What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.
"Jesus Loves You. Jesus is there for you when you need him," reads a children's book at the Barnes & Noble bookstore almost four years after lockdowns descended on this country and all over the world.
"Jesus is always with you. Jesus is there when you need him," reads page after page of this picture book in the religious books section.
Where did all the adults go, for that matter? They all left with Jesus.
How is an 11- or 12-year-old supposed to envision or experience this now - Jesus Loves Me? Jesus Will Never Leave Me or Forsake Me? How might a 14-year-old alone in his room view Jesus when a parent said he couldn't see his friends until a vaccine came out? He stares at a computer screen, in a new bizarre world, staring at other teens' faces stacked in little boxes? Teens are naturally self-conscious, some painfully so; and yet, suddenly we expected them to endure being on cameras for hours, video and audio recorded from their rooms - in order to go to school.
Jesus loves me? Is he always there for me? What does that even mean now? We have heard and read and told children in Sunday schools that Jesus will never leave you or forsake you.
How did children and teenagers think and feel? Where was hope and a future? How long would the fear and isolation go on? And where was the Jesus who would never leave you, as the children's book says now almost four years after bureaucrats and politicians wrecked the world? Where was God? Where was he when my colleague's 17-year-old child committed suicide?
Jesus will always be there for you? When a teen boy simply missed his best friend and his brother, who didn't live with him, and didn't know when or how they would return, they and the Dungeons and Dragons games, Frisbee, bike riding, or just easy hanging out they used to do together? How was a teen to imagine that "Jesus loves me" or that "God would never leave me or forsake me?".
1 comment:
Looking back a lot of mistakes were made…So where is the discussion and responsibility to correct these mistake…do we act like our centralized planners and stop all opposition…God granted us freedom, not government so likes do not follow government..Let talk about our mistakes and our government mistakes….Exess deaths are over 1,100,000 Peale in the USA since the roll out of the vacines..Are our churches talking about this…is it allowed…. Maybe in God’s eyes these are not his church…Maybe America first people are today’s church…they are the only ones speaking up…Let’s pray for God’s leadership to take the information we now have and go forward with his leadership and with his freedom that he gives us…Let’s all talk to everyone about our failed church and our failed government. Amen Al T South Carolina
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