I’m concerned that in our zeal to keep marriages together—a good and noble thing to do—we have completely marginalized an entire people group, who, by the way, are often in immense pain! We’ve marked divorced people as our modern day lepers and banished them from connection to the Church family. In some church circles, divorce is equal to the unpardonable sin. People who have been divorced are treated as if they have the plague.
Hand the phone to one of your parents promptly at 8:00 pm every school night & every weekend night at 9:00 pm. It will be shut off for the night and turned on again at 6:30 am. If you would not make a call to someone’s landline, wherein their parents may answer first, then do not call or text. Listen to those instincts and respect other families like we would like to be respected.
Get some sweet smelling oil or lotion, and give each other back rubs, foot rubs, or any kind of rubs you’re in the mood for! If you’ve never done this before, it might help to google a couple how-to’s on the best way to give a good massage.But at the end of the day, almost any kind of rub is a good rub. So enjoy feeling close through the gift of touch.
If you are single and waiting, or maybe just finding yourself in a waiting period for something in your life; I want to encourage you: The same Jesus who gave His life on the cross for you and rose from dead for you and sent His Spirit to empower you and has secured a spot in Heaven for you is the same God you can entrust your future to. He knows your desires, and He is faithful!
Every respectful conversation requires two powerful people on either side of the communication exchange. Whoever is speaking must be powerful in showing the other person the truth about how the issue is affecting them. The listener must be powerful in actively seeking to understand what the speaker is showing them. The moment one person tries to overpower the other or disappears, respect has vanished.
Your body is DESIRING something and it’s making it clear. These desires are real and ARE from God, so the prayer should not be, “God, take these desires away!” It should be something along the lines of, “God, help me have self control and stewardship over my own body!” So don’t think that because you have these desires and temptations it’s sinful. It’s sinful when you choose to say yes to your flesh instead of righteousness.
The aftermath of the cruelty I survived on those porn shoots has been a fear of people that I am only now overcoming. Every crime was recorded and lived on as masturbatory fuel for men. For a long time just walking down the street was hard because I never knew who had seen them. So I never looked up. I have learned to look people in the eye again, but it took years and distance from that time.
The bottom line is, if you don’t have the discussion with them, their school will, their peers will and culture will. They start forming their belief system at a very young age, so be sure to beat them all to it! I determined to be the FIRST VOICE that speaks into the issues of gender identity, sex, God’s design for marriage, pornography and more with my kids.
We should not conflate a condition with an identity. California’s 2019 Assembly Bill 201 makes precisely that type of error in section 2295(a)(2): “Intersex people are a part of the fabric of our state’s diversity to be celebrated, rather than an aberration to be corrected.” That is both a straw argument and misdirection because a medical condition is something one has, not who one is. Celebrate the person, yes, and recognize that person’s disorder of sex development, which may or may not need correcting.
Trauma is something that most of us have experienced in one way or another, whether it was through abuse, abandonment, or a circumstance that we had no control over. As children, when we do not have access to resources that help us navigate through the pain of these experiences, we will often develop coping mechanisms that can be unhealthy in the long term.