Christian Living

Parents just don't understand why their kids end up doing drugs.  Puzzled, they search for solutions. But their quest for answers makes as much sense as going to the Wizard of Oz. Drug abuse is out of control!  

As Bob Dylan sang, "because something is happening here and you don't know what it is. 

Do you, Mr. Jones?" 

Instead of going to the government, the shrinks, the secular drug rehab programs and other Wizards, parents need to go to God. The problem is not that, as that nudge who appears on the ad for The Addiction Network says, "addiction is a disease."  The problem with today's youth is that parents don't bring them up in the admonition of the Lord.  

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 

Parents need to set a good example. I remember an anti-smoking ad where, as a Dad puffs away on a cigarette, he says that he doesn't understand why his kid smokes. He cites telling his child all the dangers of smoking, and as he says "I just don't get it", he takes a large puff on the cigarette. 

It's important to teach your kids respect for authority. I didn't let my daughter watch "The Simpsons" because it taught kids disrespect for authority, even for parents!  

I took my daughter to church and Sunday school and she went to a preschool run by a church, which taught Christian values. She stayed out of trouble, did well in school, didn't do drugs or get drunk and didn't get pregnant out of wedlock. And she's kind to others and respectful towards authority. 

A verse that covers basic Godly ways to teach your children:  "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.  Romans 13:13-14 

We didn't have the drug epidemic back in the 50s and early 60s.  Drugs were abused, but the drug abuse and general revelry was restricted to those on the fringe of society. In the mid 50s, Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg summed up the decadence of those on the fringe in the opening of his poem "Howl".   

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, 
 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, 
 
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,…"   

The poem gets more vulgar as it goes on. 

Now this culture, where people drag themselves through the streets looking for a fix, has become more mainstream. 

Why were these problems restricted to the fringe of society duringthe 1950s and early 60s?  

People went to church. They brought their children up in the admonition of the Lord. They read Christian books such as C.S. Lewis, they read the Bible and took it to heart and lived a Godly life.  

Families prayed together and stayed together. This is how to enable your kids to just say "no" to drugs.