This concept had a pretty big effect on both of us. Obviously, we don’t want to be the same people this year that we were last year. This is why we’re beginning this year (as we do most every year) by plotting out some major goals for ourselves, including relationships we want to develop and books we want to read.

As we both change and grow each year, the books we read and appreciate change each year as well. We both grew up loving to read, and voraciously devoured all books of all ilks and genres. Some we loved. Some we hated. Some we loved and shouldn’t have. Some we hated for bad reasons. Some we positively binged on. Some we tasted and spat out. And along the way, we’ve realized that girls’ natural literary tastes cannot always be trusted.

Last year we revisited some of these beloved and be-hated books from our childhoods and did a brief study on women’s most popular literary choices, and then put together a message for a conference we were speaking at. We titled it, “Jane Austen and Vampires: Examining Girls’ Literary Appetites and Literary Eating Disorders.”

What do handsome heroes, bonnets, and vampires have in common? Not much, but they’re all pieces of the most famous and influential girls literature of all time — literature that has revamped the way thousands of young women view reality, the world, themselves, and romance. In this audio message, we attempted to analyze authors from Jane Austen to Janette Oke to Stephanie Meyer, and lay out the basics of a healthy literary diet. (Click here for more information.)

Well, to celebrate this whole new year we all have been given to read books, study, and nourish the little gray cells, we wanted to give a copy of this message away to one of you! To enter the draw, simply write to us (damselsATvisionarydaughtersDOTcom) and tell us three books you’d really like to read this year. Giveaway ends January 20. (By the way, congratulations to Brielle, winner of a copy of It’s (Not That) Complicated ! We pray the book will be an encouragement to you.)

And just for fun, we’re going to give you a peek at all the great cover ideas schemed up by our sibling design team. We liked them all so much it was hard to choose a winner. Which one do you like best? You can enter the giveaway a second time by writing and telling us your immediate reactions to each cover (e.g. #1 is the most punchy, #4 gave me the willies, etc.). We’d love to hear your thoughts!

What will you be reading this year?

We’re giving away a signed copy of It’s (Not That) Complicated! To enter the draw: Just write to us (damselsATvisionarydaughtersDOTcom) and tell us what you’d like to see us write a book about next!

To enter a second time, either 1: Put our nifty “It’s (Not That) Complicated” sidebar button (see left) on your own website sidebar (see here for instructions), and send us an email telling us, or 2: simply “like” the “It’s (Not That) Complicated” page on Facebook and write and tell us. Best yet, you can enter three times by doing all three.

Giveaway ends December 9.

Last week we were honored to talk about our new book with Kevin Swanson on his radio program “Generations”. You can listen to the interview online here.

We’re excited to share with you a number of excerpts from our new book. These next few chunks were pulled from “Chapter Seven: The Heart: Victim or Perpetrator? Getting Your Heart to Follow YOU.”

Emotional Purity Revisited

We’re very grateful for the groundwork that has been laid by the Emotional Purity advocates, people who first began to seriously address the problem of handing out bits of our heart with reckless abandon. We, for two, needed to hear about the concept of guarding our hearts, keeping our emotions under control, and being faithful to our future husbands in thought and deed. But we believe this foundation needs a little more built onto it. For many, the concept raised more questions than it answered.

As one girl wrote to us: “My friend + i hav both decided that wee r neva goin 2 d8 + we want our 1st kiss 2 b on our weddings. …[but] i was tellin sum of my friends @ school about the decisions ive made and another question came up, is it wrong to have a crush on a guy? my friend says that you can’t control whether u have a crush on sum1 or not and im not 100 % sure how 2 answer that. Can u guys help?”

Once the idea of emotional purity is introduced, the questions breed like rabbits. “Can you keep from having crushes?” “Is it wrong to have a crush?” “When is it technically a crush, anyway?” “Whatever it is, is it a sin?” “Will they come back to bite me later?” “Will each crush that I’ve had make me love my future husband less?” “Do I need to go find and marry the first boy that I ever liked?” “Did the crushes I had when I was two count against my emotional purity, or do they only start to count at age 13? Is there a crushing age of accountability?” “I’ve given away my heart so many times – is it too late for me to even care?”

To those on the outside, these sorts of questions might sound like silly wranglings over definitions to see what we can get away with, or the perfect ten in female ditziness. But these questions are actually legitimate, and the confusion a big deal, because at the heart of it, we’re talking about our moral responsibilities. When we don’t understand our actual moral responsibilities in this area, we can feel ridden with guilt over things that aren’t actually wrong, and completely unpricked by things that are. We can have a fatalistic “It’s too late to guard my heart because I’ve already botched things so badly” attitude towards doing right in the future. And we can develop an unbiblical fear of doing the things we are actually commanded to do.

We torture ourselves over quandaries like, “At exactly what point in my thought process did my favorable thoughts towards a young man turn into sin? Did I cross the line when I started naming our imaginary future children? …or was it back when I was wondering what color the bridesmaids’ shoes should be? How about when I first admired what a servant’s heart he has?”

We ask the wrong question when we ask, “Is having a crush a sin?” The Bible doesn’t actually say, and the reason is because “emotional purity” is a made-up moral category. And it’s giving a lot of us feelings of (unbiblical) guilt for committing some dreadful nebulous crime that there is no definition for, when the answer would actually be very clear if we phrased the question using biblical terms. There are plenty of real moral categories for real sins – like lust, covetousness, idolatry, fear of man, vain imaginations, and presumptuous sins. How much clearer would things be if we would just go ahead and say, “I’ve made an idol out of a young man; is that wrong?” or, “I’m having lustful thoughts for this guy – is that a sin?”

The Bible gives plenty of clear commands, both positive and negative: Guard your heart. Love the brethren from a pure heart. Think on what is pure and what is true. Don’t covet. Don’t lust. Have self-control. Take every thought captive. Going against any of these clear commands is a sin. This should answer our questions.

See? Now it’s not that complicated again.
…..

Conquering Love

But keeping our love in its proper place is easier said than done. Our hearts want to love. They want to fasten themselves to someone. As woman was taken from the side of man, she yearns to be restored to the side of man. We’ve all known since our highchair days that that’s where we belong. We’re wired to find them fascinating, attractive, and loveable. This is why one of young women’s biggest struggles is keeping that desire to love under control.

A girl once wrote to us, “For a long time I have struggled with unrequited love. I just cannot get over this one young man I know. I love him, but it seems that God has just not ordained that he should love me in return, and I am having the hardest time trying to accept that.”

There is no pain quite like realizing that what we desire most is not what God desires to give us – a pain we’re both keenly familiar with.

The truth is hard to accept, especially when we’re hurting, realizing that we made a mistake when we staked our hopes, our futures, our love, on someone who had no commitment to us in return. The girls who write us such emails are hoping for advice on how to get the young man to return their feelings, but truly the kindest (and hardest) thing we can tell them is this: that their own affections are out of place to begin with. The earlier girls would realize this, the more pain they would be spared. Love doesn’t have to go out of control and harm us. The young men God has placed in our lives don’t have to be sources of pain and heartache. There is a better way. And it requires learning to set boundaries for our own feelings.

But even those who recognize that little schoolgirl crushes are immature and fruitless can still wonder, “Is it wrong to deeply, sincerely desire a young man who is really worthy? One we could really marry?”
One thing our father taught us is that it’s not wrong to respect and admire a godly young man; not even to realize we could marry a man like him. But our legitimate and pure-hearted regard crosses the line into out-of-place love when we stray into one or more of these five mistakes:

1. Seeking our will above God’s

God already has a plan for what must happen with you and every young man you know. In His grand design, He knows who should be married to whom in order for His will to be accomplished, and your duty is to embrace that design as surely as you embrace God Himself. If we really, truly, sincerely love God’s ways, we will be able to do the impossible: Rejoice even if God gives Brandon to someone else, and take joy in the plan He has for us instead. Whenever we feel that we would not be happy with God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, if that will is different from ours, we’re out of place. If a young man becomes more important to us than God’s will and preferences, he has officially become an idol.

2. Thinking we have a claim over the young man

It doesn’t matter how much we think we understand him, appreciate him, love him, deserve him – if we do not have his ring on our finger, he is not ours. In God’s bigger plan, this young man we’re lavishing so much devotion on might be another woman’s husband. And we might be another man’s wife. If there is no marital commitment, we don’t belong to one another.

Our love may feel pure, perfect, transcendent – but once it lights on a brother in Christ and says “He’s mine – hands off,” it has become selfish, possessive, and jealous. And this is part of the reason we need to resist crushes – because they’re incompatible with real love. That’s right – real love for the young man, and also the people around us. Do we truly love Brandon, enough to want the very best for him? Enough to want something better for him than… us? (If we truly cared about a fellow, would we necessarily think, “Brandon is so amazing… he needs a really special girl. I know! Me! Why, he couldn’t do better!”) How about the other girls? Do we love Amber enough to hope that she will also get a really amazing husband? Even if it’s… Brandon? (“But she can’t have him! I deserve him!”) If we love the other girls around us, it really will change the way we love the other boys. Because true love conquers all – even crushes.

3. Forgetting who the man is

We’ve all heard it a thousand times, and yet we still forget: It’s the man’s job to choose, the woman’s job to be chosen. And no amount of active searching and window-shopping on our part will actually make our chosen chooser choose us any faster. Wrapping ourselves up in a bow and throwing ourselves at his feet doesn’t count as letting him be the initiator, either. It’s hard to feel powerless, but now is our time to learn patience and trust, to be at peace with the fact that it’s the man’s call. For a girl to “pick” a young man who may never be an option for her is presumptuous, at best. It can be asking for heartbreaking disappointment, at worst.

4. Building castles in the sky

The truth is, we open the door for heart wrenching pain when we stake all of ourselves, all of our thoughts, our whole world – on something that we have no guarantee will happen. Even in a courtship-type situation, when the young man’s interest is certain, it doesn’t guarantee that your future with him is. God may still have other plans (Jas. 4:13-15), and it’s best to be emotionally prepared for them.

5. Letting your brain go out the window

…as our father always put it. Dad taught us that when you’re facing one of the biggest decisions of your life is the time when you most need your wits about you. We all know infatuation is blinding; during this season of getting to know young men as friends, and especially in the next season of getting to know one of them as a potential husband, we will need to have our minds prepared for action (1 Pet. 1:13) and our eyes wide open.

Moreover, as appealing as it may sound, we shouldn’t expect God to lead us through our infatuations. Our hearts, feelings, “intuitions,” and romantic inclinations can all be wrong, no matter how strong they are or how right they feel. One friend of ours was so convinced that her feelings for a particular young man were a sign from the Lord, that she wouldn’t let them go even after his engagement to someone else. On his wedding day, she confronted him for going against the will of God, and told him it was still his destiny to marry her. Obviously, her feelings weren’t proof of anything but the fact that… she had feelings. God leads us through the truths in Scripture, not though our fickle human hearts.

We learned a lot from watching our dear friend – now sister-in-law –Nadia face all five of these temptations. It wasn’t long after Nadia became one of our family’s closest friends that she realized our older brother David was exactly the kind of man she had been praying for. As she describes it, “I was gripped by his humility and purity of heart before the Lord and his passion for proclaiming the Word of God.” She’d never met another man she thought she could help, follow, and complete as well. And yet… she had no guarantee that David was really the man God had chosen for her. Any girl in this situation would be tempted to check out from reality, fixating, wishing, speculating, wondering, hoping… To place her happiness in the contingency that it would work out. To view the young man as “hers.”

But Nadia knew the battle in her heart that she had to fight and win had nothing to do with David. It had to do with finding her satisfaction in God alone. She knew that no matter what happened – even if she married David – she could not be happy until she learned to love God more, know Him better, and desire His will over her own, even if His will for her future didn’t include David. She wanted to learn to love David rightly and desire what was best for him, regardless of whether it would involve her or not. She wanted to be focused on reality – growing and working to be more like Christ and serve Him in the here and now – not distracted by possibilities or fantasies.

Some girls think if there’s a chance the relationship could work out, they should hold on to their infatuations… just in case they were to need those feelings someday. The angst in their hearts isn’t even over “I just can’t stop loving him!” but “Should I stop, or shouldn’t I?” In Nadia’s mind, the question was “Are these feelings right before God, right now? Am I putting my hope in marrying David, or in God? Has my sisterly regard crossed the line into idolatry?”
….

Wash Me and I Shall Be Whiter Than Snow

Some girls fear that they will have permanent scars from mistakes they have made. They fear that part of them is gone and they can never be made whole again. But the concept of inner purity deals more with the present state of the heart, the mind, and the affections than it does with the past. What we need to be doing is developing a state of heart and mind that is self-controlled and faithful to one man. It’s never too late to repent and do what’s right.

Going back to Ephesians, we see that the Church of Christ was not naturally pure, but had to be sanctified and cleansed “by the washing of water with the word” (Eph. 5:26) before she was ready to be presented before her Groom. David cried, “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” (Ps. 51:7) Being clean means having been washed. Being pure means being purified – tested, matured, and refined by fire.

More than that, it means being forgiven. Our hearts, if not the rest of us, have all played the harlot, committed murder, and sinned against God. But what did Jesus tell the woman taken in adultery? “Go, and sin no more.” The same love that was extended to her has been extended to us by the same Savior. “If we confess our sins,” says 1 John 1:9, “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

When Christ saves us, He gives us His righteousness so the Father can accept us as righteous and see us as completely pure – as He is. This is the essence of forgiveness in Christ, which makes us clean in God’s sight. If we have been purified by Christ, we need to learn to dwell in this forgiveness rather than dwell on our former impurity. So think about your future, ladies, not your past. We should live every day in the comforting assurance of this position, and in a way that honors the Savior who bled and died to exalt us to such a place! Once you understand your forgiveness in Christ, you will be able to think and act like a pure woman, and your future husband will be able to truly see you as such.

In King David, we see a heart that was already “after God’s own heart,” but still needed constant maintenance. We should take a lesson from the way he cried out to God in the Psalms to give him continual heart surgery: “Let… the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD.” (Ps. 19:14) And after his affair with Bathsheba: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” (Ps. 51:10)

Some girls have fallen so deeply for someone in the past that they feel they’ve lost that part of their heart forever. But does he own real estate in your heart, or is he just a squatter? We say we can’t get that part of our heart back, but it’s not gone. It’s still in us – still generating special thoughts and feelings for that someone, cherishing sentimental longings and wistful regrets, not letting go. But we can get this corner back. As with conquering sin, this could require taking a knife and cutting away a part of our life. It’s not easy, and it’s not painless – but it’s not impossible. The most emotional, impulsive, anxious, romantic, or vulnerable girl is not powerless to rule this area of her life. Philippians 4:6-7 tells us how:

Do not be anxious about anything

Not even Brandon.

but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

He hears your cries for a godly husband.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding

He can envelop even the most stressful, anxious area of our lives with His peace.

will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

This is why it’s possible to guard our hearts and minds: because He makes it possible.

Boy-girl relationships are hard. They’re hard because they’re made of people, not mathematic equations, formulas, or quantifiable factors like numbers. When talking about relationships, we’re dealing with fluctuating factors like motives, irrational feelings, and a nature that was made by God to be one way and twisted by sin to be another. Numbers are easy because they are predictable, but the heart, as Jeremiah 17:9 says, “is deceitful above all things… who can understand it?” And if one person wasn’t complicated enough, just add another person, multiply their sin natures, and we’ve got an equation too hard to solve in our own strength. When we do try to boil these relationships down to simple rules and formulas, they can come out looking something like the diagrams below. Because when it comes to each of these quandaries of the heart… it’s just (not that) simple.

Here are some drawings that didn’t make it onto the cover of It’s (Not That) Complicated, but we wanted to share with you anyway:

“My biggest concerns are how should I even treat boys period? I have
no idea how to act around them…I know I should be myself but, besides
that…”

“I’m not around a lot of young men, so when I am in a group with one,
it gives me the jitters. How do I act natural?”

“Is it a good idea to be good or close friends with a guy? And if you
do sense yourself beginning to be interested in someone, is it an
option to try to get to know them better, or should you keep things
the same and wait for the guy to make the first move?”

“If I say ‘hi’ and strike up a conversation is he going to think that I
am too forward, shouldn’t my kind of man be the first to speak, and
what will others think of what I do?”

“Where do you draw the line between being friendly, which is okay, and
being flirty, which is (presumably) not okay?”

“…can you encourage a potential suitor to pursue you without being
flirty, forward, or inappropriate? …can you let them know you are
available in a God-honoring way without becoming the initiator?”

“What takes a girl from someone a man likes to be around, to someone
he wants to spend his life with? I see a lot of lists by girls about
‘my husband must be such and such.’ But it seems all I ever hear from
guys is ‘a godly lady.’ What does that mean to them?”

“If there is a particular guy that I have noticed, what is the best
way to deal with these feelings? And what should I watch out for when
I am around him/do to guard my heart?”

It’s (Not That) Complicated will explore all of these questions sent
in by our readers and many, many more. (And will, hopefully, make them
all seem a lot less complicated.)

For more information and to order a copy, visit NotComplicatedBook.com.

How do young men and young women interact with one another when marriage is not in view? Can young men and young women be ‘friends’? And how does a young woman guard her heart, preserve her purity, and walk in integrity without treating young men with disdain? In It’s (Not That) Complicated, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin address these and other questions with wisdom, grace, transparency, and biblical acuity.

— Dr. Voddie Baucham Jr.

We’re excited to announce that It’s (Not That) Complicated is now available! For more information and to order a copy, visit NotComplicatedBook.com, and don’t forget to check back in the coming weeks for excerpts and special features.

To provide a little taste of what’s inside the pages of It’s (Not That) Complicated, we thought we’d share the table of contents with you all. We’ll be posting more excerpts and updates as we near our November 1st release date, so check back with us soon!

We’re excited to announce that our new book, It’s (Not That) Complicated: How to Relate to Guys in a Healthy, Sane, and Biblical Way, will be released on November 1st! Many thanks to all of you who wrote us with your ideas and questions; we wanted this book to be as timely and practical as possible, and we couldn’t have written it without your help.

Stay tuned - we’ll be posting updates, sneak peaks, and bonus features over the next couple of weeks!

Navigating History: Egypt — more information here

Several months ago, Isaac (with Dad’s blessing and encouragement) conceived and developed a vision for a six-episode series about Egypt that would take viewers from the top of the mountains surrounding the Valley of the Kings into the tombs under the pyramids. His goal was to take a team with cameras to explore the darkest and most secret parts of Egypt’s history and illuminate them with the light of Scripture.

But Isaac wasn’t about to have all the fun without us. He brought us on board at the beginning to help make his vision a reality. Though we didn’t get to be on the trip this time, this was our part of the adventure: We got to help man Mission Control and the snazzy project website while he and his team were on the ground in Egypt.

Anna Sofia and the not-yet-Nadia-Botkin editing B-roll images

No, we didn’t get to have the boots-on-the-ground experience of actually being there and seeing and touching Egypt. But we were enjoying plenty of action on the home-front with our family; doing things we had never done before and had no idea how to do. For example, we had to learn Photoshop and basic HTML, and had to write briefings for the team on subjects like Islamic architecture and ancient Egyptian medicine.

Elizabeth and Nawelle hashing out website details

All of us had to work around the clock, marketing, managing the live broadcasts, writing articles and designing headers. And then, when he got home, the real work began – writing content for the 220-page companion book, on everything from biblical chronology to French mysticism to Shariah law to pagan death rituals to evolutionary history-revision to pyramid-building-theories (in which we discovered that aliens didn’t do it).

Anna Sofia does hands-on research on Egyptian heiroglyphs

We didn’t do this because we believed we had a biblical duty to submit to Isaac, or to be his junior helpmeets. We also didn’t do it because we particularly (initially) cared about proving that aliens didn’t build the pyramids. We did this because we particularly cared about Isaac. Isaac was about to take a big step, a bold risk, a fearless stand, and we didn’t want to miss that for the world! If Isaac was going to stand inside a mosque and call Muhammed a false prophet, and denounce Statism in front of the giant pillars at Karnak, we, for one, wanted to be on his home team. It was our way of saying to him, “We think what you’re doing is important – we think it’s important enough to put our money where our mouths are.” And we did it because our time of being with Isaac, and available to help him, won’t last forever.

Sending the Navigating History team off to Egypt with prayer.

It was an experience we wouldn’t have traded for anything. We discovered a whole new world of ideas and broadened our intellectual horizons. We learned that sisterly duties don’t have to be limited to domestic things, far removed from what the boys are doing. We discovered how much fun it is to be part of a man’s world, even if it means taking the plunge into finding world politics as fascinating as they do.

Multi-tasking: Elizabeth compares notes with Isaac on Islam’s view of women over dinner prep.

Most importantly, though, we became much closer to Isaac; and we helped him accomplish his dream, making big strides as a dominion man and disciplemaker.

(And we ended up having enough time left over to still be able to write our upcoming book about relationships with boys. But more news on that soon. Stay tuned!)