Dannah Gresh - A Girls Guide to Best Friends and Mean Girls

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE, OREGON

All Scripture quotations in part 1 are from the second edition of the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

All Scripture quotations in part 2 are from the first edition of the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Interior photos as follows: p. 7, Raisa Kanareva/Shutterstock.com; p. 9, Getty Images; p. 10, Raisa Kanareva/Shutterstock.com; p. 14, R. Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com; p. 18, Daniel Korzeniewski/Shutterstock.com; p. 23, wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.com; p. 35, Jacek Chabraszewski/Shutterstock.com

Interior spot illustrations and doodle graphics Shutterstock.com

Illustrations of fictional SKG girls by Andy Mylin

Cover photos Steve Tressler/Mountainview Studios; iStockphoto

Cover and interior design by www.DesignByJulia.com, Woodland Park, CO

A GIRLS GUIDE TO BEST FRIENDS AND MEAN GIRLS

Copyright 2008, 2013 by Dannah Gresh

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97402

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gresh, Dannah.

A girls guide to best friends and mean girls / by Dannah Gresh and Suzy Weibel.

pages cm(Secret Keeper Girl series)

ISBN 978-0-7369-5531-7 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-7369-5532-4 (eBook)

1. FriendshipReligious aspectsChristianity. 2. GirlsReligious life. I. Title.

BV4647.F7G725 2013

241'.676208342dc23

2012048467

All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any otherwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a non-transferable, non-exclusive, and non-commercial right to access and view this electronic publication and agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of authors and publishers rights is strictly prohibited.

T his book on friendship took a lot of friends to write! And we want to say thanks to those friends and to God for giving them to us.

First, we are thrilled to thank God for the friendship he has given us in each other. Its so fun to get to work with one of your best friends!

Its also a lot of fun to work with people who are friends with Jesus, and that makes us good friends no matter how far apart we may live. Mike Keil is the man who helped us meet our friends at Harvest House (our publishers). The friends there who have worked hard on this project include LaRae Weikert, Terry Glaspey, Barb Sherrill, Paul Gossard, and more. Our friends Julia Ryan and Andy Mylin made this book fantastic by designing it to be beautiful!

And thanks to our best friends on this earth, Bob and Jonathan, our husbands.

But mostly thanks to the best friend a girl can have, Jesus! We hope you meet him in the pages of this book or get to hang with him like you never have before.

Dannah and Suzy

CONTENTS

F riendships sure can be messy. We know. Were friends, and sometimes were messy.

Maybe you have some friendships that are messy. Mean-girl moments? Jealousy? BFF tug-of-war? Well, thats why we wrote this book. Weve experienced all those things and lived to tell about it.

Its going to be okay.

Gods Word gives us really clear guidelines about friendships and examples of people who knew how to handle friendship. But the hard part about reading the Bible is applying it to the life you live today. So, weve created the Secret Keeper Girl Series. These books are part modern-girl self-help and part Bible study, so you can think through how Gods truth can work in your real life.

Part 1 of this bookAbout BFFs and Mean Girlsis self-help and is written by Suzy.

S elf-help is the kind of book your parents read when they want to be a better parent or bookkeeper or gardener. In this case, youre reading it because you want to be a better friend. Self-help books advise you on certain topics. Youll read a lot of them in your lifetime.

Dont worry if this is your first self-help book. You may be used to chapter books and fiction. Suzy writes in that style and her chapters will be fun to read. You can do this part of the book alone.

Part 2 of this bookMy Best Friend, Jesusis a Bible study and is written by Dannah.

A Bible study guides you through Gods Word on a certain topic or book and enables you to do your own studying. Youll be reading Bible verses and answering questions about them, applying them to your life. There are even quizzes and games in the second section. Its going to be fun. You have to put some work in to feel the thrill in your belly for this kind of fun! You can do the second part of the book alone, but its much better if you do it with your mom or a group of other girls.

by Suzy Weibel

S he breezed into my sixth-grade life about as smoothly as the Pacific winds that had taught her to surf. She had it all, from hair bleached by California sunshine to the perfect feathered bangs. She was pretty, she had a West-Coast wardrobeand man, could she play ball!

I had grown up with two older brothers, and I was quite the tomboy. I had to do everything just like they did, from eating a ton of food to doing a flip off the top of the slide into the deep end of our pool. We walked on split-rail fences, jumped out of trees, and played a lot of football in the backyard.

When I was 11, I was the first girl in my town to play Little League baseball. The funny thing is that through all of this I had a pink bedroom and loved to play with Barbie dolls. There is a line in one of our Secret Keeper Girl pre-show songs that says, We play football, we wear pink! That describes the sixth-grade me to a T. I had a hard time finding other girls who were just like mebut then, like I said, Bobbi breezed into my life.

I knew other girls who liked sports and I had other girls to play Barbie withbut Bobbi somehow felt like an extension of me. We could complete sentences for each other. We liked to eata lotshoot pool, take long walks, throw a football back and forth, and shop for clothes. And, did we ever like boys.

You can tell a lot about a person from the friends they choose. Friends not only reflect who we are, but they also say a lot about who we are becoming. I always considered Bobbi the leader in our relationship. She was more of an extrovert (she thrived on being around a lot of people), while I was a little quieter. She was the idea person and I was the one who made things happen.