things I don’t understand, part 2

Eating contests.

Kenny Chesney’s appeal.

Why Americans are threatened by the idea of universal health care.

Why Christians are threatened by the idea of global warming.

Eating milk chocolate when you could eat the dark stuff.

The phrase, usually used during church announcement times, “We would ask you to……bring a casserole to the potluck/remember those Campbell’s soup labels/reserve your Golden Heirs Branson tickets/keep praying about Darlene’s polyps.” If you would ask, just ask.

“Customer service” 800 numbers requiring you to input your account number……only to have a live person ask you for it again when they finally come on the line.

Naming one’s children so that introductions sound like an ad for a law firm: “These are my kids Auten, Channing and Chamberlin.”

Cigarettes made with 100% organic tobacco.

Churches still failing to grasp that a group named “Pairs and Spares” will not attract many “spares.”

The people who live in warm climates and brag about it when they call you in winter, as if they had anything to do with the weather.

How I always get in front of the one person in the theater who feels compelled to offer an ongoing commentary about the movie.

The apparent brain-melting difficulty of actually matching congregational singing with the Powerpoint graphics containing the words.

Buying expensive toilet paper.

How Louie, an 8-pound runt of a cat, somehow maneuvers me to the very edge of the mattress each night.

Why Christians had to create “GodTube” instead of just putting their stuff on YouTube where people in need of God might actually see it.

The intermittent spraying of vegetables at the grocery store. Do people really believe the broccoli is fresher if it’s also dripping wet and impossible to get in a flimsy plastic bag?

Watching reality TV. My life has enough reality.

(Click here for part 1.)

baby talk

FOUR of my friends delivered babies this past week. Which explains why I couldn’t get any of them on the phone last June.

All of these friends fit one current trend: each one is in her late 20s or early 30s. Thursday’s USA Today included an article reporting a 2.3% increase in birth rates among women ages 30-34, the largest bump (so to speak) in any age group.

But these friends are all married, which distinguishes them from another growing demographic reported in the article. These stats, from USA Today, Reuters, and The Journal of Adolescent Health, are amazing:

—40% of all births in 2007 were to unmarried mothers.

—23% of these births were to teen girls.

—The birth rate for teen girls rose 5% between 2005 and 2007.

—The US continues to lead the developed world in adolescent pregnancy rates.

—25% of new HIV infections occur among people under age 22.

Clearly, something in our current approach to sex education is not working, and many educators and health professionals believe it’s the recent prioritization of abstinence-only curriculum.

Stay with me. I’m betting most of you believe strongly in abstinence before marriage and the promotion of this idea to impressionable young people. So do I. But after researching the issue I no longer believe it can be the only option offered to our public school students. Here’s why.

Oh, the morality!

Many Christians believe that presenting any birth control method other than 100% abstinence, including information on contraception and prevention of STDs, actually encourages teenagers to experiment sexually. Although the evidence contradicts this (more on that in a moment), they also believe more comprehensive education condones behavior they find immoral.

But we cannot ignore that many teens in our high schools do not share these beliefs about premarital sex. Researchers say as many as 75% of high schoolers have had sex, and Mathematica Policy Research reports more than 20% of high school seniors have had four or more partners by graduation. (The stats on Christian teens aren’t much more encouraging, but we’ll leave that for another time.) The question is not whether these kids plan to become sexually active, but when—and how safe they’ll be.

In light of this reality, other moral issues must be addressed. The Centers for Disease Control report more than nine million new STD infections each year among people ages 15-24.  Failure to educate these students about the best ways to prevent the spread of such diseases—including but not limited to abstinence—could endanger the health and/or lives of those students’ future partners. (Don’t assume teens understand these risks; the Mathematica study suggests abstinence-only education results in “a less clear understanding of STDs and their health consequences.”)

In addition to the many existing lives potentially harmed, we face another moral conundrum when acknowledging the millions of babies born to teenage girls each year. Again, research bears this out: “The children of adolescent mothers perform more poorly on indicators of health and social well-being than children of older mothers. A recent analysis found that declines in adolescent birth rates in the 1990s were significantly responsible for reducing child poverty and single-parent families during the 1990s.”

So our well-intentioned efforts to promote abstinence can actually backfire, causing generations of teens and children to experience health problems, developmental delays, and economic disadvantages. What’s the solution?

When a group of adults goes out drinking, we may condemn their behavior but we acknowledge their right to make this choice. Rather than insisting that everyone abstain from alcohol completely, we accept that some will choose to drink and instead encourage them to avoid causing physical harm to themselves and others by designating a driver or calling a cab.  I’m suggesting we begin thinking about this issue the same way; instead of offering one all or nothing choice—even if only one choice fits our worldview—let’s realize many will choose differently and need options to keep themselves safer. (Protection, if you will.)

What works

Although George Bush approved $167 million in abstinence education funding in 2005 and Palin (ironically) promoted the issue while her own teenage daughter carried baby Tripp, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (during President Clinton’s administration) also increased funding and promotion of abstinence education. Both parties—and again, most educators and health organizations—support abstinence among teenagers.

But as the statistics show, an abstinence-only approach is not resulting in fewer teen pregnancies or less disease. A five-year study of 11 such programs “showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact. A few programs showed mild success at improving attitudes and intentions to abstain. No program was able to demonstrate a positive impact on sexual behavior over time.”

Similarly, the Journal results offer “no scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs demonstrate efficacy in delaying initiation of sexual intercourse.” What these studies do show is that sex ed promoting abstinence along with information on contraception, STDs, HIV/AIDS, etc. does delay teens’ sexual experimentation.

That’s right—we may actually achieve the goal of more teens remaining abstinent for more years by giving them all the information. Amazing.

What really works

For all this talk of education, parents still have the most influence on the sexual behavior of their teenagers. In response to the new stats published Thursday, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released the results of a public opinion survey in which “teens say parents most influence their decisions about sex—more than friends, the media, teachers and sex educators, and others.”

Ultimately progress on this issue, as with so many others, comes back to healthy families and on-task parents—all the more reason thousands of new parents shouldn’t be babies themselves.

trust fun

My years in California prevented me from developing geographical snobbery, that condition in which you assume your city/county/state has the corner on all things progressive and everywhere else is a barren wasteland. It’s a hobby along that coast; one California megachurch pastor (CMCP) actually told me Willowcreek grew to its current ginormity because “there’s nothing else to do out there. What’s in Illinois, yaks?” Yep, buddy, their church is just way bigger than yours because Chicago’s boring.

So I anticipated my first-ever visit to Nebraska with an open mind. However, already today I have….

–been called “doll” by two different men, each my age or younger.

–driven 17 minutes on a country road without seeing another car (I clocked it).

–spent three hours in a building Mapquest doesn’t have a record of.

–held a meeting in which one of the other participants sat across from me and knit a sweater.

And I don’t want to be negative, but let’s just say that if CMCP’s theory had any merit, the churches out here would make Southeast look like a small group.

Fortunately I am here on a good mission. I work part-time for Financial Planning Ministry, an organization that creates living trusts which allow couples and individuals to plan their estates, choose medical conservators, and name guardians for minor children. Unlike wills, living trusts avoid probate completely and free thousands of those dollars for gifts to family and ministry. And unlike wills or trusts prepared by an attorney, FPM offers a living trust at no cost; we simply ask each family to consider a gift out of their estate—when they’ve passed away and won’t care!—to one of our sponsors. More than 50 Christian churches and parachurches sponsor FPM and make its ministry possible.

So Christian families practice good stewardship with their lifetime accumulation of assets, Christian ministries receive a portion of those funds, and FPM offers a valuable service free of charge. It’s a great business model and a great organization, one I’m even willing to brave Nebraska for. Cornhuskers, I’ll be here all week—holler if you want to learn more about living trusts, practice condescending nicknames, or teach me to knit.

no guarantees

My heart is aching. Yesterday afternoon the 16 year old son of some good friends, a boy who many years ago made me a recipe card holder complete with a hand-painted monster, took his own life.

This would be a tragedy for any family, but as I absorbed the news this morning a gallery of good parenting images flashed through my memory: my friends explaining choices and allowing their boys age-appropriate freedoms; their involvement in the boys’ spiritual and educational development; their outings for paintball and camping; their consistency and balance in discipline.

None of us can know the intimate details of another family’s life, but from all appearances these parents did everything right. And so my heart aches doubly for their loss.

My mom often reminds me that in life “there are no guarantees.” We do our best to choose a good spouse and raise healthy kids, but for every couple who succeeds there’s at least one more—who also avoided promiscuity, prayed over their relationship, attended premarital counseling, raised their children in the church, and dared to discipline like Dr. Dobson himself—whose kids go off the deep end or whose marriage ends in an explosion of adultery and divorce. Whenever we allow other people into our lives we risk hurt and betrayal.

God knows this better than anyone. He set up the system of no guarantees, otherwise known as free will, and remains its biggest victim—every human in every time has made choices that cause him pain. “Your own conduct and actions have brought this upon you,” he says through the prophet Jeremiah. “This is your punishment. How bitter it is. How it pierces to the heart! Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent.”

I often question issues of justice, privately and on this blog. I would like a satisfaction guaranteed system, a planet organized to reward those who work hard and act honorably and punish those who don’t. But in this life that’s not to be; instead God simply promises his presence when we experience a small measure of the suffering he endures. And so I pray God, please. Please. Be with my dear friends who are also writhing in pain today. Amen.

anablog

It’s entertaining, actually, to see the looks.

“You don’t have cable?”

“You use a binder with paper to stay organized?”

“You don’t have an iPhone yet?”

The fact is, in many areas of life I am unapologetically low-tech.

This isn’t so I can claim self-righteous superiority, like those people who tell you they spent the evening re-reading Ulysses when you ask if they watched “The Bachelor.” (Although this is a bad example, because WHY would you be watching “The Bachelor?” And if you are, why are you admitting it to others?)

No, my reluctance to purchase some technology is not rooted in pride. I have a Mac, I don’t leave home without my iPod, and if I loved the Internet any more I’d have to marry it to avoid a scandal. But I’m not a big fan of gadgets, even the ones that supposedly improve my life.

My phone died this weekend, so I stopped by the Verizon store to get a new one—a cheap one, because I don’t spend a lot of money on cell phones. For one thing, I drop mine about once a week and it doesn’t hurt much to drop something I got for $29.99 with a two year contract. It would hurt to drop an iPhone.

But I haven’t refused the upgrades just because I’m a klutz; the main reason is my aforementioned love affair with all things online borders on addiction. If I had a Blackberry or iPhone I’d constantly be reading email or updating Twitter. I’d waste even more time than I already do following obscure links or watching video.  And I don’t want to be online every minute. I don’t want the constant temptation to check out of the here and now so I can check my email instead, or be one of those people who can’t sit through a movie (or conversation) without texting.

So I simply told Kevin the Verizon salesperson, who actually looked a little like the “Can you hear me now” guy, that I wanted a basic LG phone—preferably that schnazzy red one to his right.

He looked like I’d just suggested he eat his Bluetooth earpiece.

“You don’t want to download music? Or send email? Or edit video? Or find out the time in Belize?”

“No, just……make calls. Send texts, maybe. I guess that’s standard now.”

“Hmmm.”  He raised one eyebrow and pointed me to the three non-smart phones the store had to offer.

In the end, I left the store without buying anything—the red one was sold out (apparently I am not the only person in search of something basic) and Kevin gave me a new battery so my ancient phone works just fine. Because flirting is also low-tech.

all wet

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to download Christian Standard‘s new compilation of articles on baptism. The 14-page resource offers perspectives on this important and sometimes controversial issue from seven authors including Paul Williams, Bruce Shields, and Jon Weatherly. Since these articles all come from current issues of Christian Standard, you can also access them online. But this download offers them as a really attractive, concise package for study and for sharing with others—and at $2.99, it’s a steal.

I love anything Brian Jones writes and his article “What Happened When I Preached on Baptism?” is one of my favorites in the pack. He shares the story of defending the doctrine of baptism at a “101″ class in his then-fledgling church plant, and how the ensuing pushback resulted in all 23 class attendees leaving the church that day. It’s usually churched people who attend these classes, he says, and it’s usually churched people who resist the idea of baptism as necessary for salvation. On the other hand, people learning about Jesus for the first time—the people Jones wants to reach—typically have few of the same concerns.

“In fact, I’ve found that the more we’ve taught on baptism, the more churched people have left, and the more non-Christians have come to Christ and brought their non-Christian friends,” he writes. “Preaching baptism spurs church growth with the right people, it doesn’t impede it.”

As a bonus, CS’s website also offers several photo galleries of these new believers being baptized in swimming pools, oceans, and rivers all over the country. Here are a few of my favorites.