Struggling to answer someone's questions about your faith, Pastor Greg Laurie recommends a great book to help. You know, I remember the first time that I shared my faith. I was so young, and I was challenged by an atheist. I did not have a clue as to what I should say. And I wish I'd had a copy of this book by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler, and the title of it is "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist." And we want to send you this book for your gift of any size, available at.
Harvest. dot org. But so your mom was a tough cookie, as you said. And so have you been a strong mother as well? I think I saw these strong women in my life.
My grandmother, as you mentioned, the men were gone. My grandfather was gone for months at a time. Yeah, I can remember. You know, both I have different stories. I tell one of my mom.
I wasn't there for this story. I think maybe I wasn't born yet. It came later in my parents' life, but I was looking at this old USA Today like magazine of my dad. Yeah, and it was telling the story of my mom. Wow, I was thought hilarious.
I'm like, Dad, of all the stories you could tell of USA Today, you're telling this one where she shot the snake in the yard, and the little country boy from Western North Carolina says, "Shoot it again, Jane. Shoot it again." But he was talking about God. My mom. She was a woman of strength. Yeah, she is.
And she was just never afraid of anything. Nothing really shook her. And I saw that just in the women in my life. Yeah, and that's I see this world where I believe. The world has lied to women.
They've sold them this fake, counterfeit version of strength. But also, believe the church has weakened women. And what do I mean by that? Interesting. And it's not all the girl boss from the culture.
Like girls are superheroes. Girls can beat men in fights. Like, come on. And but then in the church, it's this therapeutic, emoting, feeling, bonding over traumas all the time. Yeah, interesting.
And so that was really kind of the. Heartbeat behind this book, yes. And I don't mean that not all churches. There's great, wonderful women's ministries that are really teaching the solid word of God. But as I mentioned, I would go to these conferences, and there was very little Bible teaching.
It was all emotional. Women are crying around me and bonding. I'm like, I'm not feeling it. I'm like, I have no emotion. I'm not feeling it.
I just want to study the word of God. Yeah, here I'm hungry. I'm thirsty for it. Yeah, don't give me the emotion. I feel like in in In life, emotions run this deep, but there has to be a truth that is deeper than our emotion.
We have to know when we're feeling certain things, like even if it's a love for the Lord or an emotion, a good emotion of love or worship or whatever. To recognize what is emotion and what is truth, and are you willing to worship when you're not feeling it? Are you willing to obey when you don't necessarily feel the motivation, or the or the reward at the end of that? And but you know it's right, so you have to have that deeper than emotion. And absolutely, the church needs to equip women with that.
And the idea of bringing women together to rehearse their past traumas, which very early on in my ministry there was a speaker who who went around and she had. Been abused. She had gone through some trauma in her youth, and that became her whole platform. But what I saw was a red flag for me when I started reading more deeply was she started listing all these symptoms that were very vague symptoms that. Could mean that you were also abused, and that if you've had these feelings or outbursts of anger, or if you felt, if you were compulsive eater or whatever, that all of these things.
What did your gesture toward me when you said compulsive eater? I don't think it's compulsive. You're not a woman. You don't. It doesn't apply.
This is true. But for but she had all, and it became this, and I found that. I attended a place where she was speaking, and there was no resolution or victory. The only way through this was to continue to dig deeper into your past memories, into your history of hurt and trauma. And it was like what the fruit that I saw as a result of that wasn't taking those things to the cross and taking them to our healer and taking them to the Word of God.
It was just this. Yes. This next step was just this perpetual cycle of hurt and rehearsing. And whenever we get in small groups, you know it can happen. As we're discussing the Word of God, one one starts saying this, the next, and you have to.
Some of those Bible studies out there have like serious rules, like you can't say proper pronouns. You have to kind of wrangle, wrangle all of that back. Say, okay, girls, that's very interesting. We all have experiences, we all have memories, but we. Remember, let's we're here to study God's word, bring them back to that.
So, but yes, emotions and feelings they're. They're this deep, and they are not to be trusted because you can flip your emotion in a day. For us women, it can be hormonal. It can be, we read something, we saw something, a friend didn't invite us to the party. All of a sudden, it's like the world is ending.
And young girls, in particular, now with social media, it is really, really hard for them because what alarms me. Is there's a story out right now about a young girl just turned thirteen years old, raised in a Hollywood home, and she took her own life. Suicide among young girls has like tripled, and this is so scary to me. And I know a lot of it is influenced of social media. I think you can almost trace it back to when the social media platforms were born, you know.
And and I think we can dismiss the pain that these young girls are feeling, but it's real to them. Maybe they're being bullied online, or they don't feel they measure up. Like, what would you ladies say to the younger girls out there, who are, you know, maybe don't think they're as beautiful as they can be, or as smart as they want to be, or or whatever it is they want to be?
Sort of like an older sissy talking to a younger sissy, an older Kathy speaking to a younger Kathy, or just talking to young girls like, hey. It's okay, and please don't ever think about taking your own life. Yeah, yeah. I was growing up in the '90s and early 2000s, which was the time of like supermodel thin, and the pressure to be. Bone skinny, you know, no muscle on you, and I talk about that in my book a little bit.
But my eating disorder that I had for years that kept me just a bondage over my life, and I couldn't get out of it. And you know, I knew truth, and I would be praying, like, "Lord, free me from it," and He wouldn't. And just like any addiction, it's self-serving. You're putting yourself first. But I would look at these girls.
I really can't fathom with the world of social media. What these women or these young girls are facing, right? I would first start with the parents. And it's kind of the thing is like the world won't understand when you don't want to give your child a phone. Yeah, there's gonna be pressures.
The kids gonna say, "No, I can't do this. You got to give me a phone, or I can't go to this practice. My coach can't." There's so many pressures and reasons, and it would it's easier to give in to some of them. Yeah, but to really rein it back, it's not too late to rein it back in with our children. Yeah, um, to really set.
Closer boundaries and standards for our families, and more rules, and it won't make sense. And your kid might be mad at you. It's okay. You're not their best friend. It's okay.
You're the parent.
So look at parents first to rein it back in, protect them, keep them safe. That's your job to protect your child. That doesn't mean we can protect them from everything. I'm not there yet. I just have a 13 year old.
I'm getting ready to enter. All of this hard stage, the really fun times, but boy, I look at those little girls, and their worth is not in the words of other people. Their worth is not in social media and this comparison world where we're constantly comparing our lives and complaining about what we have and don't have. Yeah. It's um, they are in a battle, and we're in a battle for our children and the heart and souls of our children right now.
I think kids are so isolated today, and I think parents are distracted as well as the kids are. That no one's really paying really careful attention when you start seeing these warning signs, but as in. Every life we have value. We have purpose. We have gifts.
God loves us. He wants to use us. We have, we have a beautiful future that God has designed for us. That's unique. And so, for me, what I would love to see every young child, starting from the time they're very little, is to recognize they have sources of strength in their life that not based on what social media or the current trends or culture is.
Telling them, not based on what their little circle of friends on that they might see on social media, but they would know that they have a family, pouring into family, like you were saying, starting with the parents, giving those children that home is important. That parent, the parental love is they have that no matter what. And then, second of all, church, the community of God's people that begins. You know, I'm so grateful for the. Youth ministries in our church that begin from the time that a baby is born, when the children are taken to the nursery, so parents can hear the word of God in the sanctuary.
They are loved. They they begin to see a family beyond their family.
So even if your family, a child's family is is shaky, if they can be rooted in a church family, and then as they grow older, that that church family becomes significant in friendships, and then as they learn. They have a role. They have a purpose. They have gifts that they can use in the church. And I loved what you said in your book about the importance.
This culture is a thing about ageism. That you know, older people is all about being young and looking like you're young and staying young and forever twenty one and all of that. But that there is such value in having older saints. Women who have lived life, experienced life, gone through difficult marriages, raised a prodigal child—that in every stage of your life, that there is probably a woman in the church. Maybe she doesn't have a title, but she might be a small group leader, or she might be just a woman that you sit next to in church that has lived.
You know, as a younger person, if we can. Seek out those mentors, and mentoring doesn't have to be a formal program. It can just be striking up the conversation, asking questions. And then for those of us that are older, to open our hearts and our homes, and our lives, especially those of us who have a little more time, we've raised our families that we could just say, "Hey, come on over, let's let let's cook." And then you have these conversations side by side, where you're not necessarily going through a formal. Program of mentoring, but you are—they are just observing.
And there was a young boy that was Christopher's friend. His name was Hank, and he was raised in the family of a single mother. And Christopher really liked him, and his mom was part of the church. And he would come over and have sleepovers. We had no idea that he's in his forties now.
No, maybe almost fifty, because Christopher would have been fifty. He's the same. Christopher would have been the same. As well, and you are the same age as Jonathan, and then you have a few siblings in between. We have none, but anyway, Hank would have been in his fifties, and he has reached out and told me.
He said, "I didn't know what a father was like. I didn't know what a together family was like because his mom was a single mom." And he said, "But I saw, and we had no idea. He saw us in that role of being mentored." Hey everybody! Thanks for listening to my podcast. Before you go, I wanted to let you know about the important work we're doing here at Harvest.
You know, we've had the same goal these last fifty years, which is simply this: we want to know God, and we want to make Him known. And we do that in a lot of ways: documentary films, animation, radio, television, large-scale evangelistic events, and more. If you want to be a part of what we're doing to fulfill the great Commission, you can support us with whatever you can give at harvest.org/donate. Again, that's harvest.org/donate, and thanks so much.
