By John Warren

I just attended a class addressing how to deal with stressful situations and stressful people.

I was looking for insight in order to help them.

I have a teen who is being bullied by students in school.

That happened in my day as well.  But today they have more tools in their arsenal.  Today teens are not only bullied at school they are bullied on the Internet, Facebook and Twitter.

We see adults being bullied.  I learned in class that many adult’s maturity levels stopped developing in junior high, so the way they think, react and conduct their lives is like that of a junior high student.  So, when the teacher calls the parent about the misbehavior of little Mary the teacher may find themselves in a conversation with an adult who behaves just as badly as their child.

As I remember, our Junior High behavior we were awful.  We thought we knew everything and you could tell us nothing.  Our goal was to put the other person down before they were able to put us down. We called it ranking.

I think it is there that we lose our compass.

We lost our respect for our fellow human beings, where even if we do not agree with their politic or the person they decide to marry or with the way they comb their hair we feel we have the right to bully, belittle or taken to the extreme, walk into their church, synagogue, classroom, concert or bar and shoot them.

The problem is deeper than no prayer in school because I think prayer in school is more prevalent in schools today than ever before.  Why?  Because today you have to pray “Help me make it out alive for just one more day Lord.”

It is true guns do not kill people, people kill people.

Jesus said to turn the other cheek, in the words of Taylor Swift it means to shake it off.

But our people are no longer mature enough to handle the basic pressures of life in a healthy way, they are thinking like junior high students, underdeveloped, immature, self-centered junior high teens.

As a minister I will tell you where it started; in the home with parents who let their children rule the household.

“I can’t make my child go to church”, “that is something for them to decide”, and so they didn’t go.

Do you let your child decide whether or not to go to the dentist concerning their teeth?  Then why would you let them decide on what to do about their soul?

It is not time to make America great again, it is time to make Jesus great again in our homes, and families.  Find a church and get involved in its ministry.  That changes lives.

That is how we change the world back into what God intended.

And it starts with you and your family.

 

 

John Warren is Senior Pastor at First United Methodist Church, 502 North 6^th Street in Orange.