I am an assistant principal in a middle school (grades 6-8). When I have to search a student's cell phone, I often get sick to my stomach at what I find. It gets worse and worse every year.
In churches across America, a quiet but consequential conversation is unfolding. It often begins with a question—sometimes whispered, sometimes posted publicly on social media....
"Once intimacy begins to wane, it can become hard to get back on track. One of the keys to reconnecting is understanding that intimacy is a multifaceted thing. In fact, there are five different types of intimacy, and only when we keep all five functioning can we have marriages that feel profoundly connected."
"I don’t know who this lady is... she waved at him and he made his way up to her. I thought their interaction would be the same as last time but I was wrong. "
"The smell of stale cigarette smoke mixed with urine and body odor permeated from his dirty, wrinkled clothing. He’d been known to pass out at the hospital room bedside, after vomiting all over the floor."
"I don't want anyone to ever tell me there's not a God. There is a God, and he works in the most amazing way, and he's touched me today out of the blue. And I'm not even a real religious person."
"'I’m a homebody,' my son declared with confidence and surety. I blinked. First of all, where did he (then four) hear that expression? And second, how did I not know this?"
"You never figure out, until it’s too late...Yet I tried. For 10 years, in fact... I took a rocket ship billions of light years away from who God made me to be. No wonder my existence felt alien."
I told her that God would walk us through the current crisis. She stood up, threw a Kleenex box at me and yelled as she walked out of the room, “Stop talking! Just stop! I don’t want anything to do with your God.”
"Recently, my family walked past a Victoria’s Secret store (which was across from the kids’ playground). I was behind everyone, helping our youngest child keep up, and couldn’t help but notice how the older kids’ eyes were instinctively drawn to look at the pictures of nearly nude women hanging in the window."
