The Simple Life

Media   posted by   Dannah Gresh   on 04/27/10 A few weeks ago, a colleague in the Christian publishing and speaking world suddenly needed an audience with me and my team...and fast. You see, over the weekend his eight-year-old daughter had a sleepover with a nine-year-old friend. When his fourteen-year-old got on the Internet after they’d used it, she found herself seeing images no girl (or woman, for that matter) should ever see. His heart was broken by the fact that both of his little girls had been forced to look at images that rip the innocence right out of girlhood. It should not surprise you that this happened. It happens in most houses everyday. It may be that you were the eight year old, or the fourteen year old that it happened to.  The fourth most-searched word on the Internet for kids ages 7 and under in 2009 was “porn.” For all kids up to age 18, sex was No. 4, porn No. 5. (According to data collected by OnlineFamily.Norton.com.) This supports some resea...

It seems as if we have minimized the Holy Spirit in the Evangelical community in the United States. We have replaced Him with good things, things that He could use, but things that have indeed replaced Him. Instead of counting on the Spirit of God to lead our leaders we count on the majority. Ministries have studied secular businesses and figured out how they need to operate, and they have replaced the Spirit of God with long range plans, feasibility studies, strategic plans, etc. The individual has replaced the Spirit of God with the plethora of books available on any topic. Psychology seems to be equal to if not more important than God's Spirit, and we place our hope in our doctors, insurances and retirement plans. What would happen if the Spirit of God was trying to get someone to give away their retirement money? Would that individual even be listening, or has the logic of the day replaced the Spirit of the Lord? What if God wants a successful business man or woman to leave h...

What if we have this thing we call Christianity wrong? What if it is built upon what is perceived as best for us, rather than on what is best? What is the best? Is it Christianity really about Christ? Is it about dying to self? Is it about glorifying God? Is it about living and dying in the manner it was meant to be? If it is about God, then why have we made it about man? That could only lead to disaster. It seems to me that so often we do everything we can to make God, Creation, and our churches about us. Our prayer times are about us, our giving is to causes that benefit us, our “giftedness” is about us, our pastor needs to be about us, our voice needs to be heard, our friendship wanted, and our lives need to be affirmed. Not only has it become acceptable, in essence, to worship man; it has become the norm.   We now gather in our ministry meetings and talk about what we are capable of doing. We make long range and strategic plans according to what we see us being able to do. ...

A new, controversial dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation. In the 1970s, many U.S. colleges moved from having only single-sex dormitories to providing coed residence halls, with male and female students typically housed on alternating floors or wings. Then came coed hallways and bathrooms. Now, some colleges allow undergraduates of opposite sexes to share a room. About 50 U.S. schools offer this housing choice, according to Jeffrey Chang, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign in 2006 to encourage gender-mixed rooms. Participating schools include UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Haverford, Wesleyan, Pitzer College and the University of Michigan. Chang estimates that at schools where the option exists, only 1 to 3 percent of students living on campus choose a roommate of the opposite sex. [Source: Los Angeles Times, March 15] Does anybody really...

There is a great problem in our culture today that is not unique to the Godless. Our nation is trying to live without God. There is not room for Him in government. There is no room for Him in public. There is not room for Him if He is not one we control, so we either ignore Him or make Him up in order that we might be able to control who He is and what He is about. The consequences of this are enormous. Without God, the only and true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, there is no reason for life, there is no “way it should be,” there is no “ethos,” no absolutes, no norms, no “as it should be.” Without God there is purposelessness. We become accidental blobs of protoplasm, we shrink in importance, and have no reason or ability to be significant. Without God there is no right and no wrong. There is only good and bad, and that scale keeps moving as it needs something to be compared to. Without God, abortion is an issue, “family” needs a new definition, and things that were once...

I do not know what is in the health care bill that was manipulated into passage. I am not sure how many pages it actually is, because I have heard different numbers. It seems as if there are close to three thousand pages and then several hundred other pages that explain something that could not be explained in the three thousand or so pages. I have heard that in the health care bill there are provisions for changing the student loan program, and other ideas, concessions, and benefits to those who needed extra persuasion to vote for the bill. I heard a lot of arguing, fighting, name calling, and anger. The talk was not one of finding answers. It was one of winning and losing. They talked about winning the vote or losing the vote. They talked about the ramifications of the vote in terms of winning and losing seats in the next elections. They talked about building Obama’s legacy and the historic nature of such a bill. Like I said, I do not know what is in the bill. I do know that if y...

  " Ours is an over-stimulated culture, and an insidious side effect is that our inner worlds are atrophying. As our world becomes more and more driven by external stimulation, and our lifestyles mirror the dizzying speed of our technology, we focus outward at the expense of the inward. We take leaps and bounds in one direction, but drift from another, which can have the effect of alienating us from ourselves, others, and God. My wife and I recently witnessed the disorienting nature of technology at a local movie theater. The next day, perhaps ironically, I recorded my reflections on my blog: There were three people in the rows in front of us who had their cell phones open during the entire movie. They were text messaging and surfing the Internet and otherwise annoying people. As I saw those cell phone screens open during the movie, I observed that the people using them were not fully committed to being anywhere during those two hours. They were physically sitting in the theater, ...