Watching news footage of kids filing out of the building after a school shooting is gut-wrenching. It leaves us broken, hurting, and realizing that things are not they way they are supposed to be. And then there are the all-too-often (sometimes daily) reports of racial injustice, mental health crises, and a host of other social problems that are further evidence of the fact that things are not the way they’re supposed to be in the world of our children and teens. And this realization of the way things are points us to the fact that we long. . . in fact groan for. . . things to be the way they are supposed to be.
The practice of “dual-listening”. . . listening to God’s Word and listening to our broken world. . . instills in us a perspective that fuels hope for healing these awful realities. And when we are aware of and not ignorant to what’s happening in our broken world, we are then driven to bring the light of God’s Word to shine on the darkness of the broken realities which exist.
And so it was gut-wrenching to spend the last couple of days binge-watching Season 2 of the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” . . . a highly-criticized yet widely-viewed depiction of life’s brokenness as it visits teenagers and their world.
We’re going to be recording a “Youth Culture Matters” podcast on the latest 13 episodes of the series in a few days. Stay tuned. But until then, perhaps the fact that processing in writing what I saw is helpful for me might be somewhat helpful, I hope, to you.
Source: CPYU
