What Do You Remember from School?

I went to a Christian High School out on the west coast.  (Pacific Northwest, so West Coast, not 'left coast' in California).  And something happened there at recess and lunch time and between classes that would be absolutely intolerable in any high school today.  40-75% of the student body at any given point would troop out the back doors of the school into the 'smoke hole' located in the woods behind the school to light up on cigarettes.

Grades 8-12, Christian kids, from a bunch of churches around the area, smoked, maybe up to a pack a day.  And it was okay.  And teachers who smoked had duty out there in the smoke hole.  When I graduated, grade 12, there was finally a move afoot to phase out the smoking and the smoke hole, from the incoming 8th grade class and up, year by year.

I remember my senior high trip to the capital city.  Big attraction was a smoke shop.  Turkish cigarettes were the rage, if I remember correctly.

I knew people who would get me alcohol, if I asked.  I knew who was having premarital sex.

Yah, Christian High School.

But there were a few things I wouldn't be able to tell you.  I wouldn't have been able to tell you where to get drugs.  I could not have told you who in our class might be the one who would bring a gun to school to shoot someone with.  That wasn't even in our focus.  There was low-level bullying, especially if you didn't smell like cigarettes...

And the strange thing is that our church Youth Groups-Young People Societies-did a pretty good job "churching" us.  There wasn't the decimation of young people that seems to occur all too often somewhere between the latter stages of high school and college.  There was some, of course, but not so bad.

So now, here we are a generation later.  More stuff, more availability of stuff, more tempting stuff, more needs for the church to do something in the lives of young people.  1 Corinthians 13, translated just before, the choice of so many weddings, is the bible's voice to the question of Love.  It is also the Scripture for Youth Sunday next week.

How does the culture of young people today stand against those verses?  More focus on that this week.