I spent a great day with some great new friends at Southern Seminary in Louisville. I was there to talk about youth culture. As always, I told the youth workers that whatever it is we find in the soup of today's youth culture, we need to prayerfully develop a three-fold response - prophetic, preventive, and redemptive - that reflects biblical priorities. Because we are broken, we all sin. And because we all sin (our kids included), we will need to be redemptive in our responses.
Someone asked this question: "Can you give an example of a redemptive response?" Today, it wasn't difficult. I pointed immediately to a blog I discovered last week. It's a blog written by Vicki Courtney, a woman who describes what she blogs as "the rants and raves of an author-mom smack dab in the trenches of teen culture." I learned that Vicki speaks to teenagers, particularly teen girls, with an emphasis on matters of navigating today's promiscuous culture. I'm sure Vicki has spent lots of time with her own kids passing on prophetic and preventive messages about this promiscuous culture. Last week, she approached her audience with great vulnerability as she publicly began modeling a redemptive response to the announcement that her son and his fiance were pregnant. I won't try to represent what Vicki Courtney has written. . . you need to read it for yourself.
All I'll say is this: we need to embrace these difficult times as wonderful opportunities to grow deep in the Lord. I love what the Psalmist says in Psalm 119:71 -"It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees." I'm glad that Vicki Courtney has gone public, and I'm sure she's embracing these words. The rest of us need to listen.
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