Ten Time Bombs: Defusing the Most Explosive Pressures Teenagers Face

By Ronald Hutchcraft

You get only one life…Make it one you’ll never regret!Every young person, including you, lives with pressures that really are like ticking time bombs. But you don’t have to be a victim—if you know how to defuse the most explosive pressures young people face. Ten Time Bombs is your personal “Bomb Squad” manual, showing you some very practical ways to avoid life-wrecking explosions.Through humor and practical straight talk, Ron Hutchcraft provides answers to some of the most important and confusing pressures in a young person’s life:SexFriendsFamily relationshipsThings that make you angryThings that make you depressedThings that make you hurtThe lonely timesHow you handle your feelings and choices in these areas will decide the kind of life you have now and for many, many years to come.So don’t just sit there. Get a life! And make it the best one possible.Adults: Ten Time Bombs is for you, too!Looking for some practical insights into the top pressures of today’s young people? Rod Hutchcraft’s straight talk will equip you with knowledge and understand so you can provide help to a young person you know!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: May 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9780310873945

Ronald Hutchcraft

Ron Hutchcraft is an author, speaker, and international radio host of such programs as “A Word With You” and “Alive! with Ron Hutchcraft,” the most widely circulated Christian youth broadcast in the world. A thirty-four year veteran of youth and family work, Ron has spoken around the world to thousands of people, presenting practical answers to real-life issues. Ron has one wife, three crazy kids, and a pet parakeet named “Cherokee.”

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INTRODUCTION

THE PAGE THAT TELLS YOU ABOUT ALL THE OTHER PAGES

If you’re like a lot of young people I know, reading a book may not be on your personal Top 10 List. If you’ve got a few minutes of personal time, it seems more exciting to plug into a video or a TV program or stereo than it does to pick up a book. By the time your English teacher and history teacher and biology teacher get finished with you, your brain is fried and flashing a red warning sign that says, Overload! No more information!

But this book isn’t about some poem a guy wrote a century ago or a battle some armies fought three hundred years ago—this one is about the only life you get and how to make it a life you’ll never regret! It’s straight talk about some of the most important, sometimes most confusing pressures in your life: your friends, your relationship with your family, sex, the things that make you angry, the things that make you depressed, the things that make you hurt. How you handle your feelings and choices in these areas will decide the kind of life you have for many, many years—and even for the next few months!

Why did I take time to write all this down? Because I’ve seen these pressures blow up so many young lives—like deadly time bombs. I have had the privilege of working closely with thousands of teenagers—and the pain of watching too many hurt or destroyed by these ten time bombs. And because I get mail constantly from the listeners to my national radio program for young people, I am hearing all the time the if only I had known’s of hurting lives. A lot of what I want to give you in the pages ahead is from all those young people.

Their experience can show you where the time bombs are on the road ahead—those mistakes that can wreck the things that matter most to you.

But there’s an even better way to make the most of the one life you’ve got. Listen to the person who put you here—He is the only One who can see the whole picture. He’s like the man in the traffic helicopter—He can see the messes ahead that we could never see.

The biggest single reason people end up disappointed and depressed is not because they don’t listen to their teachers or their leaders, or even their parents—it’s because they don’t listen to their Creator. Thankfully, He wrote a book—the world’s best-selling book, the Bible. In those pages is the mistake-proof, big-picture advice of God Himself! That’s why we will also check out His perspective on the pressures you face.

Every young person, including you, lives with pressures that really are like time bombs. But you don’t have to be a victim—if you know how to defuse the most explosive pressures teenagers face. These pages are your personal Bomb Squad manual, showing you some very practical ways to avoid life-wrecking explosions.

Your life can be dynamite if you know how to handle the bombs. You’re about to find out how.

1 Sex at Its Best!

TICKING TIME BOMB #1:

Sacrificing Sex at Its Best for Sex Too Soon

Five people in our family—three of them teenagers. Each one doing their own thing in a different room of the house. My Mission Impossible—somehow get them all together in the living room for some family time. Good luck!

But what’s the first thing they do when that Mission Impossible theme starts? Light a match! So I do—to start a fire in our fireplace. Of course, first I secretly turn down the thermostat on this cold winter night. As the house is getting colder, the living room is getting warmer. One by one, every shivering member of the family drifts into the room muttering, Man, is it cold in this house!

I love our fireplace. But our son Brad probably loves the fireplace most. Fortunately, he has never reached the point where he wants a fire too much. Imagine if I came home some night and smelled smoke coming from Brad’s room. I would be in a panic, and I should be in a panic—there’s no fireplace upstairs!

Brad, do you smell smoke up there?

Yup.

Where’s it coming from?

Well, Dad—you know how I love those fires?

Yeah…

I decided to build a fire in my room.

But, Brad, there’s no fireplace in your room!

Fire is nice—when it’s in the right place. It makes you warm and cozy. But that same fire outside of the fireplace will burn you and destroy things that matter to you.

Just like the fire of sex.

Sex in its right place, in its right time will warm and beautify your life. But when you play with sex outside the fireplace it was made for, you get burned and irreplaceable treasures get destroyed.

So many young people are deciding to try the fire without the fireplace and, in the process, giving up more than they could ever imagine. Having sex too soon is one of those ten time bombs that can do serious damage to your future.

Designer Love

What are sex and love going to mean to me?

That is one of the most important questions a teenager can answer. The question is so personal that no one else can or should answer it for you. Your parents can’t answer it for you (even though they would like to go out on your dates with you, if they could). Your church or synagogue can’t answer it for you. And it’s too personal for you to let any friends give you an answer. So much of your future love and happiness is wrapped up in whether or not you make the right choice about what sex will mean to you.

If you get it right, sex can give you a life full of closeness, caring, and ultimate relationship. If you get it wrong, you will end up—as all too many people found out too late—with disappointment, regrets, loneliness, and maybe even disease.

Now, it’s obvious that what everybody is doing isn’t working. Too many people are ending up feeling used, lonely, and disillusioned. And the relationships our go for it! world is producing tell us that something is messed up. There is one divorce for every new marriage in America these days. If you had a machine where every other product it made broke, wouldn’t you get a new machine? Well, our dating-and-mating machine is manufacturing lifetime relationships in which every other one breaks! Any thinking young person can see that there must be something better than this rush to physical relationships.

So, where do you look for that something better? For some honest help that will keep you from making the mistakes that ruin sex and love?

How about checking with the inventor of sex and love? Check with Madonna? someone asks. No, neither Madonna nor any media sex symbol created sex. "Check with Playboy or Hustler?" Sorry, no magazine invented sex either.

The starting point to have sex at its best is this simple, maybe surprising, fact: God invented sex, and the Inventor knows best.

No one knows as much about sex and how it is meant to be as God does. It only makes sense. If you have a question about your Chevrolet, contact Chevrolet—they made it. If you have a question about your Windows software, contact Microsoft—they made it. And if you want to know how to have the best of sex and love, find out what God says…He made it!

My friend Mel keeps his garden protected by having a fence around it. The fence isn’t there to keep everyone from enjoying it. It’s there to keep it protected from unwanted animal visitors.

That’s why the Creator of sex put the fence of marriage around it—not to ruin it, but to protect it. In His manual on life and love—the Bible—God describes the place He designated to keep sex special: Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure (Hebrews 13:4).

The Inventor of sex says He designed it to be kept inside the fence called marriage. Jesus Christ described sex at its best when He told us, At the beginning of creation, God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate (Mark 10:6-9).

Jesus was describing what most of us really want deep down inside—a lifetime love we can count on with someone we are totally committed to and who is totally committed to us. And He said an important part of the love between them is a sexual bond they have never experienced with anyone else.

Marriage is the fireplace where sex belongs. When two become one flesh within the fireplace of married love, sex warms your life in a uniquely beautiful way. But just like fire, when you play with sex outside the fireplace of marriage, you get tragically burned. The winds of passion will take you farther than you ever planned to go, keep you longer than you ever planned to stay, and leave you in a place where you never wanted to end up.

When the Failure Rate for Condoms Is 100%

It used to be that even married couples were a little embarrassed to talk about condoms. Now everybody is talking about them, and they’re selling them right up front in the drugstore with the bubble gum and the chocolate bars! In some places, schools are even handing them out to students like Band-Aids. It seems as if the community is assuming most kids will have sex, it’s inevitable, so let’s give them what they need to protect themselves.

The theory is that with a condom you can protect yourself from the consequences of sex outside of marriage: AIDS, sexually transmitted disease, or pregnancy. But these are only the selective consequences of premarital sex—the ones only some young people experience. Usually, you have heard about those consequences so much that you almost get dangerously immune to all the lectures. Many teenagers decide they will roll the dice anyway and say, Hey, I’ll take my chances. Those things probably won’t happen to me. Everyone who ever got back a positive HIV test or pregnancy test thought the same thing.

A lot of people are telling you about these selective consequences. But, chances are, no one is telling you about the universal consequences of sex before marriage. These are the consequences that happen to every person who has sex outside of marriage. No condom on earth can protect you from one of these universal consequences: damaging memories.

The Invasion of the Video Monsters!

Do we have to?

That was our son Brad’s reaction whenever we pulled out the old family video of our trip to Alaska. For some reason, he wasn’t excited about seeing himself again in all his twelve-year-old splendor. He was entering that phase when the caterpillar is starting to turn into a butterfly—and when most people are some caterfly or butterpillar intermediate life-form.

Also, the video has an abrupt ending—his fourteen-year-old brother Doug was using the camcorder and didn’t know how to turn it off. Consequently, the picture is enough to make you seasick in your own living room as it races up and down over snowdrifts, boots, clouds, and unidentified flying objects. The reason Brad hates it is because the audio features his high-pitched twelve-year-old voice squeaking in frustration—Doug! You’re still filming! Unfortunately for Brad, because it’s on video, those precious memories will never go away.

Not all recorded memories are ones we want to replay. Especially when it comes to memories of physical relationships you had before you were married.

A result of sex that few people ever think about at the time—one that happens to every person who has sex outside God’s fence—is damaging memories. Because sex was designed by God for one man with one woman in lifetime relationship, He made it so it creates powerful, long-lasting memories. But when you have sex outside of marriage, the video camera in your soul is still filming, recording indelible impressions. When you are making out or making love, you are making memories.

And those memories start playing back just when you don’t want them to—in the intimacy of your sexual love with your husband or wife. At a time when you were meant to be thinking of only one person in the whole world, another relationship is invading the most intimate moments of your life. God designed sex so that each married couple would develop their own, never-before, never-like-this language of love with each other. But the replays of previous experiences introduce comparison, guilt, and mental adultery into what was supposed to be some of the most beautiful moments of your life.

Don’t take sex outside the fireplace of marriage—when you do, you are making damaging memories that can spoil sex at its best.

You Threw It Out?

For a long time, our son Doug thought his grandmother had committed the unpardonable sin.

When I was a kid, I dug pop bottles out of a vacant lot, went to the corner store, got the deposit money for them, and spent it all on baseball cards. Many years later—long after pop bottles had turned to pop cans—Doug went into baseball card collecting big time. He invested like the Donald Trump of cardboard. He liked rare cards that could be turned into big bucks. Like the ones I had in my boyhood collection.

There was just one small problem. My mother—Doug’s grandmother—threw them all out some years ago when we were moving. After much therapy, Doug has finally been able to forgive his grandmother. But the fact remains—she threw away something really valuable without even knowing it!

Lost treasure. It’s sad—especially when it comes to what could have been sex and love at its best. Every night, somewhere in this country, young men and women are having sex before marriage—and, without knowing it, throwing away treasures that are very, very valuable. And like damaging memories, lost treasure is a consequence of sex outside God’s fence that affects every person involved and that no condom on earth can protect you against.

How Sex Is Like Scotch Tape

One treasure you lose with unmarried sex is your bondability. You can see bondability when you stick a piece of tape to something like the side of a desk. It sticks. It stays. But take that same piece of tape and stick it on the floor, then several pieces of furniture, then a carpet—and finally on the side of the desk again. This time it won’t stick. It won’t stay. It has lost something important—its bondability.

When God created sex, He created it with bonding power, to glue two people together till death do us part. No matter how casual or serious the relationship, inside or outside of marriage, sex will bond people as if this were a forever relationship. That’s the way sex was created—you cannot make it not bond the two people involved. Speaking of the most meaningless sex of all, the Designer says, Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh’ (1 Corinthians 6:16).