This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, Aug 22, 2023
Can you believe that today is the first day of school? Where did summer go? Didn’t I just take down the Christmas trees at the church like last week? It feels that way. As you all know I am a pastor, and one of the biggest parts of my job is to pray for people and to call all people to pray. Well, that is what I am doing today. I want to call our whole community to pray for the kids in our school. They need it badly because the world being created for them is, shall we say, less than ideal.
I graduated from high school back in 1993. At that time, the big fear was the gulf war, a war I fully expected to be drafted into. Obviously, it didn’t happen, but that was the shadow I was under back in 1993. That shadow is nothing at all compared to the shadow kids starting school today are under. The concern today is not a hot war brewing somewhere in the world, but a world suffering from despair. We are so insulated from good news that we live in a world that crushes hope.
For this current generation, it began for most of them before they were born. In the years of 2000-2020, over 15,000,000 of those kids were aborted. That 15 million potential classmates, boyfriends, girlfriends, teammates, lab partners, band members, and friends never had the chance to be born. You mix that with the fact that most of these kids are growing up in world old people like me do not know. I grew up in a world where video games were connected to the TV. If my mom wanted to curtail my gaming, all she had to do was throw me out of the house and make me go outside. That essentially cut the cord. And when I was playing, it was just me playing. I didn’t run into people online and make them my friends through playing games even though I had no idea who they were. I had to talk to my friends faces, a skill the kids in our local school struggle with.
Most of these kids are heading into a workforce where they are going to have to work very hard to make sure the Ponzi Scheme known as Social Security will be there for the Boomer generation. I’m a Gen Xer. My retirement planning is counting on nothing from Social Security even though I am paying thousands upon thousands of dollars into it every year. The other part of my retirement plan is to work until I am 80 and die within 6 months, but that is another article for another time.
Entertainment is awful. The Barbie movie grossed over $1 Billion. That is over $1,000,000,000 dollars. We are creating no art, no music worth anything, and nothing of a spiritual nature any more. Our heritage is considered evil, and the American Dream is no longer to work hard and succeed, it is to be woke and have no morals or standards. We are about a year and a half from a presidential election where just about everyone is going to vote against someone rather than vote for a candidate they are excited about. That’s what it looks like I will be doing. It’s hard to get excited when we define victory as the other guy failing. Yawn.
At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I want you to pray. Last time I checked, that is not prohibited (yet). But I want you to pray something specific for the kids. I want you to ask God to inspire the kids to earnestly and honestly pray for each other. They don’t need to do it in public, in fact, no one needs to know they are doing it. I just want them to feel free and inspired to pray for each other because until we get to the place where we can get over ourselves and the fake walls that divide us and earnestly lift each other up to God by name, this culture is going to continue to erode. We have fallen a long way from where we once were, and we are a very long way from where we need to be. The only way I can see coming back is if we all adopt an honest attitude of prayer in our heart of hearts.
I am not saying that prayer changes things overnight. Honestly, prayer might not change anything at all. But one thing prayer does do is it leaves room for God to work in the heart and life of the one who is doing the praying, and that is what Jesus has been about since the very beginning. If our kids can allow that space in their own lives, then I think we might be amazed at how many of the problems we see in society today might start to improve.
Who knows, maybe we old people need to take this advice as well…