is a bit late. I'll try to be timelier in the future!
So today I want to share one of the most influential and inspiring authors I have ever read-Dannah Gresh. Dannah Gresh is the author of many books including And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity, Lies Young Women Believe, and Get Lost: A Girl’s Guide to finding True Love. She has sold nearly 1.3 million books encouraging modesty, purity, and sexual wholeness. Check out the websites www.dannahgresh.com and www.liesyoungwomenbelieve.com. Dannah writes in an incredibly relatable manner, sharing clips from her own diary, experiences from real-life girls, and stories of her own teenage years. I’ve read many of her books, and I’m going to give you a short summary of three of them.
And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity is my favorite book of hers. In this book she outlines how to keep yourself pure, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well. She shares entries from her own diary, outlining her struggles with boys and when I read them, I just had to stop and clutch the book to my heart since her entries were so similar to mine! Dannah does not preach at you, she writes in an incredibly sympathetic and understanding manner. After I read this book for the first time (I’ve read it about seven times now!) I felt so affirmed in my commitments to purity. And I got my purity ring two weeks after reading it! She shares amazing real life stories about couples, relationship struggles, and the way God made everything perfect in the end. And as I read it, I realized God is working all things together for good, even if we don’t realize it.
Get Lost: A Girl’s Guide to finding True Love. I read this book for the first time a week ago, after my mom gave it to me. I admit I didn’t have a very good attitude at first. I had been struggling with a boy issue for a while, and things were kind of looking down. I had whined a lot to my friends, and to God, and mom finally told me to read this book and reevaluate my attitude. When I read it, I was hit hard with how poor my attitude really was. Dannah says “Discover how to get so lost in God that a guy has to seek Him to find you.” Wow! What an eyeopener! I realized just how backwards my attitude was! Instead of finding fulfillment in God, and waiting for the right person to come, I was trying to find my fulfillment in boys, and oh how fickle that is! This book is an amazing tool for helping you reevaluate just where your priorities are, and how to straighten them out. And since reading it, I’ve been trying to focus on spending my time thinking about God and my relationship with him, as opposed to boys, and desperately pining after them.
Lies Young Women Believe is a workbook of sorts, which outlines twenty-five lies that bombard teen girls today. Some of these lies include “God is not enough.” “Beautiful girls are worth more.” “It’s okay to go out with a non-Christian.” “I can’t overcome my sin.” And “What I do now doesn’t affect the future.” Along with her coauthor Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Dannah clearly and bluntly exposes these lies, and tells the truth, even if it might hurt. When I first read this book, I was hit hard. Take this passage from the book: “We are convinced that many young women are experiencing the destructive consequences of believing lies, but cannot see the connection between what they are experiencing and those deeply embedded lies…the spiritual attack on your generation is intense. And we’re going to do our best to wake you up.” As I read through this book, I became uncomfortable several times. After all, it’s okay to pine desperately after a boy as long as he’s a Christian, right? It’s okay to use social media constantly if it helps me in some way, right? It’s okay to engage in harmful habits if they aren’t hurting anyone else, right? WRONG. Dannah writes in a very blunt yet loving manner, which makes this books absolutely invaluable.
And there you have it! Thank you so much for reading this rather long blog post, and I hope you will check out Dannah Gresh’s books! She is truly amazing and such an inspiration to countless teens worldwide.
Sincerely, Hannah