I couldn’t help thinking that the first line of the first reading is so apt for today. ‘Cursed be the person who puts their trust in people, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.’
‘Blessed is the one whose hope is in the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters... In the year of drought it shows no distress.’
Anywhere on earth where a government has decided to create a utopia, or heaven on earth, without God, they have ended up creating hell on earth, such as Nazi Germany and Communism. If we take God out of the picture, then our dignity disappears, since we get our dignity from being created in God’s image. ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image. In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them.’ (Gen 1:26-27). If God is not part of the picture, then we are just servants of the state, as opposed to children of God. The wonder of our being created, is that God deliberately created us in his own image, with reason and free will and an immortal soul. Everyone in this building will live forever, either with God in heaven, or without God in hell. There is no in-between.
Just after Thanksgiving we had our convocation, which is when all of the priests of the diocese get together for a few days, to pray, socialize and for further education. I always enjoy being able to spend a bit of time with the other priests, as it is really the only time of the year we get together for more than an hour. I think the other priests feel the same as there is always a very good turnout.
The diocese also gets one or two speakers to give talks each day. This year the whole convocation was addressing the LGBTQ and transgender issues and how best to address it. I have to say it was the most intense and disturbing conference I was ever at. I was quite exhausted by the end of it.
We had two speakers. The first was a lady by the name of Mary Hasson, an attorney specializing in ethics, who has represented the Vatican to the UN. The other speaker was a deacon and plastic surgeon by the name of Patrick Lappert, both very high-powered people with extraordinary careers.
It was much too long to go into any details, but there are one or two issues that I think it is really important that you are aware of, especially parents with teen and pre-adolescent children.
In the last few years there has been a 5000% increase in transgender diagnosis among females. Historically it was almost exclusively males and at that only 0.02%. So why is this?
The reason is not that we have suddenly become enlightened, which every generation seems to believe it is. The reason is largely because these ideas are being suggested to children, pre-adolescents and teens and are also being encouraged and groomed. This is happening in high-schools all over the country at this time and it is being done without parents knowledge. Discussions in classrooms are taking the form of bringing up questions about your gender and whether you feel at home in your own male/female body. IF you don’t feel comfortable, maybe you are not meant to be a boy/girl. So maybe you should starting looking at why you aren’t a girl and how you can become one. For boys, if your best friends are only other boys, then maybe you are gay and you should embrace that. The biggest difficulty is that this is being done without parents knowing. They are told that this is a matter of privacy which is not parents’ business and then parents often begin to discover what is going on when a lot of damage has already been done. The news is full of articles about these cases right now. You may well have read some of them.
Here is one example which I read this week. On Jan 24th, in Clay County, Florida, a lawsuit was filed against a school where a 12 year old girl had attempted suicide, twice in two days. Only after the second attempt were the parents called into the school. When they asked what was going on, they were told that this had happened because of their daughter’s gender identity crisis. For months the child had been having private meetings with the school counsellor about her gender identity crisis, which she had never had up to that point. The counsellor and staff had gone so far as to give the girl a boys name and refer to her publicly by this name. This had led to a lot of bullying and the child had become so distressed she ended up trying to take her own life. All of this was done without the parents knowledge, because they believed the parents would not be in agreement on account of their Christian beliefs.
If an adult decides that they want to change their sexual identity, that is their own business. But to be suggesting this to children and encouraging them, is evil, because they are at a very impressionable age. Does it bring peace and joy to the child? No. For the most part it causes great anxiety and distress. It is evil. If something is good and of God, it will bring peace and joy. This is the exact opposite.
The Child and Parental Rights Campaign, which is a non-profit law firm set up to defend parents’ rights to shield their children from the impact of gender identity ideology, say that they are being completely overwhelmed with phone calls for help, from parents all over the country.
The reason I wanted to talk about this is because all of you parents who have teen and pre-adolescent children, need to be aware that this is going on and it will be done without your knowledge, so talk to your children and make sure that if this does come up, they talk to you about it.
God’s creation has an order to it and that order works. One of the first things it shows in the creation account in Genesis, is that the Spirit put order on the chaos that was there. God created man and woman in his image. Male and female He created them. God knew what He was doing and as long as we continue to listen to God’s word and live by the order that He shows us, we will have the right foundation to get through all the craziness that is going on around us. But we must stand by our beliefs. The teachings of Scripture either come from God or they don’t. If they are from God, then we need to listen. If they are not from God then why are we here?
The foundations of our faith are under attack at the moment. We shouldn’t be afraid of that, because the Lord always helps those who try and be faithful to him, but we must be faithful to him and not give in to teachings which go directly against the word of God.
‘Blessed is the one whose hope is in the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters... In the year of drought it shows no distress.’
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