Healthy Relationships

Dating relationships are very important to the young people that I work with in Homewood (as they are with most teenagers in any environment). One of my main objectives in living incarnationally in Homewood has been to model a healthy marriage for the young people that we work with, because it's easy to talk about abstinence and making good choices but it's much more difficult to model certain behaviors consistently over a long period of time. Lots of outsiders come to Homewood to talk to kids about all kinds of different perspectives on dating relationships and sexuality. While I want to be careful not to devalue that type of work that does help some kids, a lot of the "talks" the kids get from outside organizations go in one ear and right out the other. The young people in Homewood face overwhelming pressure to become sexually active at a young age. To overcome those tempations, the kids need adults who will invest in them to help them understand healthy relationships.

This past weekend I was taking a long car ride with a few mentees and they started asking me all kinds of questions about my marriage to Julie. They were fascinated by my marriage! They told me all about their perspectives on dating, and they really wanted to know what I thought about certain issues that they were dealing with. God opened the door for me to be able to speak into issues of dating, sexuality, and marriage for these young people. I am able to speak into my mentees' lives because after six years of building meaningful relationships with them, I have earned the right to be heard and I have modeled a marriage for them. For a long time, some of my mentees called Julie my girlfriend because they didn't have a category for wife. Many of them had never had a marriage modeled for them. By being present in this community for a long time, my hope is that just as there are lots of men willing to speak to the young people in Homewood about unhealthy relationships and doing what feels good, that my presence in Homewood would allow me to be available to young people to talk to them about God's plan for healthy relationships and families. I am thankful for the platform that God has given me, as a pastor, to be able to speak into that area of my mentees' lives so that they at least know about the difference between right and wrong and unhealthy and healthy relationships. I don't take the kind of influence that my presence in the community allows me for granted.