The Truth Your Girl Desperately Needs

This episode contains portions of the following programs:

"Tough Issues for Tweens"

"Staying Close to the Good Shepherd"

"35 Things I Wish I Knew in High School"

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Dannah Gresh: This is Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh. Listen to these sobering statistics.

Announcer:

• 58% of teen girls feel persistently sad or hopeless. 
• 30% of adolescent girls have seriously considered attempting suicide. 
• By age thirteen, 73% of girls report feelings of loneliness.
• 80% of ten–eleven year-old girls report feeling self-conscious about their bodies.
• 41% of fifth and sixth grade girls spend over six hours daily scrolling social media. 

Dannah: Woah. Let’s take a deep breath. If you’re a mom or grandma, your head is probably spinning. Or you’re thinking, Surely these are not our girls! More than anything, you want them to be okay. 

I’m right there with you. I’m a mom, and a grandmother—NanaDannah—and I’ve devoted my life to minister to tween and teen girls. I love God’s “little women” with all my heart.

It’s easy to hear a set of statistics like that and quickly move toward despair . . . or denial. But today, we’re gonna move toward something different together—the truth of God’s Word. Because let me tell you, God’s Word really is living and active. I’ve had a front row seat to see its power to transform little girls, and I’m filled with hope for this next generation.

Recently, I got a letter from a tween girl. She wrote to tell me that she had been to one of my True Girl events. And since then, her mom has been listening to Revive Our Hearts. She wrote to tell me that she used to feel very badly about herself. But then she found this ministry. She wrote, “I think very differently about God and about myself as a girl since I went to the True Girl event. Every day I wake up to your voice because my mom listens to Nancy on Revive Our Hearts.”

There is hope! Our girls just need a little help navigating their emotions according to God’s Word. That’s something I talk about in the book Lies Girls Believe. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and I spent some time discussing that, not too long ago.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: You gave a tool that I thought was really creative and helpful. It’s a tool for girls to use on themselves to tell if their emotions are healthy, normal, and good, or if they’re evidence that a lie is lurking underneath the surface. Can you explain how you shared that?

Dannah: I came up with the term (I should say my husband helped me come up with the term; he will appreciate the credit!) “sticky emotions” or “sticky feelings.” Our emotions are supposed to come, and we’re supposed to be angry when somebody does something bad, but we respond . . . and the emotion goes away.

We’re supposed to be anxious because we have a test—maybe that even helps us study for the test—but we study, we take the test, the emotion goes away. But when our emotions are chronic and “sticky”—they stick to us like glue and they never go away, and we maybe don’t understand why they’re there—then that’s possible evidence that we’re believing a lie.

So the one thing I want to make sure every mom knows, every grandma knows, every woman working with tween, and even teen girls knows: Chronic, recurring emotions that don’t go away could be evidence that there is a lie growing deep in the root system of that tween girl’s life!

Nancy: I’m just imagining a young girl—or teen girl or a grown woman—feeling like those emotions have wrapped themselves around her like a wet blanket that she can’t get rid of: it’s heavy, it’s always there. This is a sign to look for when you care about this young woman or teen in your life.

They’re clothed in this, and they just feel overwhelmed by it, and it’s chronic and recurring. That’s a sign that there’s a concern there.

Dannah: Yep, that’s a concern there. That’s a sign, and also just sinfulness is a sign. So the two big emotions that your daughter/granddaughter might be believing a lie is that “sticky emotion,” to the point where the emotion becomes a label—it defines who she is. Or, she’s acting out. She’s sinning. That might be evidence that there’s a lie in her heart.

Nancy: And you have a character in the book named Zoey (a made-up character), who kind of walks girls through a narrative. You actually have her describe sticky feelings.

Dannah: She’s very real to me, Nancy! She’s not made-up—she’s become a very important part of my life! (laughter) Her name is Zoey, and she describes what sticky feelings feel like. I think she does it really well! So, let’s let Zoey describe it for you.

Zoey: Hi! I’m Zoey, and just like you. I’m a girl with a lot of emotions! It’s normal to feel sad, ugly, lonely, stupid, weird—and all kinds of other things sometimes—but when feelings stick to us all the time, every day, that’s not good! I call those feelings that never go away, “sticky feelings.”

Your feelings—or emotions—are kind of like the skin of your heart, the inside part of you that has feelings, not the organ that pumps blood. Let me explain. When you accidentally touch a hot pot and it burns you, your skin tells you, “Don’t do that! Ouch!” When you touch a soft, comfy blanket, your skin says, “Yes, do that!” It helps you know what is safe and unsafe for your body.

In a similar way, your feelings can protect your heart, when it is under God’s control and you use God’s truth to direct and respond to your feelings. They are good tools from God! For example, your emotions sometimes tell you when a friend is bad for you, and when a friend is good for you.

One important sign that your feelings are working the way they should is that they come and go. They do their job, and then they wait until you need them again. They aren’t sticky. You don’t feel them all the time every day. God created both good and bad feelings, and they can both be useful if you use God’s truth to respond to them.

But when you have a bad feeling and you don’t know why, or it just never goes away and you feel it all the time, every day; well, that’s a sticky feeling. It may be evidence that you believe a lie. Trust me. It happened to me!

Dannah: So, Nancy, because it happened to Zoey, these girls who are reading the book are going to have to kind of advise her in how to believe truth. And, thankfully, we have a three-step process that’s not only going to help them advise Zoey, but help them counsel their own heart. It’s from Lies Women Believe; we’ve just translated it for girls this age.

So, let’s go through those three steps.

Nancy: And, just to give context here, in all these Lies books, we list lies that women believe, young women, men believe, girls believe. We talk about the truth that sets us free. But after people read these books, we want them to be able to discern other lies they may believing, and to know how to deal with them.

So the first thing we say is, “You’ve got to recognize the evidence that you’re believing lies.”

Dannah: Yes, and so the evidence that a tween girl might be believing a lie may be a sticky feeling—a sticky emotion that just never goes away. Or it may be sin that’s evidence in her life. I want to share a couple of thoughts that tween girls said in our survey of fifteen-hundred tween girls that we used to write this book. How did this sticky feeling sound in their words?

Tween Girl 1: [deep sigh] I don’t have any friends!

Tween Girl 2: My life stinks!

Tween Girl 3: I’m the dumbest person alive!

Dannah: Sometimes the sticky feelings were well verbalized, Nancy, but sometimes they weren’t verbalized at all, and moms had to be kind of undercover agents, detectives, in observing and discerning that those emotions were there. It’s so important to just talk with your girls and say, “Hey, sweetie, I’ve noticed that you’re not as outgoing as you used to be. Have you figured out why that might be?” And maybe she does know, maybe she doesn’t know.

Mom can say, “Hey, does it have anything to do with this person that has been saying really mean things to you?” And as that kind of conversation begins to happen, the daughter’s going to be able to maybe identify the lie herself, but you need to be prepared to go to those difficult places, the places that no mom wants to go.

We don’t want to talk about our daughter being bullied or think about our daughter being bullied.

Lies, by nature, are deceptive! You write that in Lies Women Believe. And so for that reason, we all tend to need help identifying them.

Nancy: And they’re not always obvious. Kind of like roots of a tree underneath the surface, you don’t always see what they are.

Dannah: What a great conversation Nancy and I had about sticky feelings! You can hear more from that episode at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. Select today’s episode. You can also find a link to the book, Lies Girls Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free. I hope the “sticky feelings” framing will be helpful to you as you shepherd the girls in your life on emotional days. 

Now, speaking of shepherding, I live on a hobby farm, and I love to take walks with my goats and my one lone sheep. Not too long ago, I invited my good friend Suzy Weibel and my True Girl listeners to join me. Now, if you’re not familiar, True Girl is my podcast for tween girls and their moms. You’re about to hear part of an episode about finding safety from false teachers. 

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Dannah: As we’ve been walking and talking about false teachers, it’s raised my awareness. And Suzy, I’ve started noticing something . . . there are a lot of them. I’ll see a video online or hear someone teaching, and I catch myself thinking, Hmm, that sounds like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It seems like more and more people are talking about the Bible but not always getting it right. And I just started worrying about our True Girls and getting a little obsessed about learning about wolves so I can protect them.

Suzy Weibel: Well, Dannah, the Bible tells us that false teachers have always been around and that they’ll increase as we get closer and closer to the return of Jesus. But sometimes their voices just spread farther and influence more people. So it may not be that there are more wolves today; it’s just that it’s easier to hear them and their teaching can reach a lot more people because of the internet.

Dannah: Exactly, but that had me feeling a little afraid . . .

Suzy: So it seems.

Dannah: . . . until, I took my little herd for a walk and saw this.

Suzy: It’s pretty cool, but what exactly am I looking at?

Dannah: Here, I brought my Bible. A few days ago; I thought of a passage of Scripture. 

(Pages rustling)

Let me read John 10:11–15. This is Jesus speaking:

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep.”

And then Jesus talks about how hired workers won’t do that for a herd of sheep. They run when they see a wolf coming. They will abandon the sheep because they aren’t the Good Shepherd. And then, just to be sure we get it, Jesus says it again:

“I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, just as my Father knows me and I know the Father. So I sacrifice my life for the sheep.”

Do you see it?

Suzy: I sure do!

Dannah: Do you see what Jesus is saying here? Wolves are real! They do exist. But the sheep don’t have to spend their whole day worrying about wolves.

Suzy: Why?

Dannah: Because they just need to stay close to the shepherd.

When sheep stay near the shepherd:

• The shepherd is the one watching for danger.
• The shepherd is the one protecting them.
• The shepherd is the one who fights off the wolves.

So the safest thing a sheep can do isn’t to try to learn everything about wolves. The safest thing a sheep can do is stay close to the Shepherd and learn everything we can about Jesus.

Suzy: Wow! I love that picture. And just look how much this little herd trusts you, their shepherdess! They feel safe because they KNOW you and they TRUST you.

Dannah: Yeah, I want to be like that! These little creature teachers taught me not to fear the wolves, but to stay close to the Good Shepherd.

Suzy: That’s the secret. Stay safe by staying close to Jesus.

I just have to say this: the key to that is to open your Bible regularly—not just when someone else tells you to. The sheep know the shepherd’s voice because they hear it a lot. The more you read God’s Word, the easier it is to recognize when something doesn’t sound right.

Ya know, as far as our True Girl family goes, staying close to the Shepherd also requires praying. How about we just sit here with this sweet flock of yours and pray for the flock of Jesus.

Dannah: That's a great idea, Suzy.

Suzy: Let's pray.

Dear Jesus, our Good Shepherd, we thank You that You invite us to be near You, to be in Your presence so that You can protect us, where You can keep us, where You can comfort us, where You can let us know that we are Yours.

Lord, I pray for these True Girls. It can be scary sometimes when we talk about things like false teachers and wolves. But remind us that we don't have to be afraid. Our Shepherd is the Good Shepherd. And Jesus, You have laid down Your life for these little sheep.

In fact, You promised in Your Word that You have not even lost one of us—not one! And, You never, ever will.

I pray that these girls will learn to love the Bible and open the Word so that they can hear Your voice often and so that they know Your voice. Let us be wise, let us test the teachings so that we know that if they are listening to You and are in step with Your Word, or if they might be a wolf. In Jesus' name, amen.

Dannah: Amen. I’m grateful Suzy Weibel and I could take that walk with our sweet True Girls. If you’ve got a tween girl in your life, invite them to listen to True Girl with you! We’ll put a link to the season that helps tween girls identify false teachers—influencers on social media, YouTube and other places. We want them to be discerning. You can find the True Girl podcast at ReviveOurHearts.com. At the podcast you’ll also find out more about the True Girl live events I mentioned earlier. We’ll be touring this fall.

Erin Davis also has a heart for the next generation. She’s a dear friend of mine. When she turned thirty-five, she shared thirty-five things she wished she’d known in high school. I think they’ll be encouraging for the girls in your life—and I have a hunch they’ll encourage you too. 

Erin Davis: I'm always thinking, If I could just have one cup of coffee with a teenage girl, what would I say? So this is that coffee conversation.

Number 1: God's promises are true.

Young Girl: "Come to Me, and I will give you rest."

Young Girl: "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

Erin: Number 2: He really does have a hope and a future for me. That's what it says in Jeremiah 29:11.

Young Girl: "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for your wholeness and not for evil; to give you a future and a hope."

Erin: Number 3: The college major and career I picked don't define me. I am not my work. I am a child of God.

Dannah: Okay, let's pause there on number 3. How much pressure do young women feel to define their value by what they do?

Erin: Well, when I was in high school, I thought I had to choose the right major or the next sixty years were tanked. There was all this pressure to know what I wanted to be as an eighteen-year-old girl, and I didn't know.

So as I spend time with teenage girls, I just want them to know to hold that open-handed. I started out as a dental hygiene major. So thank goodness I didn't have it all figured out, because I don't think I would make a very good dental hygienist.

So I'm constantly having to remind myself that I am more than what I can accomplish, more than my to-do list, and that I still don't have it all figured out, and that's okay.

Dannah: During this season of life, one of Erin Davis' main jobs is to take care of three young boys, and that creates a whole new need to remember her value isn't in what she does but who she is in Christ.

Erin: I think the hardest part about being a mom is that none of it fits in checkboxes. I could spend the whole day at home with my three little boys, and I sure feel like I'm working hard, but at the end of the day, there's nothing to show for it. In fact, the house looks worse. There's more laundry somehow, and maybe we spent the whole day building a fort outside, but there's nothing to measure for that time as a mom.

So I just have to remind myself a lot that the Lord doesn't love me because I'm the best mom ever or the most achieving career person ever or any place that I would want to give myself gold stars. When He looks at me, I have worth because He made me, and He loves me, and that's a good lesson—especially when there's no measurable progress in the motherhood world.

Dannah: So, say you're tempted to get your value from your accomplishments, how do you set your mind on the truth?

Erin: Well, I'm a huge advocate of memorizing Scripture. I'm kind of constantly memorizing Scripture, and that's something that we do as a family. I also have it all over our house. My New Year's resolution a couple years ago was to get a Bible verse in every room of the house. So everywhere you go, there is truth. I have a Bible verse on the steering wheel of my car. I'm just constantly forcing my eyeballs toward the Word of God because it's so easy for my emotions to tell me a different story.

Dannah: Erin Davis is reading us a blog post she wrote called "35 Things I Wish I'd Known in High School," and number four encourages younger women to focus on internal qualities when considering a potential spouse.

Erin: Number 4: Marrying a guy who loves Jesus really, really matters.

Number 5: Parents are pretty cool. Their rules are for my good.

Dannah: And Erin says you can choose to respect and honor your parents even when they're not perfect.

Erin: When I'm obedient to authority, even difficult authority—and I would say sometimes especially difficult authority—that there's grace for me there.

When I'm obedient to what the Lord has asked me to do, which in this case is to honor your father and your mother, that the Lord blesses that. And my little guys will tell you that that is the first commandment with a promise. It's as if God knows that honoring our fathers and mothers can be challenging.

So if that's your situation, your parents are difficult and it's hard to submit to them, I would just take that to the Lord often. I would look for every way possible to honor your father and mother. You don't have to like them. You don't have to like everything that they do. But you can honor them. You can find ways to honor them. And I can just say from experience that God will bless that.

Dannah: Erin Davis is continuing to tell us "35 Things I Wish I'd Known in High School."

Erin: Number 6: Being the prettiest or most popular girl in school matters for about half a second after graduation. In contrast, being the kindest girl in school gets remembered well past your ten-year reunion.

Dannah: And this point was inspired by a story.

Erin: After high school, several years after high school, I was taking a class, and there was a boy there that I'd gone to high school with. Honestly, I didn't even remember his name, and I would have guessed that I wasn't very nice to him. But he said, "You know what I remember about you? You were always really nice to me." That left an impression on me that so many years later just being kind to him made me memorable.

Dannah: So being kind and developing other heart attitudes is far more important than physical characteristics. And her next point is about physical appearance, too.

Erin: Number 7: You will look back at pictures of you and think you were stunning, trust me!

Number 8: Insecurity is a massive waste of time and energy. Be confident in God's love.

Dannah: Okay, let's park there for a minute because insecurity isn't just something that's in high schoolers.

Erin: I think insecurity is an issue that just gets larger and larger as we age if we don't address it. Of course, the first place we see insecurity is with the first woman, with Eve, where the serpent says to her, "You will be like God." And so the undertone there is who you are is not enough, and my guess is that's why she nibbled. I mean, insecurity has a way of taking women down.

So if you're insecure about how you look in high school, and you don't understand God's truth about that issue, you will be insecure about how you look everywhere along the way. If you think it's hard in high school, wait until you have a post-baby body, and then I imagine all along the path.

So, for me, I know I have to grab onto God's Word about my identity at every stage of life. And insecurity is something I battle often. The only thing that I have learned, the only weapon I've learned that works is the Word of God.

Dannah: Not just hearing the Word of God, but really believing it.

Erin: I think for most women, insecurity is really an issue of unbelief. We know what God's Word says about us, but we just choose not to believe it. I know that's true because many women. I would say, "How does the Bible say that you were made?"

And they will say, "Fearfully and wonderfully." But that's not how they carry themselves, and that's not what they think when they look in the mirror.

So it's about knowing what God's Word says about you, which I think is probably the easy part, and then believing it.

For example, I know that the Bible says that God loves me with an everlasting love, that He woes me with lovingkindness. So that's not the same as a temporal love or a love that comes and goes based on my performance or a love based on his mood. Everlasting love is love that goes on and on and on, and it existed before I existed, and it will exist forever.

So I just have to know those verses, like, "I'm fearfully and wonderfully made." "He loves me with an everlasting love." There are just passages all throughout the Bible that speak to the depth of His love, and I just have to, first, know them, and then I have to believe them. And if I'm honest, I have to take both of those steps most days.

Dannah: And like Erin said, the only way to get truly over insecurity is to be confident, not in ourselves, but in God's love for us as His children.

Erin: I'm not sure I understood God's love until I birthed three beautiful baby boys who are so imperfect and make mistakes often, but never does it dampen my love for them. So, fearfully and wonderfully made does not mean I have no flaws. It means that I was made, and the Creator loves me because I'm His creation, imperfect, deeply flawed, and deeply needy of Him—much the same as my children are of me. But none of that means He doesn't love me. In fact, a sentence I have to say to myself a lot is that I will measure Jesus' love by the cross, and His power by the resurrection.

So how can I know that He loves me? Is it because I feel loved in that moment or loveable in that moment? No. Is it because I had the perfect day? No—it hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen. But I can know that He loves me because He went to the cross for me. So I will measure His love by the cross and His power by the resurrection, because no other measuring stick works.

In spite of the fact that I'm flawed and broken, He loved me so much to go to the cross and rescue me. I've never known a bigger love.

Dannah: Erin Davis sharing what she wishes she knew in high school. How encouraging! This is the truth our girls desperately need! The statistics may look grim, but God’s Word offers hope. There is a biblical truth to counter every lie the enemy whispers to our girls. So let’s continue to lead them toward Scripture together.

We’re here to partner with you in this work—and we’re able to do that because listeners like you give generously to support this ministry. If you’ve been listening today and you’d like to make a donation to keep it all going—resources like the Revive Our Hearts podcast, the True Girl podcast, and so much more—you can do that today! Visit ReviveOurHearts.com to give.

And when you do, be sure to request this month’s gift! It’s a brand-new photo book designed to help you find beauty in every season. It contains thirty days of reflections and quotes from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth—and each day features a beautiful landscape photo taken by one of our staff members. I’m imagining this booklet sitting on my nightstand so I can flip through these heart-quieting pictures and reflections at the end of the day. Again, you can request yours when you make a donation of any amount at ReviveOurHearts.com. 

Next weekend, we’re talking about another season of life—singleness. Every woman will spend time in this life stage at some point. Whether or not you’re there now, I think you’ll be encouraged next weekend as we remember God’s grace for this season!

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time, for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.