No Trespassing

The night after the cheerleading auditions, Stacy's boyfriend phoned and convinced her to let him sneak into her house. He did so, and although nothing sexual occurred, Stacy discovered that overstepping her "good girl" boundaries gave her a thrill. She decided to sneak him in again, saying to herself: "I'm going to do this--I'm going to sneak my boyfriend in. I'm going to be a bad kid. And that's when everything happened."

Though they had been dating for two weeks, they hadn't even kissed yet. But that night they were sexually intimate--everything but intercourse, she says. During the next three weeks, they continued experimenting, but as the initial thrill dwindled, Stacy once again felt a void. "It was just like, on the inside I knew that if this was all just an attempt to make me happy, it wasn't working," she says.

Stacy was 13 when she signed the True Love Waits pledge at her church, a large suburban Baptist congregation. She says that even though she hasn't fully lived up to the pledge, it hasn't changed her feelings about what is right and what is wrong. "When [the Bible] says, 'flee from sexual immorality,' that doesn't mean push it as far as you can but don't cross the line. That means go as far as you can in the opposite direction. I'm saying all of this because this is what I believe. This is not necessarily what I've done and am doing."

Emotional neediness has often led Stacy to go further than she knows she should. "It becomes almost like a drug--not in that it's addictive, but the emotional attachment will make you do things you don't want to do," she explains. Or, at least, things that she regrets later. Knowing her weaknesses, though, hasn't kept her from falling into the same traps over and over again. Her experience following the cheerleading tryouts was repeated, with less intensity, a year later when she didn't win the student council presidency.

Often, the young men she turns to for comfort are members of her church youth group. The close, spiritual atmosphere of the group sometimes fosters physical relationships, and confessional sharing among the teens can be exploited. "If I have this friend, and we've shared our sexual histories with each other and pledged to pray for each other and I know that that's his weakness, of course the devil is going to tempt me to call him up when I'm feeling lonely on a Friday night, because I know that that's something he struggles with," Stacy says. "I know that he's an easy target and, as a guy, not likely to say no." Yet from her past experiences, she knows that if she fools around with a guy from the youth group, within a week, they will call each other to apologize.

TLW's Ross says this is typical with the teens he's counseled. He says teens seek sexual expression because of parental abandonment or emotional emptiness. "They come to believe that if they give their body to another lonely teenager, maybe somewhere in that relationship they'll find something that resembles authentic love," he states. But in the end, he says, "there's just sadness with the loss of innocence. There is sadness among young people that trusted a partner to protect their heart, and now they have discovered that partner was not interested in their heart at all, but only some organs."

But even though the True Love Waits pledge offers a goal and a focus, Stacy recognizes that controlling her sexual nature will be an everyday battle. Her faith has given her confidence that the battle is not in vain. "I don't think I ever would have gotten how sublime a relationship with Christ is unless I'd seen, by comparison, that other things don't work," she says. "I know it's not a pretty testimony, but it's mine."

Anger Management

Hal Werner's always been different. In blue jeans, purple sport coat and matching violet sunglasses, Werner, 19, stands apart from the crowd at First Baptist Church of Richardson. Before he began attending church, the University of Texas sophomore dressed in baggy black pants with chains and ripped-up black T-shirts and listened to music by Rob Zombie, Pantera and Marilyn Manson. "Not just that it was 'heavy rock,'" he says. "It was the death metal, 'I'm-going-to-feel-up-dead-people' and really weird stuff like that, talking about flying limbs and all kinds of general mayhem."

In junior high, he saw his grades slip. Werner's father, a strict, retired U.S. Army major, intervened. "My dad would lecture me anytime I got anything below a 97 on an assignment," Werner says. So he transferred to Trinity Christian School in Cedar Hill, which required that all students and their families attend a Protestant church at least once a week.