Love. We live in a world obsessed with it. From the movies, to music, to our conversations with each other, we all talk about LOVE. We all want it and need it.
A few months ago I was sitting at Night and Day Coffee with my friend Amanda drinking coffee, each on our own laptops with our own thoughts and both watching these two young teenage girls across from us and I was totally eavesdropping. The one girl looked at this piece of jewelery for sale and I heard he say, “OMG! It says LOVE, I need this!” As I watched her pine over this bracelet I could see this sadness in her face, a NEED for love.
The last few years I have seen it over and over again young teen girls (around here girls get pregnant at age 13 and many have 2 kids by their senior year in High School) looking for real LOVE and finding it in the wrong places. They look to boys for love. Last night Amanda and I were watching “Morning Glory” and Amanda commented, “Did you ever notice in the movies how these women/girls think sex is the key to love? They have sex with the hot leading man and THEN they are in love and THEN they break up later.” This is interesting…Hollywood is selling women and girls the idea that sex is love. You have sex with a man and he will “love” you. These teen girls see women in movies ALL THE TIME giving it up on the first date or within a few days of meeting the guy (Titanic, 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, 10 Things I Hate About You, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the Notebook, Knocked Up, Monster in Law, etc etc etc). It glamorizes sex and makes sex look like the KEY to finding true love. Very rarely do they show the downside of sex (Riding in Cars with Boys) such as teen pregnancy and STD’s.
When I was a Youth Leader I saw alot of girls who were being sexually active as teens that were abused in some form. They had either been raped, sexually assaulted, come from broken families with either one parents or parents who just didnt care what they did, or had no dad in their lives. So these girls would look to boys to fill the void. These girls are looking for love and will do whatever it takes to find it. I was watching a documentary on prostitution and how all these young girls in the hood (12-18 year old girls especially). These young girls talk about their lives and how they have no daddies, no one who truly loves them so when a guy (who is actually a pimp) promises to love them and take care of them they jump on it! They want to be loved, valued and protected so much. In this world love has become such a polluted word. Love has become an obsession. We see it everywhere, fake forms of love promoting pre-marital sex, finding love whether it be same gender or not, commercials encouraging girls to never be satisfied with themselves and to lose weight and do all these things THEN a guy will love them.
We hear Pop Artists singing about sex and love like it is a casual thing, no big deal. Who cares if you get pregnant??? Sex means love and that’s what matters. We see movies encouraging teen drug use, alcohol abuse and sex at age 15. We have TV shows glamorizing sex and making teen girls feel like they are missing something without it. Teenage girls want LOVE. Girls look to boys to fill a void that maybe their dad never filled. They want love. A boy tells them that having sex with him is love, of course they will do it. I know too many teen girls who have told me they regretted having sex in High School because all it has done is make them the “school whore” because they are trying to find someone who will love them when all that really happened was them feeling used and neglected and depressed and dealing with self-hatred.
What can we do to change this mindset? What can we do in a world filling young girls minds with glamorized sex and hollow “love” relationships? WE HAVE TO SHOW THEM TRUE LOVE. God has been really challenging me lately to just love people. Meet them where they are. God’s love is PURE, ATTRACTIVE, AND FULFILLING. We need to reach the world with that love.
The only fulfilling love is Gods and as Christians we should be full of it, we should be overflowing with it. We need to be lavishing Gods love on people. The world is looking for LOVE. The world needs Love. Christians have access to the most fulfilling love that the world craves. Its not about preaching a message and getting someone to say a prayer. Its about LOVING people to Christ. Showing them this love through your life and making them want it and to understand it. Love people. We get so focused on just getting people to say a prayer but if they dont have an understanding of Gods love then what good is it? DONT GET ME WRONG…Getting people saved IS extremely important but its not about shoving the Bible down their throats, its about loving them to the Kingdom. Be love, Live Love. Teen girls (and boys) need us as Christians to counteract this worldly obsession with “love” with true love, Gods love.
We have to show them. If we dont show them how will they know? We have to show these girls that they are worth more, valued more and loved by God more than any man would be able to give them.
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