The Cover Up

This summer I've had the privilege of teaching a teenage girls Bible study. I started this last year and we all had a blast. This year, because I had a baby in the middle of the summer, we took the month of July off. So now we're trying to play catch up to get done. The study I'm leading is called "His Girl". It covers issues such as self-esteem, purity, dating, girl politics, etc. Tonight's lesson was on modesty. This is a tough one for teenage girls. For one thing, it's hard to find fashionable clothes that are also modest these days. Especially for their size. Another, there's so much pressure from the world to reveal more than they should.

To start our study tonight, I had them make 2 giant paper dolls. Then one team had to make 2 outfits for the doll that were modest. The other team had to make 2 immodest outfits. For their first outfit, the immodest team made the extreme. A tube top with extremely short shorts. I then had them create an outfit that was closer to what they might see one of their classmates wear. After they were done, we had a "fashion show" of sorts. We talked about what made the clothes inappropriate and how you might make the outfit more modest by adding another piece of clothing. However, we all agreed that the only way to make the first outfit more modest was to just put clothes on top of it!

After the fashion show, we watched the video portion of our study. Then we discussed some Scripture and talked about how what we wear should glorify God. Then we made a list of modesty standards for them to keep in their purse for when they go shopping. Finally, I challenged them to go home and go through their closets and see if their clothes fit the modesty standards. If they don't, they should get rid of them.

This was a tough lesson to teach, but we had a lot of fun! I just pray that the concepts we discussed made an impact. Here's the pictures of our paper dolls:

The extremely immodest outfit and the modest counterpart.

And the "more modest immodest outfit" and the modest counterpart. Notice she made jewelry and flip flops for both modest models!