Considerations for the future

I was just reading an article from MSN about how every year the sexual content of our society is hitting younger and younger ages. The article was entitled "Grade-school Logita: 'So Sexy So Soon'. (As a disclaimer, i do want to apologize for the picture on the very front of it. In my putting this on here, I don't want to come across as condoning that type of dress.) But reading through this, I was thinking about how would I handle these types of situations. I mean, lets face it: you can access just about anything now via the internet.

But for myself, I was thinking about how I would handle these types of situations. With my future more than likely dealing with these types of situations, what would I do? Not looking through my 'ministerial' lens and/or 'adult' lens, but coming at it from, lets say, a secular perspective. There are a lot of messed up families out there. And luckily, I grew up in a good Christian home. To this day, i feel pretty comfortable discussing these issues with my parents and family in general. Then again, I feel comfortable addressing these issues with just about anyone really, to a certain degree. I mean, I can't stick my head in the sand about this stuff. Issues like these are things I'm doing to be dealing with. And of course, I'm going to be going to scripture and pointing people to Jesus in those times.

But other than that, what do you do? I've learned that it's amazing what happens when you just listen to folks sometimes. (When you listen to them, they're more prone to listen to what you have to say and then you get to present some awesome Biblical truths.) But aside from that, i'm amazed and somewhat very shocked at the issues i've had to deal with folks in the past. I mean, what do you tell someone who is 13 and they're parents are getting a divorce?

I forget who I was listening to sometime ago, but he made mention of a situation where one of his daughters at home mentioned about how hurt she was that something happened to her. He said that at first, he was just going to quote a scripture verse to her. But then, he felt prompted to just say "honey, I hurt when you hurt." it was at this time that his daughter came over and gave him a great big hug! Instead of him just throwing out some rhetoric, he first sympathized what what she was going through. But how often do I actually listen to folks and take in what they're saying?

Just reading through this article gave me things to pray through and really get into the scriptures about and really think and ask how would Jesus have responded to this type of stuff? I mean, the things mentioned in this article simply are expressing human emotions and things that people deal with. Unfortunately, its at such a young age.