The Best Thing You Can Do for the World’s Children

Christianity Today has published one of the most startling landmark articles in many years. If you read nothing else about helping children this year, this rather lengthy article should be on the top of the list.

Let me summarize this long study. Dr. Bruce Wydick is an Economics professor at the University of San Francisco. In this article, he tells the story of several graduate students who have completed a five-year study looking into the effectiveness of child sponsorship programs in the Developing World. You can read the entire study here.

As I read this, several details stood out strongly:

• These graduate students sought to study a number of agencies who provide money through sponsors. Only one organization agreed to be studied: Compassion International. That tells me several things. First, they are probably the only organization of this kind that keep their own records and were therefore comfortable with being studied. Second, the other organizations showed antipathy toward the idea of being studied, which means they are more afraid of their funding drying up (if the studies are not favorable) than they are in making sure they are being effective.
• The study concluded that children who receive sponsorship are up to 80% more likely to go to college and graduate than unsponsored children.
• Children who are sponsored are shown to have significantly better viewpoints on what they want to do for a living when they grow up. They also show higher levels of contentment in life and less pessimism about the future.
• Sponsored children have lower rates of suicide, depression and violence done against them.
• Sponsored children with unsponsored siblings are more than three times more likely to grow up to be the family’s primary bread-winner.

This study has been scrutinized by over a dozen universities since it was produced and each of them has ratified the methodology used. This means that at least as far as Compassion International in concerned, one of the best ways you can change the Developing World is to sponsor a child on a monthly basis. Nothing that we have yet seen even comes close.

God Can Help you With Money

We now come to the two most popular posts in the past 10 years on this blog. This one (#2) was posted just last year , but already it has been viewed over 15,000 times. The truth is this: Knowing God will change your finances.

In a nutshell: He doesn’t help us with our finances, if by “help”, you mean that God will swoop down and rescue you from financial disaster. God wants to be our partner in everything in life, and that would not be a partnership at all.

However, God does give huge support in our financial endeavors. In the lifestyle we call “following God”, we recognize that everything we do in this world can be a partnership with God. With regards to money,  I can see at least eight ways God can give us long-term support with our finances:

1. Wisdom: There are thousands of traps out there ready to waste our money, steal our money and cause us to lose our money through negligence. Twice in the past five years, people have come to me with incredible investment opportunities. Both times, the risk seemed low and the rewards considerable. Both times, God sent people to me who gave me advice on why I should not go with either investment. Each of these investments went through bizarre disasters, and I would have lost most of what I owned if I had gone with either of them.

2. Defeating the Waste of Self-Absorption: We often think that we don’t have enough money. That is sometimes true (especially of those who live in third-world poverty). For the most part, we have enough money, we just have too many wants. God helps us with our money by showing us how much we are spending on ourselves: Our comforts, our habits, our pleasure and our fears. We are self-absorbed and this costs us a lot of money. Think of the person who spends $100,000 on a sports car and then wonders why God didn’t answer his prayer for more financial success.

3. Rebuking the Devourer: In Malachi 3 God promises if the people of God will begin living on 90% of their income instead of 100% (tithing), he will “rebuke the devourer”. The Devourer is everything in our world that will destroy our possessions. Traffic accidents, household appliances exploding, unexpected medical bills; these are all examples of the Devourer at work. When we tithe we are recognizing a partnership with God. The person who stops living a self-absorbed life, who tithes in recognition of God’s partnership will find that things just don’t break down as often. The pastor of my church growing up lived on very little and gave much of his financial wealth away. He kept a car running until 250,000 miles. When he got a new car after almost 20 years, his old car died about a month later. The mechanic opened up the engine and found there were almost no piston rings left. It should not have run at all. But God kept it going…he rebuked the Car Devourer.

4. Simplifying our Needs: When you follow Christ, your priorities change. One thing many followers of God find is that they don’t want expensive things or too many things to complicate their lives. A simple follower of God is usually quite content to live simply. This will definitely change a person’s financial standing. John Wesley used to teach that a follower of God needed to work as hard as they can, live as simply as they can to give as much as they can to God’s Work.

5. Work Ethic: Those who follow God with a full dedication often work harder than the average person. For centuries, this has been called the “Protestant Work Ethic”. Hard work almost always impresses those for whom we work and it almost always produces higher returns on our money. Hard working salespeople make more sales. Harder working students get better jobs. The work ethic that comes from the Spirit of God will give a person more ability to produce money…and this will dramatically impact a person’s finances.

6. Sin is Expensive; Righteousness spends Differently: Which person will spend more money: The one who spends a week in Las Vegas, or the person who goes to Yellowstone Park? I am not saying everyone in Yellowstone is righteous, but is hard for me to believe that those who deliberately choose Vegas as a vacation spot are doing it in order to enjoy the Godly life. Let’s face it: Sin can be very costly. Look at addicts, adulterers, thieves, alcoholics, liars, swindlers and the like. Though they may all have moments where they make a lot of money fast, they usually lose it even faster. Most people who live Godly lives never waste their money on vices.

7. We Become God’s Channel: When we seek to use our money for God, he sees that we are good stewards of our money. God loves to use good stewards to get some major things done. If you continue to allow your life to be a channel of God’s work, expect he will give you enough money to get that work done. You will never out-give God.

8. Long-term View Always Pays Off: In the world of investing, it is said that those who invest with an eye to the long-term always do much better than those who invest in the short-term. Long term vision often keeps us from spending foolishly. No one has longer vision than God. The person who plants a tree often will not see that tree grow to its full height. But living in Sacramento, a city of Trees as it is known, I can thank God for the vision of people who planted so many of the downtown trees a century ago. The same is true of finances. The longer a vision you have for finances, the better you will handle it. For instance, if you waste five dollars now (money that could have been invested) it is like wasting $25 over the next 40 years. Keep the long view and understand that God may want us to be frugal to bless future generations and not just the here and now.

False Beliefs that Can Destroy a Marriage

This week, we are featuring the top ten most viewed articles on this blog. Today’s reprint is #8 on that list with over 4,000 hits. It is a two-parter. First part I will post this morning and the second part this evening.

Cathy’s husband wiped his oil-stained hands on the rag beside his workbench. As he came into the house, he realized the rag was getting so dirty there wasn’t enough ‘clean’ on it to sustain another wiping. He saw Cathy reading the newspaper and casually remarked “Remind me to wash all the rags in the garage before Monday.” Cathy dropped the newspaper, narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Then she said, with an acidic tone: “I will have you know I worked hard today. I didn’t get around to the garage after cleaning both cars, wiping little kiddie butts and straightening out the mess with the IRS.”

Within 2 hours, Cathy was in the car headed for her parents house, leaving behind a bewildered husband and two preschoolers. Within two years, they were divorced. Her husband had no idea what hit him.

My wife used to work on a hospital ward devoted to people with emotional challenges. One of her regular patients was a young man who used to have code words to identify “unsafe” people. The problem was, no one knew what the code word of the day was until you said it. He would randomly collect the first word that went through his head. If anyone said that word throughout the day, he would refuse to talk to them for the rest of that day. Nurses and doctors were left to wonder what part of their speech had produced the silence. It might be a simple word like “talk” or something more complicated such as “remember”.

Cathy and this young man in the hospital had exactly the same problem. They exhibited this problem to different degrees, but essentially it is the same problem. Cathy and the patient were both operating on a false premise. The young man’s false belief was that a spoken word could identify a dangerous person. We will discuss Cathy’s false belief at the end of this article –  suffice to say, it is just as real as the young schizophrenic.

The false beliefs we gather to ourselves over the years become like tendrils of kudzu that wind their way around every healthy thought, seeking to choke the life out of them. Nowhere does this show its effects more than marriage. Allow me to quickly summarize several of the most common false beliefs and how they affect husbands and wives. At the end, I will use Cathy to show how the false belief infiltrates a person who would otherwise function quite well in society.

Here then are the most common false beliefs that can ruin a marriage:

1. Independence: This is the belief that we really don’t need anyone else in life. It has a 100 variations, but they all focus on the self-sufficiency of the individual. This belief prevents a spouse from allowing the other person to get close, to interact on a deep level or to partner in marital goals. Those with Independence beliefs often have separate bank accounts, enjoy much different life pursuits than their partners, stop short of really expressing their needs, are constantly making new friends and discarding older ones and run away when they are asked to make deep commitments to their partner.
2. Abandonment: A person with abandonment beliefs sees many situations as the springboard for their spouse leaving them. These beliefs are often accompanied by fear and result in both over-accommodating behavior and flashes of rage. The person with abandonment premises will constantly ask their spouse to account for their whereabouts. They will express how insecure they feel about the future. When their spouse criticizes them even moderately, they will say things like “well why don’t you just leave. I know you want to”.
3. Love based on Performance: This belief says “I will not be loved unless I perform adequately”. Those who hold to this foundation often are overly critical of their spouses, seeking to bring down the performance of another person to elevate themselves. They can become workaholics, alcoholics, clean freaks, clingy, anorexic, bulemic, suicidal, or obsessive-compulsive. Their core idea is that must constantly be doing something to earn or deserve the love they receive from their spouse. It doesn’t help to tell them they are loved –  they won’t really believe it.
4. Love Will Not Be There: There is an equally large group of people who just assume they will not be loved no matter how hard they try. Many of them just give up without really trying. These people will often test their partner by failing in really obvious ways in order to see how the other person will react. This belief can even push them into relationships with people they don’t really care about, just to prove they don’t care if they’re not loved. In addition, people with this belief may question their spouses to death, showing a total lack of trust.
5. Alone: There is a common belief with many people that they are going to be alone. This is similar to the abandonment belief, but it has a nasty twist. They don’t really think a person is going to leave; they are more fatalistic than that. They often fear their spouse will die, or will be swept away in an unavoidable situation. They therefore go through life with few boundaries, allowing their partners to do anything they want to them, fearing the relationship is simply on borrowed time.
6. Shame: This is a simple belief, but deadly. It is the core understanding a person carries that there is something wrong with them. When they were children, it came out as “I am stupid”, “I am going to be beat up”, “I can’t ever get this right”. In adulthood, this person often allows their spouse to find many things wrong with them, accepting blame when they have done little wrong. Shame beliefs foster such behavior as closet drinking, sexual deviancy, serial adultery, lying, self-mutilation, depression, anxiety disorders and even violence.
7. Helplessness: These beliefs (and there are many) come from situations in childhood where a person was treated unfairly and given no recourse to bring closure to the issue. This unfair treatment leads a person to conclude they will never get a fair shake, and therefore they need to protect themselves. Helpless beliefs can result in adultery, pornography obsession, eating disorders, obsessive drug use, phobias, prostitution, violence, angry speech, etc. These beliefs often result in the worst of behaviors, since the behaviors are often ways of bringing a sense of “control” back into their lives.
8. Escape: These beliefs focus on the only way to deal with reality –  run away from it. Every time life gets hard, this inner belief is triggered and the person finds some way to get away from it all. This often cuts the other spouse out of the picture and hurts them deeply. Most people with this belief abuse substances or use sex as an escape. Compulsive masturbation, compulsive gambling and spending are often seen.

There are other beliefs than these, but I have found this list to be the most common. But every person brings their peculiar beliefs into a marriage. When two people come into a marriage relationship with false beliefs, this mixes up a soup of disaster. Let me show you how it worked with Cathy.

She had a belief that no matter how hard she tried, everyone who mattered to her would eventually leave. You would think this sprung from a traumatic childhood experience, but the roots were very simple. Her two older sisters were both hippies and moved out of the house quite young. They had been best buddies to Cathy and now she was the only child left at home. Her mother reacted to her oldest daughters leaving by drinking gin every night until she passed out. Dad dealt with his wife’s inebriation by working 60 hour weeks. Cathy spent most of her days quite alone with her thoughts.

In high school, she made up for this sense of being abandoned by trying to over-compensate. She became hyper-flirtatious and joined every club at school. But because she feared being dumped, she often got clingy with both boy and girls. The result of this clinginess was that people didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Thus, they fulfilled her fear and abandoned her. This just served to reinforce her fear. In order to overcome this, she tried even harder to get people to stay with her. With her girlfriends, she was known as the one who would help out in every way. She spent her own money and bought gifts, helped with homework, staying up half the night sewing cheerleader outfits for her friends. With boys, she basically allowed them to take any sexual liberties they wanted. Yet, despite this extra effort, people still got tired of how hard she was trying and rejected her.

When she married her husband Ben, she really wanted to overcome this. She knew she tried too hard, so she sought to back off and give him breathing space. But her fears kept growing. So often she would get angry and say “Why don’t you just leave? I know you’re going to leave”. Her fear led her to get violent at times, hitting Ben in the head. She sometimes even took out her anger on the little girls.

The day she left, her fear of abandonment had been acute for weeks before. She determined she was going to solve this fear by praying every morning and then serving her husband in love. She had been reading a few books on Christian marriage and she read that if you serve in love it will cast out fear. Now, that is a good principle, but it was no match for her false belief. For a week or more, she tried to anticipate Ben’s every need. But it was exhausting. By the end of the work week, she was an emotional wreck.

When Ben came in and innocently mentioned the grease rag, it echoed against her deeply-ingrained fear. He had one more demand she couldn’t meet. Something inside her snapped and she realized her fear had only been submerged in her cleaning and service. Now, it came rushing out with a fury. Even though Ben had not been criticizing her at all, that is what she heard. False beliefs often affect our hearing, causing us to interpret all communication according to the matrix of the belief. Cathy left and never returned. Her example is repeated millions of times a year, by both men and women.

Examine your own life. Can you see evidence of these sort of beliefs?

There is an answer, and it’s quite straight-forward. More about that in the next article.

Sex and the Single Christian

The other night, my wife and I caught an episode of “Parenthood” on Netflix before bed. If you know the show, it’s the episode where 16-year old Haddie admits to her mother that she and her 19-year old boyfriend are having sex. Mom panics. Mom tells Dad. Dad panics. Dad and Mom agree that Haddie needs to be warned to use contraception (“not just the pill, but condoms as well”).* See Note at the bottom.

Then Haddie’s parents, Adam and Christina, look at each other and say “What else can we say to her?” In their minds, they both remember they had sex the first time before high school was over and it didn’t kill them. So they decide to give Haddie the ‘responsible warnings’ and move on past it.

I told my wife that many Christians we know would have been scandalized by that episode. They would have risen up out of their chairs, incensed that the parents did not offer any moral assistance or guidance. They would have observed it is difficult for parents to give children a moral compass when they didn’t have one at the same age.

But I’ve been wondering lately at some of the messages we send single Christians about sex. Many Christian book authors and bloggers are wondering the same thing. For instance, Sarah Bessey in an article titled “I am Damaged Goods” tells about a Church youth rally she attended:

I was nineteen years old and crazy in love with Jesus when that preacher told an auditorium I was “damaged goods” because of my sexual past. He was making every effort to encourage this crowd of young adults to “stay pure for marriage.” He was passionate, yes, well-intentioned, and he was a good speaker, very convincing indeed.

And he stood up there and shamed me, over and over and over again.

Oh, he didn’t call me up to the front and name me. But he stood up there and talked about me with such disgust, like I couldn’t be in that real-life crowd of young people worshipping in that church. I felt spotlighted and singled out amongst the holy, surely my red face announced my guilt to every one.

He passed around a cup of water and asked us all to spit into it. Some boys horked and honked their worst into that cup while everyone laughed. Then he held up that cup of cloudy saliva from the crowd and asked, “Who wants to drink this?!”

And every one in the crowd made barfing noises, no way, gross!

Read the entire article here.

At the end of the article, she concludes:

“No matter what that preacher said that day, no matter how many purity balls are thrown with sparkling upper-middle-class extravagance, no matter the purity rings and the purity pledges, no matter the judgemental Gospel-negating rhetoric used with the best of intentions, no matter the “how close is too close?” serious conversations of boundary-marking young Christians, no matter the circumstances of your story, you are not disqualified from life or from joy or from marriage or from your calling or from a healthy and wonderful lifetime of sex because you had – and, heaven forbid, enjoyed – sex before you were married.”

If you’re like me, you start to respond “yeah, but…” and then trail away.

If the statistics are correct, 80% of Christians have had sex before marriage. And if the anecdotal evidence from many Christian counselors is accurate, pre-marital sex does not ruin your sex life in marriage; and conversely, maintaining virginity does not guarantee you will have an enjoyable sexual relationship with the person you eventually marry.

Here is the bottom line: God-followers are running out of the stock answers for why Christians shouldn’t have sex before marriage. For the past twenty centuries, we have fallen back onto these:

1. No one will want to marry  you if you’ve had sex before marriage (almost always applied to women).

2. God will judge you for having sex.

3. You will open yourself up to demonic attack.

4. You can get pregnant (women), STD’s (men and women), mental illness.

5. Society will reject you (once again, women).

6. Your future marriage will be doomed to failure before it starts.

As you can see, most of these no longer apply in the twenty-first century. Contraceptives have gone a long way to eliminate the scare of pregnancy and STD’s. Western society no longer punishes or segregates those who have sex. Marriages don’t seem to be ruined by people who have premarital sex (any more than those who got married as virgins).  And perhaps most noticeable, Christian singles have sex and no lightning from the sky falls to smote them. Indeed, it seems like most of the reasons we have told each other for abstinence no longer seem as scary or applicable.

Chanel Graham, writing on her experience with Christian singles in New York City, observes,

When I moved to New York City in the years following college, I was devastated to learn how many of my Christian friends were regularly hooking up at bars and sleeping with boyfriends and girlfriends with no plans for marriage. And more than that, they didn’t seem to feel bad about it. The sub-cultural sentiment was that abstinence is worth preaching through the college years as parental influence wanes and students bumble through the early years of adulthood. But for twenty and thirty-something Christians, for mature adults who had yet to find the one and had been battling hormones for a decade-plus, waiting was child’s play. Celibacy among my Christian peer group was viewed as cute and commendable, but certainly not crucial.

Since few single Christians are willing to abstain from sex forever, what should be the next dialogue for the Church and single Christians?

I had a close friend tell me a few months ago that there are no valid reasons and we should give up telling them to abstain. I didn’t agree with him then or now, but I admit the reasons are not as obvious as they used to be in days gone by.

The easiest way to put this is we should not have sex before marriage because God does not want us to. That’s the easy answer. But that just begs two more questions:

1.What does God say in the Bible about pre-marital sex?

2. What happens to unmarried Christians if they do have sex?

So let’s dive into these two incredibly relevant questions.

So when did God first address issues concerning pre-marital sex? God didn’t say anything to Adam and Eve or their children. This is noteworthy, since it is obvious there was a lot of sex taking place in the early days of man’s existence: There was a whole lot of begetting going on…and apparently, it was all okay. God never mentioned sex to Noah before the flood or to Noah and his family after the flood – other than “Be fruitful and multiply”. And apparently, all this was okay too.

We see the same pattern with Abraham. Abraham even engages in extra-marital sexuality (see the relationship between he and Hagar, his wife’s maid). God never says a word about Abraham’s sex life. Nor does God intervene with Isaac and Jacob. Jacob married a couple of sisters and has sex with both of their maids as well (with his wives’ permission…they had a little bit of a sibling baby competition going). Still, God does not say anything.

With Jacob’s children, a lot of extra-marital sex happens. Probably the strangest incident involves Judah and his daughter-in-law, who gets pregnant by him by pretending to be a prostitute. At this point, God is still silent over the entire issue of what sexuality is allowed and what isn’t.

Thrown into the mix however, is a poignant scene where Sodom and Gomorrah are incinerated…most likely because of their homosexuality. However, we’re not even sure if that was the entire issue (Ezekiel also points out the sin of greed as the partial reason for Sodom’s demise).

So where does God start talking about extra-marital sex? In the giving of the Law to Moses, God begins to lay down some boundaries regarding sexuality. In Exodus 22, Leviticus 19, the same set of limitations are placed on sex. They were not to have sex with relatives. They were forbade from homosexuality and bestiality. They were not to engage in sexuality related to idol worship or group sex. But in no case is premarital sexuality addressed. Nowhere in the Mosaic Law is there a prohibition against premarital sex.

If you peruse the rest of the Old Testament, there is a complete absence of prohibition on pre-marital sex. In fact, there are many commentators who point to the Song of Solomon as a tacit endorsement of enjoying sex before marriage. I do not agree with most of their assessments, but it is clear that Song of Solomon does nothing to show the dangers of sex outside of marriage.

In the prophets, however, we get the first glimpse into God’s true heart on the matter. I need to qualify this to point out we only get a glimpse of God’s biggest purposes in sexuality. All of the relevant passages say the same general thing, so I will just deal with one of them.

Isaiah 23:17 (NIV): “At the end of seventy years, the Lord will deal with Tyre. She will return to her lucrative prostitution and will ply her trade with all the kingdoms on the face of the earth.”

The word for “prostitution” here is a word which refers to “fornication”, most commonly defined as sex outside of marriage. In every case where the prophets mention this word it is in reference to two things: People having sex related to idol worship (forbidden in Deuteronomy) or as a picture of nations courting other nations for protection.

In other words, there is no absolute verse in the Old Testament that does more than hint that sex outside of marriage is wrong. However, the references made to this sexual practice through the prophets do show that God does not think highly of sex outside of marriage. I can just see some Christian singles wanting to stop right there and be satisfied that their sex life is just fine as far as God is concerned. But please, keep reading.

There is much in the New Testament that is worthy of study. But it is not as straight-forward as parents might like when talking to their kids. Take for example,

Matthew 15:19: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.”

The inner heart of man can conceive of many shades of evil thoughts…one of those is called “immorality”. It is a Greek word that sometimes means adultery. However, because “adultery” is used right before it in this list, it cannot mean that. The other meanings of this word include fornication, group sex and idol/temple related sex. There is no reason to believe that Jesus would be referring to either group sex or pagan temple sex, for neither of these were practiced in Israel at that time.

Therefore, he is referring to sex outside of marriage in whatever form it happens. And in this verse, Jesus is not talking about the act, but the heart that conceives these things. The core of a heart that wants sex outside of marriage is called “Evil”. The Greek word there is Poneros. Though it means ‘evil’ the root of the word means “that which causes pain”. These are painful things. It is not that a person is called evil at their core, but that these thoughts lead to pain. Murder is obvious, as is adultery. But Jesus lumps immorality in with the rest. Why? It doesn’t say here. But it is pretty clear this is not God’s best plan.

Years ago, I had a couple of parents drag their 16-year old daughter in to see me so I could “talk some sense into her”. She had just admitted to her mother that she had sex with her boyfriend. She had not become pregnant and didn’t know why her parents were making such a big fuss. I was furious inside that they would totally shame their daughter in front of me. (Later, I did sit them down to tell them how much they owed their daughter an apology). But the conversation I want to relate at this point happened with the girl.

She was 16. She admitted the details of the sexual encounter and how badly she felt about it all. In fact, she looked sick as she told me what happened. What began as a make-out session quickly led to sex. Her boyfriend talked her into going “all the way”. She was not sure what was happening; and then it was all over.

She felt horrible and hated her boyfriend. It ruined their relationship from that point forward. Most of her questions for me had to do with why anyone would ever want to have sex. It hurt, she felt betrayed and everyone “hated” her afterward – including her boyfriend.

I assured her she had experienced one of the worst-case scenarios regarding sex. If she were to sit down with 100 women who have had sex before marriage, most would have related a better story than hers. Most would also have said that the experience was not everything they had hoped for.

But the key thing she realized after several counseling sessions is her early entrance into the sexual arena was painful in so many ways. This is the idea inherent calling extra-marital sex “poneros”…it can be very painful at so many levels. In order to see what this really means, we need to look at the most detailed explanation of God’s view on sexuality, found in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7.

First, it is no surprise that a letter to the Church at Corinth should contain clear teaching on sexuality. Even by the somewhat “loose” moral standards of the ancient Greek and Roman world, Corinth stood out as an extreme place. Any and all sexual practices were flouted by the Corinthians. Orgies were relatively common and temple prostitution abounded. Women who went out in public usually had to cover their entire head so as not to be confused with a temple prostitute. (Note: This is the point Paul will make in 1 Corinthians 11 when he warns Christian women not to go out with their heads uncovered).

But in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul has several points to make about immorality of all kinds. We can safely assume this includes all types of extra-marital sex. Here are the highlights of what he says:

1. The life we live in the Kingdom of God does not fit well with sexual immorality. - 1 Cor. 6:9-10,

“Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

All of these activities hinder the sanctifying work of the Spirit in our lives and stunt our spiritual growth. The verb tenses here mean that each of these sins are ongoing problems, not just one-time experimentation. This verse isn’t talking about someone losing their virginity but rather a person who has sexual encounters as a regular part of their lives. The more someone indulges unhealthy, painful activities the more it blocks the work of God in their lives. The Kingdom of God is not primarily about salvation but more about the Sanctifying work of the Spirit.

So the first thing we learn here about immorality is it blocks the work of the Spirit and thus the working of the Kingdom of God in our lives. Sexual immorality causes a person to walk more and more focused on pleasure and renders them less capable of seeing the godly path in front of them.

2. Our physical bodies are not the only part of us involved with the sexual act. In 1 Cor. 6:13-17, Paul says,

“ You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.  By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! ¹⁶ Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit”.

Even though Holy Spirit is spirit, his presence in our lives affects our bodies also. Romans 8:11 affirms this:

“And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Our bodies are somehow affected by sexual immorality. I do not know how or to what extent this happens. This is not judgment per se. No one should say that God sends disease or disaster on us because of sexual immorality. More to the point, the act of sexual immorality blocks the healing flow of the Spirit and therefore blocks some of that life he is giving to our mortal bodies.

Also, we are reminded that our lives are given over to Christ when we become a Christ-follower. In these verses, Paul wonders what happens if a person joined Christ to a prostitute. This person is reminded that we are one with Jesus in spirit. Therefore, there is some connection deeper than the physical that goes on between two people when they are sexually joined.

This perhaps is a hint toward the deeper meaning of sex and the deeper danger of sexual immorality. If the physical joining is also the beginning of a deeper connection between two people, then casual, flippant sex is dangerous. It potentially creates bonds between people that are harder to break than non -sexual friendships.

3. Sexual immorality causes us to sin against ourselves: 1 Cor. 6:18-20 puts it this way:

“Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. ¹⁹ Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

If you commit sexual immorality – i.e. sex outside of marriage – you probably hurt no one more than yourself. It doesn’t describe how we hurt ourselves, but I think we can imagine. Our lives are a delicate balance of the physical and spiritual. We know that any kind of psychological pressures and failures can wreak havoc on our bodies. When someone is involved in sexual relationships that are less than God’s ideal, it will have some emotional effect. And this emotional effect will take some type of toll on the body.

I’m not talking about superstitious things like hair on your knuckles. I am not talking nonsense like those who claim AIDS is a judgment for homosexuality in our world. I think we rob our bodies of energy and compromise our immune system by creating deep sexual bonds with other people before we’re ready.

All of this is saying that sex is more complicated than two people joining their reproductive organs together. You don’t even have to be a Christian to know that. Our emotions are so heightened when sex is involved. When a couple goes from being friends to being sexual, immediately the stakes are higher. What might have provoked mild jealousy in the friendship stage, now causes huge emotional reactions in the sexual stage. How many people can handle that kind of stressor in a relationship that has yet to be fully defined?

The value of waiting until marriage for sex is that it brings those stressors under the boundaries of a covenant relationship. At least in theory, two married people are required to work through any problems they have in their sexual relationship. That is not the case with teenagers. Haddie and her boyfriend had sex and their relationship inexorably changed (as it always does). Eventually, the escalation of their relationship into sexuality was a prime factor in why they split up a few months later.

Paul in Chapter 7 of 1 Corinthians concludes the discussion on premarital sex this way: “Now for the matters you wrote about:

“It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”  But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband.

Paul does not see sex as inevitable. There is nothing in God’s mind or Paul’s that concludes everyone has to have sex. It is not a right or an absolute need. However, Paul also recognizes that some people will go through life eternally distracted by the opposite sex if they don’t get intimate. So he proposes this is why God created marriage. It is a place where sex can be bound to a covenant. It makes life a little less complicated, a little less painful and somewhat sexually satisfying.

I qualified all of the above statements because as long as sex exists in this world, it will be the point of so many problems and contentions. That’s why Paul probably advises to stay away from it if you can. If you can’t, help sexual pressures out by putting it in the boundaries of marriage. This is the better way.

If you have had sex before marriage, you have not necessarily ruined a future marriage. You have not become a candidate for God’s wrath. You are not a dirty person. You have not given away your best gift. You simply have a choice what you want to do from here.

I believe there is a best way.  Most people today are not finding that way…getting lost in the vagaries of sexual experimentation. But, if you don’t find it at first, keep looking for it. Certainly, don’t allow the enemy to our souls to discourage you if you are no longer a virgin. Virginity is not the point at all. The point is that we have to choose each day how we want to walk with God.

The Bible and the Spirit of God will help you.

*[Endnote: I am concerned that the writers of "Parenthood" did not use the plot of the show to address the illegality of 16-year old Haddie and 19-year old Alex having a sexual relationship. In California - where the show is set - this is called Statutory Rape. This is irresponsible by the show. Teen viewers may not realize they are watching something illegal if someone doesn't point it out. My wife told me she has been informed by the authorities (as a school nurse and thus a mandated reporter) that they will not enforce the Statutory Rape law when the sex is consensual and the parties are this close in age. My point is, it is irresponsible of the show not to address this issue, especially since they were willing to bring up the issue of underage sex].

The Missing Word in Esther

In the Old Testament of the Bible, one of the most intriguing stories is that of Esther.  Essentially, Esther wins a beauty contest and, as a prize, she is forced to join the King’s harem. The Medes and the Persians were a middle-eastern jointly-ruled kingdom of the sixth century B.C. The King had just exiled (and possibly put to death) the former queen for overstepping her authority and totally disobeying a direct order from the King.

This wasn’t Macbeth. Queens in those days did not talk back. Esther was chosen among all the beautiful women in the kingdom to be the next Queen.

I’ll let you read the book for yourself. In the end, Esther saves the Jewish people (she herself is a Jewess) and a national festival is enacted to commemorate her feat. It is a story of intrigue, power, greed, hatred and fear: But more than anything it is about God’s sovereignty over all the other things.

Yet strangely enough, a particular word is completely missing from the book of Esther. And you can read it several times and not even notice it is missing. And this word is so essential to the Jews and Christians that you would think the book would be banned for not containing it. Have you guessed the word yet?

The word is…..GOD.

For a book that has God as the underpinning, God as the director of events, God as the ultimate focal point, it is interesting that God is not mentioned in the entire book. Why would God (who co-authored this book according to Judeo/Christian doctrine) neglect to mention himself in the book?

I believe that God wants to underscore that He is at work in all nations, all people groups, all situations and desires to protect his people, even if we don’t notice what God is up to.

The reason I bring this up at this point in our nation’s history is so I can point out something regarding the two Political Conventions that have taken place over the past month. It seems that both parties have been scrambling to put a particular word INTO their message as much as possible. It’s the same word that Esther left out: GOD.

Why did they want to do that? For the same reason that people want God’s name on our currency, in our constitution, in our Pledge of Allegiance, on public buildings and Foundation stones. I believe many people want to include the name of God in things as a talisman, a good luck charm to convince others of what we are.

As a contrast, God didn’t write his name into Esther because He didn’t need to. Those with eyes to see can see the hand of God everywhere. Those who could not see God’s hand (such as Haman) would not have seen any clearer if God had been mentioned more. Or, at all.

Both major political parties want to score points with religiously-minded voters by throwing in God’s name. Of course, some truly feel they are honoring God by doing so, but I am not so sure it accomplishes their goal. Have you ever seen a child that wants something from a parent. They might start whining, “Mom, mom, mom, mom….” over and over. Does this endear them to their mother? Hardly! The same thing is true when political parties mention God’s name over and over. Most people stop listening. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of mentioning God?

God is not impressed when we keep saying His name over and over. In fact, there are many biblical scholars (I am not one of them, but I respect them) who will not write out the name of God in any form because it is too holy a concept to speak or write. Often they will write “G_D” and leave out a vowel to signify respect. That sure beats the person who prays and mentions God’s name about 100 times per minute.

Now for the other perspective. I was on the golf course a year ago with a friend when his doctor called. He had been battling cancer for several years. The doctor was calling to say that, for some reason, there was no trace of cancer anywhere in his body. The doctor kept saying “There can only be one explanation” over and over. In the entire conversation, neither of them mentioned God’s name. Yet in the end, they both knew who had brought about the remission of that cancer.

Even the doctor knew it wasn’t him.

But, when God’s name is thrown out like a loose thing, an empty thing, when God’s name is slathered all over dollar bills and is found on the lips of many people who don’t even believe there is a God, it is a pretense at best and a mockery at worst.

One of the Ten Commandments is that we NOT take the name of our Lord God in vain. That doesn’t mean as a swear word. “Vain” means “empty”. It is wrong to use God’s name in an empty fashion, as many did in their political platforms and as many do with their money.

We should care more about the Presence of God working through his people than with the name of God used as a slogan. I would be content if neither political party mentioned God ever again, in exchange for the people of God who are in those parties living like Esther.

Addiction in the Plastic Brain

David Sheff’s son, Nic started using drugs when he was 13. By the time he was a late teen, Meth had completely grabbed every part of his being and set he and his family on a nightmare journey from which they have never really returned. Dad, a free-lance writer, tells his side of the story in the book “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through his Son’s Addiction”. Nic tells it from his point of view in “Tweaked”. There are some points where they differ, but it is essentially the same story. David, the writer, tells the story more eloquently while Nic’s account is raw and first-person. They are both good reads.

Nic’s story has a twist that most addicts don’t encounter. Between David, Nic’s mom (David’s ex-wife) and David’s current wife, they have the finances to send Nic to the best treatment centers in the country. And they have done so. However, even with the world’s best addiction specialists working with Nic, he has failed to overcome his addiction. Meth still rules his life.

In one of the last rounds of treatment, David was confronted with a horrid piece of news: Meth is so damaging to the brain’s ability to change (i.e. plasticity) that he may not ever be able to kick the habit. By addiction standards, he may be an addict until he dies.

Why is that? As I said in the last article, the brain is capable of changing itself much more than people think. There are at least a half dozen ways it does this, but none as important as LTD (also known as Long-Term Depression). By the way, don’t think of the word “depression” here in the counseling sense. In brain chemistry, this word “depression” means to “push something down”. When the brain senses that a chemical or a process is hurting mental functions, it sends out chemicals to the synapses to “depress” their activity. This explains why  you might take a drug for a year and find it is effective and then all of a sudden, it stops working. The brain doesn’t want it any more and it creates a “long-term depressant” to stop the chemical from working.

According to this study done two years ago in Bordeaux, France by Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Olivier Manzoni, the brains of some addicts are literally burned out and cannot produce enough LTD to stop the effects of certain drugs. Meth and cocaine are the worst for overpowering the LTD process.

However, there is another side to this equation that might be helpful for everyone who wants to live a healthy emotional and spiritual life. The mind can do anything you want it to do. It can depress itself, it can delight, it can cause itself to have panic attacks, it can choose to block memories, it can live in unreality, it can live in reality, it can find contentment; in short, our brain can rewire itself any way we desire. How does this work?

I won’t bore you with the chemical mechanics, so allow this to be a very simplistic summary. Our brain stores its experiences in different locations. Our images are stored in one place, smells in another, logic in one place, emotions in another. When we have an experience, we chop up the data and store the memory in a hundred different locations. We draw upon the data when it reinforces our chosen behavior.

When you store something, you store it according to what you want to do with it in the future. We are always learning and remembering. Let’s say you go to the store and your mother gives you a piece of candy. And it is a blustery, rainy and depressing type day. As soon as you eat the candy, the sugar makes you feel better. So, from that day you may associate all these things together: Mother, bad weather day, sugar, grocery stores etc.

Now, let’s say you take one or two of those associations and keep repeating them. Let’s say every time the weather gets bad, you go shopping. Let’s say you do that thirty or forty times. After that, just the appearance of dark clouds makes you think of shopping. You have wired your brain that way. If you also get sugar every time you go shopping on a bad day, you have doubly reinforced that connection. If you make that triple connection for 20 years, you have long since forgotten why you go shopping on bad weather days. And if you try and stop, there are chemicals in the brain that will be produced to give you discomfort. In essence, you will feel pain.

That, in a nutshell, is how ALL addictions work.

The answer to it is always “stop making those connections”. However, even though I know that, and even though I don’t like gaining weight from eating too much candy and maxing out my credit cards in the rainy season, I don’t want to stop either. I don’t like the painful way I feel if I resist the connection. The way I have wired my brain reinforces my choices. When I want to choose something else, I am punished. When I continue the behavior, I am rewarded.

But I can stop going shopping on a bad weather day. It will mean rewiring through beliefs, different choices and alternative lifestyle changes. It may take years to completely rid myself of all the vestiges of those choices, but here is the good news: If I want to (i.e. motivated to, decide to, learn what I really want and know how to get it) I can change. And changing my brain means rewiring my brain.

All our ingrained behavior is based on beliefs. And all those beliefs are stored as synaptic processes in the brain. Therefore, all repetitive behavior is a type of addiction.

In the Bible, God is pretty clear on how we change one behavior and choose another. In Romans 12:2 it says “Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this culture, but rather, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” There are several greek words here which need to be understood to get the full meaning.

Conform: It means to change shape to match some other thing

Patterns: repetitive behavior

Culture: The world system around us

Transformed: The greek word is metamorphoo, which means to go through a series of changes.

Renewing: The Greek word means to take something meant for one thing and use it another way. It comes closest to our modern word “recycling”.

So let’s put it together. The writer of Romans says: “Stop changing your mind so that it looks like the behavior of everyone in your group of friends. Instead, go through a process whereby your brain changes into something different and is used in a different way than ever before”.

In order to understand how this works, our next article is going to focus on three societal problems that have reached epidemic proportions and how each can be changed by a spiritual rewiring of the brain:

Dangerous flirtation

Controlling actions

Depression and Anxiety

10 Ways to Get Back Your Gaps

In the last article, we talked about how completely we are losing the very few gaps we have in our days. Cell phones seem to have placed the final nail in our coffins when it comes to being creative, innovative and meditative.

Creators of the Windows Phone, instead of trying to ignore their impact, used it as a marquee for their advertising campaign. Remember this ad:

Now it’s time to fight back. Here are ten ideas (some of them are mine while I also gleaned and stole from smarter people) to give us more spaces, more gaps to reflect and breathe in our technology-saturated lives.

1. Have a technology Sabbath once a week: Have one day a week where you do not turn on a computer, television, phone or any other interactive gadget. I actually don’t think most of you can do it. Prove me wrong.

2. Turn off your phone when you are speaking with other people. If you cannot turn it off, turn it to a setting where it is totally silent and cannot interrupt you. One of our most important categories of “gaps” are those where our minds interact with the minds of other people.

3. Have set times in the day when you engage with technology. In other words, reverse the pattern. Right now, we schedule in things that do not directly involve technology (appointments, engagements, projects, to-do lists) and then allow tech stuff to interrupt. And it does. Why not schedule  your tech times? Have three “email slots” per day, 3 “text message” times a day, 3 “Internet” times per day. Then, the rest of the day make those media unavailable.

4. While in the car, do not turn on the radio or answer the phone. Let the flow of traffic, with its repetition, carry you away to other thoughts.

5. Do nothing automatically involving Tech. Do not automatically go to Facebook when you sit down at your desk. Do not automatically bring your laptop to the breakfast table. Switch it up.

6. Only turn on your computer to use it for a task. Then turn it off. This prevents you from meandering to the 10 billion distractions the Internet offers.

7. For one week, record exactly how much you used each piece of technology. Carry a $1 notepad in your pocket to record these events. At the end of the week, be chagrined and hate that gap-taking, mind-sucking tech-barrage.

8. Get a dumb phone. No Internet and pay instead for every text message. Unless you are under 18…you don’t need an $800 bill from Verizon for text messages.

9. Have a partner who asks you regularly if you’re finding gaps in your day. Choose someone who has one or more of these characteristics:

a. Someone you don’t want to disappoint.

b. Someone who is annoying and relentless

c. Someone who also wants to regain gaps in their day.

Hey, it works for weight loss, it can work for gap acquisition.

10. Reward yourself at the end of every week for how much you were able to resist the tech incursion. If  you honestly did well, give yourself a treat that does not involve more tech stuff: massages, waterslide, new clothes, golf course etc.

I would be thrilled to hear ideas you have. Let’s help one another.

Filling in All the Gaps with Technology

For years I’ve had the displeasure of explaining to people exactly what it means to have Attention Deficit Disorder. While I don’t consider having ADD to be a problem anymore, there are many people who pay me sideways glances, as if trying to detect some hidden psychoses buried in all of my behavior. Such is life. I’ve learned to be quite content with the constant challenge of focusing on the task ahead and not allowing it to meander away to a colorful bauble.

Therefore, I take pointed interest when I read that most people in our culture over the last three or four years have developed a type of ADD. This problem does not originate in their biology but from their environment.

In a recent blog entry by Joe Kraus he points out that most people now have a unhealthy relationship with their cell phones. He observes, “I don’t think I have a healthy relationship with mine. I feel a constant need to pull it out – to check e-mail, to cruise the Internet, to see if there is something interesting happening right now. It’s constantly pulling on my attention. There are studies that have been shown recently where people have reported at a rate of 35% that they check their phone before they even get out of bed in the morning. Do you do this? I do. If I let it, it easily fills up those gaps in my day – some gaps of boredom, some of solitude.”

Another study has shown that the average teenage girl – mind you, we are talking about the average girl; some girls do more – uses her cell phone to text an average of 4000 times a month. That equals one text for every 8 min. of waking time. The number is only slightly less for boys; 3000 texts per month.

What this means is that cell phones,  televisions, video games, computers, MP3 players, tablets are filling up every gap in every moment and every day of our lives. We interpret this to mean we are able to do more with our brains.  But here’s the truth: we are constantly teaching our brains to be distracted by every piece of information and data that comes within observing distance.

Krause goes on to point out  this may have some kind of evolutionary roots to it. He notes that over the centuries it is the Hunter/Gatherer who was constantly wary of danger from every direction that lived when something dangerous decided to attack. Those who are not easily distracted by swiftly moving things in the peripheral vision don’t live very long when they’re out in the wild. He postulates that our surviving ancestors were able to keep living by becoming good at distraction. Whether or not you accept the validity of evolutionary roots to anything or not, it should be obvious that we are becoming more and more distracted in everyday life.

So who cares?

Most psychologists who study the concepts of creativity and insight observe that the majority of our most creative moments happen when we are not keeping our minds busy on many things. Those momentary “gaps” in our day are crucially necessary to tie together many of the loose ends that will eventually join to form a creative thought or mindset. Without those gaps, we never really see the bigger picture. As Krause says, “…gaps used to happen all the time. Now they’re disappearing. You’re eating lunch with a friend and they excuse themselves to the restroom. A gap. Now you check your phone because being unstimulated makes you feel anxious. Waiting time in a line at the bank? Used to be a gap. Now it’s an opportunity to send e-mail or text”.

So what can we do about this? I really think the number one answer is overcoming this dread of these gaps. Is it possible for you to embrace those moments of reflection, those unexpected times with nothing to do? If you can build in habit of allowing your day to have a lot more gaps than it presently has, it is more than likely you will be able to hear what has been rumbling around in the far corners and recesses of your mind. For those who are followers of God these gaps are the moments when Holy Spirit can come in and tie together all the loose ends of the things that his voice have been trying to indicate to you.

What then will you do? In the next two articles, we’ll explore how to make room for more gaps and how to utilize them to bring good mental health to your life.

The Hardest Prophecy ever Given by God

When we think of the Love of God, it is very possible to slip into a motif of sentimentalism. Be assured of this: God is not sentimental. His love does not drip of syrupy platitudes and pictures of little puppies. He loves the old gnarly dogs just as much as the cute youngsters.

But most people don’t define love the way God does. That makes it more difficult to understand some of the things God does and says. There may not be anything more difficult than Ezekiel 24:15-18. Here’s what it says:

¹⁵ The word of the Lord came to me: ¹⁶ “Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. ¹⁷ Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead. Keep your turban fastened and your sandals on your feet; do not cover your mustache and beard or eat the customary food of mourners. ”

¹⁸ So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded.

God tells the Prophet Ezekiel that his wife is going to die that evening and he is not allowed to outwardly mourn her in any way. This may be one of the most incomprehensible things God has ever asked anyone to do. Leaving aside for a moment that God is telling someone their loved one is about to die. Leaving aside for a moment that, from the way it is worded, it appears that Ezekiel and his wife were very close and loving.

Actually, we can’t leave those things aside. He is not asking this of a divorced prophet or of a man whose wife was a shrew. This is the love of his life. Not only is she about to die, but he is not allowed to grieve and he has to talk to people about why he is not speaking.

Why would a loving God do this to one of his best people? The love of God compels God to do the best thing for the most amount of people while keeping two truths in mind:

1. That people have freedom of choice over their own lives.

2. That sin is powerful and if allowed to go unchecked will destroy every person on this planet. God’s purpose is to deal with this second truth without completely violating the first truth.

The entire nation of Israel has wandered away from God and is practicing witchcraft, rampant immorality, idol worship, child sacrifice and war cult activity. God has given Ezekiel and a handful of other prophets messages to pass on in warning about where these actions are leading. No one is paying any attention to them. But as the days before consequences for their actions get closer, the messages of God become sharper. Finally, God uses a metaphor that will drive home the point. But it requires a picture that will not easily leave people’s minds.

Several things to remember. First, we all die. And death is in itself not a curse. The cross of Christ has removed sin from death and therefore taken away its sting. Second, we will all die when it is our appointed time to die. Nothing anyone else does or says can change that. Third, those of us who believe in God do not see death as a final moment. Fourth, sometimes for many of us, grieving has to be postponed due to other critical issues.

The nation of Israel are about to be attacked and attacked and attacked by their enemies. This time, God is not going to stop the attacks. People will die by the thousands, not because God is unloving, but because the nation didn’t want to acknowledge God any longer. This prophetic action God is calling Ezekiel to (i.e. not mourning his wife’s death) will mirror the coming days when the chaos and confusion of being attacked will leave people no time to grieve as they run for their own lives.

God gave them this picture to warn them and perhaps shock them into seeing what their actions would cause. They could have changed their minds and their ways and turned back to God. It may not have prevented everything from happening, but God is a forgiving God and will help us when we turn to Him.

We ought to remember the words of C. S. Lewis in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” when describing Aslan, a figure of God Himself: “He is good, but He’s not safe”.

Not safe indeed. But He is loving, good and forgiving. And just so you know, God did comfort the prophet after he gave this word. At the end of that chapter he does tell him there will be a time he can openly grieve and God will help him.

What we all need to know is that when we think God does not care about the smallest things in our lives, we can be assured He does. But there are moments when God’s actions tell us He has bigger fish to fry. If we know he loves us fiercely, that can help us get through the tough times.

Why You Can’t Remember Traumatic Events

Let me get the scientific part out of the way first. To understand the rest of this article, I need to define three things:

1. Traumatic Event: Any happening which effects major change in our emotional, physical and memory functions
2. Glucocorticoids: Substances produced during trauma that help our brain cope with the overwhelming nature of the event
3. Hippocampus: The central core of our memory system that allows us to take events and store them in long-term memory.

Armed with those definitions, let me walk you through recent discoveries with memory research. In about a dozen studies (but most recently in this one by Benno Roozendaal et al), it has been shown that when we have a traumatic event in our lives, the body produces major amounts of glucocorticoids. This helps to calm us down so we can cope. It also gives us that “numb” feeling that many people describe during stress. But glucocorticoids have a transverse effect. They destroy neurons in the Hippocampus. This means that the more stress we are under, the less we will be able to store the traumatic event it in long-term memory. This partially explains how some people who endured years of trauma through abuse have very little memory of the entire season of events.

However, there is one other effect of Glucocorticoids. They enhance the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system helps us store our emotional reactions in events. Our brains can actually store our emotional output during a traumatic even much more completely than we can store the facts of the event.

The implication of these two findings is huge for TPM (Theophostic Management) counseling. TPM counseling accesses emotional reactions in the present time and follows them back to their original memory. Since emotions are actually heightened during trauma, they are a more accurate way to access traumatic memories than any other method.

I consider this a true endorsement for TPM and EMDR approaches to emotional and spiritual well-being. Each of these counseling methods relies on triggered emotions to go back to false beliefs and decisions that are still affecting our lives from those trauma.