I made 8 Barlow Girl Icons here~ Not really fancy, but please credit =)

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My very good guy friend is dancing with me in my sweet 15 and I am praying that he will come with me to church. He thinks I am a very good "church girl" and he realy likes me too. So can you all pray that he will come with me to church and that if me and him are meant to be with each other.
Kayla

Please pray for cindmouse. Her husband is in the hospital (i don't know the details but it's real serious) and the two of them could really use prayers and encouragement. Please drop by her LJ and let her know you are praying.

- DON'T WORRY ABOUT REPLYING HERE, GO TO HER LJ -

This essay I wrote focuses on why God has selected sexual intercourse for marriage and not at any other time.

Oh and before I start, plz comment if there are any aspects of sex, sexuality, or intimacy in marriage or before that you'd like to read about here. I think a good post on boundaries may be coming up.

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Looking for a fun challenge community to try your icon work each week? We'd love to have you join ccm_stillness! Although a fairly new community, there are some great entries and good competition. However, if you are new to icon making, you are welcome to join as well! It's a great way to pick up new tricks and learn as your icons are voted for by your peers. Contests on different artists are posted weekly, as well as special challenges every other week. Come and join us!

New community dedicated to followers of Christ who are in Long-Distance Relationships. It's called ldr_christians and anyone who is, will be, or has been in long distance relationships feel free to join. Even if you aren't actually long-distance but maybe for whatever reason can't see your special someone regularly, or maybe you can and you just need help keeping your relationship Christ-centered, JOIN!

Don't be scared off by awaiting approval, that's just to minimize trollage. Any suggestions you may have are certainly welcome! :D

ps. didn't see anything saying we can't advertise but if we can't feel free to delete this ^^

Anyone who's been on a college campus lately will confirm the depressing report delivered by Vigen Guroian in this essay [the essay located above this article in the magazine]. As someone who does a lot of campus speaking, I've seen my fair share of posters announcing sex-toy workshops, transgender celebrations, and, on one Ivy League campus, an open invitation to a "naked party." What's a naked party? Anybody who wants can attend, but you have to take off all your clothes to stay.

It makes you want to weep for the children, for girls in particular, who deserve to be protected from this carnival of leering and molestation. Guroian hits the target in his demand that colleges do more to provide such protection. But what about the students themselves? How can we help them resist this expectation?

There are three typical strategies, and I don't think any of them work. The first is practical: We tell students to abstain because immorality leads to misery. But the libertines in the audience don't see evidence that this is so; they're having fun, for the most part, and it doesn't look like anyone is harmed. The second is romantic: We tell students that marriage is glorious. Once again, they don't see a lot of evidence of that, not in the lives of married people they know, perhaps especially in the lives of their parents. What they saw at the breakfast table for the last 18 years doesn't look that great, and what they did last night didn't feel that bad.

The third is our foundational premise that it's a matter of "objective morality." We regularly complain that young people have no absolute values; that, in Guroian's words, "There is no right and wrong." But this message is likely to strike hearers as irrelevant, speculative, and quaint. Not only that, but flat-out wrong. These students have an objective morality, it's just different from ours. They believe that it's objectively wrong to dump someone in a callous way. It's wrong to have sex with someone who isn't willing. It's wrong to transgress any one of a hundred subtle etiquette cues about who may sleep with whom under what circumstances. There is plenty of objective morality on their side, and they think it's better than ours. As far as they can see, theirs is working and ours looks pointlessly difficult. Why should they switch? This argument sounds like nothing more than "because I said so."

What we really mean, of course, is "because God said so." And indeed persevering in chastity is so difficult that no other motive except self-abandoning love of God is sufficient. All the warnings about the dangers of promiscuity, all the vaunted bliss of marriage, can be irrefutably countered by somebody's experience. Doing the right thing is not guaranteed to make you happy, and the wicked sometimes thrive. But because the love of God constrains us, because our bodies are not our own but bought with a price, we persevere in a difficult path, pressing on toward the light ahead.

Now, this is a difficult sell to people who don't believe in God. For them, this is like a shiny new car with no engine. If you don't have the motive of love for God, passion for purity looks like an empty shell.

I believe that the only conversation that will currently make sense begins with faith in God. The best we can do is speak passionately about our own experience--our own transformative contact with God, and how it has reordered actions and relationships, and empowered ever-greater deeds and greater love. It's not a bad story, actually, and authentic passion connects with an audience in a way that theoretical propositions cannot.

I say "currently" because I think there is long term hope. Look at 'It Happened One Night'. While that excellent film exhibits good sexual morality, it also displays behavior we consider unacceptable today: drunkenness, smoking, threats to "sock" the female star. Hollywood wouldn't include such elements today, because the culture changed. It got better. Bad behavior hurts, and eventually this becomes undeniable. Chastity has been such a fixture of human history that the current situation is wildly anomalous, and I expect it will eventually right itself, probably due to women realizing that promiscuity doesn't make them feel empowered, but endangered. It may even turn out, in a supreme irony, that the current phenomenon of transitory student lesbianism was just a strategy of desperation, the only way society currently allows young women to tell boys, "Go away, I'm not ready."

"God hates sin," some emphasize. But God hates sin like the parent of a leukemia victim hates cancer. God really does love the sinner. In order to reach the sinner we will have to love them, too, and offer ourselves humbly and authentically as examples of what God's power can do.

by Frederica Mathewes-Green, the author of "Gender: Men, Women, Sex, and Feminism"

Hello. Any new males joining here, or am I the only one?

Well, I wanted to say I appreciate this livejournal for people who are striving after sexual purity. This is like one in a million on the internet.

I appreciate the long post from bp_rose on her concerns about how we should help out the people in South East Asia. Even though Christ and His followers during their time didn't have instant media access to these sort of catastrophic events, I think if they did, they probably would have helped any way they could. Maybe. The problem is that when disasters occur all throughout the world, everyone knows about it. Instantly. And the U. S. feels obligated to help everyone. This is good in one sense. The U. S. is probably the wealthiest nation on the earth and has the resources to help out. But, this global-neighborhood is pretty new to the history to mankind. We are bombarded every day with awful things happening around our country, and the world. Are we really supposed to be responsible for them all? Maybe we are. But God did not invent TV and media, and the annihilation of space (modern transport, telephone, internet, etc.) is one of the great disasters of humankind, in my opinion. I'm not anti-technology, I just think we don't think hard enough about what goodness technology takes away. What does technology steal from our humanity?

Anyway, just food for thought.