This is so so important. These young adults are suffering a very real collective trauma, and I dont say that lightly.
It is not getting spoken about, and the consequences are dire.
The people in charge are leveraging the fear, pain, tragedy, hostility, division - to keep them "engaged" for just one...more...minute.
Thier attention is the commodity. So they can sell them.
While their souls suffer unspeakably.
Thats why the Lord gave me Battle Field Guide. I am with you in this fight, brother. I will pray for you & your ministry, please pray for me.
My substack, by the same name, is currently just where I think things out in the margins of my life. But, the book is happening now. I am trying to finish it by end of June to get it edited.
The Lord called me to write to Gen Z's. To tell them what is theirs in Christ. To give them a map and a guide. To tell them that they have armor available, God's own armor.
Praise God for your work. I will try to support it when I can!! You have my prayers for now.
Self inflicted collective trauma. Now I've heard it all! I carry 2 DNA strains of collective trauma on my dad's side. The Famine in Ireland on top of everything else and the Trail of Tears on top of everything else. It gets in your DNA and you pass it to your descendants. Random fits of grief are the price you pay for the thousands of years of racial memory that it triggers. But the Brits did it to the Irish and the US did it to the Cherokee but I've never heard of people doing it to themselves!
I genuinely believe this is why we must work to teach young Christians the Sermon on the Mount. The way Jesus shows us to treat other people as image bearers of God, made in His image, is so different from what the world teaches.
Every nation has been built on the bones of people from other nations. The Kingdom of God is the only truly different nation in the world, one that spreads not with bloodshed or the sword but with love and the Word of God.
I resonated with this strongly as a preacher. I feel pressured all the time to talk about the latest news event and always find people upset when I instead focus on teaching what the Bible is saying, rather than using the pulpit for a soap box commentary on current affairs. Thank you for sharing this encouraging piece.
It's always so bizarre to me when people want their pastors to be dispensers of political commentary rather than dispensers of biblical truth and spiritual formation!
Don't we already have enough podcasters, YouTubers, and talk radio hosts?
Don't we have enough pundits on the news?
The local church should be a place that is above and beyond these things, where we are taught to view what is going on in the culture not through the lens of the left or the right, but through the lens of the kingdom that is above.
I completely agree. I used to send out an annual anonymous evaluation survey to my staff and key volunteers to help me see some blind spots and areas for growth for the next year. I stopped doing this when one year I got more than one response that asked me in my preaching to step away from the Bible and get on a soap box to share my thoughts on some current political issues. It was so depressing to read. But I have seen fruit more in staying the course and since then a greater hunger in the church to get in the Bible and discover what it is actually saying. I don’t believe that desire would have awoken in my context if I had started doing what was wanted of me.
One thing that was absolutely shocking for me to see over the past several years between COVID and several of the other things that have happened is how much people want their pastors to affirm their biases on a Sunday morning.
Like... it's been absolutely blatant.
I saw so many posts from both people on the left and right who are saying if your pastor is not addressing xyz you need to find a new church.
And again it's like do we not have enough pundits on YouTube and TV and radio?
Why must we require our pastor to tell us what we want to hear?
I would much rather have a pastor that challenges me to think about a situation differently than somebody that just affirms what I already believe.
I'll tell you you a story about my trip to Ireland. I had 2 chapbooks my US publisher had put out and I was showing them around and I was up North for a week or so. I was invited to read for a wee evangelical fellowship in the heart of Protestant Belfast and I signed up for music open mic in a pub in the heart of Catholic Derry. Both loved it.
Man, I miss Ireland. We had the opportunity around 2018 to travel through the whole country. We started at the bottom and worked our way up to Northern Ireland, hitting a lot of cool towns: Cork, Galway, Waterford, Belfast, and many more. Oh, and of course Dublin. What a gift. I hope I get to return!
Very well written! I echo your sentiments completely. I tell my Gen Z son the same thing constantly. When I was growing up, there was no social media. We didn't get bombarded with terrible news constantly. We were outside playing sports, games, reading books, and we went exploring outdoors, etc. Social media began to take a toll on my mental health the last few years so I got rid of most of it. My mental state improved and I devoted more time to reading scripture and prayer. God never meant for us to live depressed, sad, and anxious. Thank you for this Aaron! 💙🙏
Thank you, Tiffany! I agree. When I was growing up, I didn't know what was going on in the news. I didn't know what was going on with the politicians. I didn't know how bad things were. I actually got to enjoy my childhood and my early teenage years.
Back in the day, people were largely focused on what was going on in their own town and in their own country. All you had was the newspaper and the radio.
These days, a teenager can literally open up their phone and be bombarded with every single horrible injustice, war, genocide, murder. It is just blasted in their face constantly. Not only that, on top of it, you have everyone rushing to make memes and jokes about all these horrible things that are going on.
Think about the cognitive whiplash going on there, being faced with horrors and then faced with a group of your peers that are basically profiting off of making a mockery out of it. It is just too much for young people to bear, I believe!
And the news was terrible! Vietnam. Race riots. Antiwar protests. The Cold War. And yet I had an idyllic childhood by doing what you were saying and my teens were filled with rock concerts. The music was our voice in the middle of all that madness.
YES!! If I may ask, who were your favorite musicians from that time? I'm a weird duck. I'm 38, but when I was in high school, I was obsessed with 60s music: The Beatles, The Who, The Zombies, The Kinks, Etc :)
This is why your work is so important Aaron. Now you can post or not post. You don't have to issue a statement because you're not some spokesman. Silence can mean steadiness. Boy I was attacked by some liberal because I got disgusted with the Dems and said so. 30 years of voting faithfully for change with nothing to show for it but major mental illness and malnutrition. And yet they still hound me for donations and and volunteer work as a foot soldier when every day I meet people who count the months and years. If the dems had been representing them then Kamala Harris would be president, but they didn't think voting was worth losing hours for. So I'll never lift a finger to help the party instead. But look at my own FB page Aaron. It's fit to show your class. I post my artwork and good pics I took. I'm about to jump off and finish waking up I'll start my day. That's when the phone goes in my pocket and only comes out when I see a good pic. It's not about following and influencing. It's about showing the beauty of things. It creates a good emotional effect which is badly needed. It transcends political, religious, racial, and national divisions. There are those in India who think highly of my poetry indeed! I have a nice collection on my Substack page ed lyons poetry. It's all a positive alternative.
Thank you for affirming my work, Ed! Also... The fact that people in India are moved by your poetry is proof that genuine expression impacts in ways that outrage never really can! :)
Outrage eats at the outraged. Aiding the victims feeds the soul with good substance. Bobby Sands said the laughter of our children will be our revenge. There's a wall mural in Derry. I find a lot of value in retreat. All I can do about the world is let it drive me crazy. I want to engage society from the bottom but I won't organize so much as a weekly Bible group since they all work different hours. I'm almost ready to put my native American books away. It was good to read the words of the medicine men and women and I'm a better Christian for it. I've made a place for my visionary capacity and all my pretty crystals are calmed into a harnonic resonance field or whatever it is they do which fills my room with something that has a healthy effect on me and those stones know what they're doing and I've decided not to try to understand. I'm not Etowah Band, I'm just Wolf Clan. My ancestors weren't initiated into the priesthood. They knew about it and knew I have a knack with all kinds of stones and have a lick of sense when handling crystals. So I worked diligently in tough ceremony and arduous testing all for the sake of getting the crystals settled in comfortably so they can be a balm. I'm a better Christian for this. Concentrating on Matthew nice and sharp.
I like that old time rock and roll too. I spent the 90s chasing after local bands and I met some good people through it. In the 70s I followed a lot of current bands, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are faves.
This is so so important. These young adults are suffering a very real collective trauma, and I dont say that lightly.
It is not getting spoken about, and the consequences are dire.
The people in charge are leveraging the fear, pain, tragedy, hostility, division - to keep them "engaged" for just one...more...minute.
Thier attention is the commodity. So they can sell them.
While their souls suffer unspeakably.
Thats why the Lord gave me Battle Field Guide. I am with you in this fight, brother. I will pray for you & your ministry, please pray for me.
My substack, by the same name, is currently just where I think things out in the margins of my life. But, the book is happening now. I am trying to finish it by end of June to get it edited.
The Lord called me to write to Gen Z's. To tell them what is theirs in Christ. To give them a map and a guide. To tell them that they have armor available, God's own armor.
Praise God for your work. I will try to support it when I can!! You have my prayers for now.
Yes!! Collective trauma is absolutely a good way to put it!
The corruption we see, people leveraging the pain of others for engagement and enragement, has long frustrated me to no end...
I will absolutely pray for your ministry, my friend. I will pray that God blesses the work you're doing.
We are running in the same lane here, and we have the same group of people on our heart!
Thank you for your prayers! I will covet them. I love that we’re sharing this part of God’s heart. Let’s go get ‘em and bring them home!!
Thank you brother. Work as meaningful blundering.
Self inflicted collective trauma. Now I've heard it all! I carry 2 DNA strains of collective trauma on my dad's side. The Famine in Ireland on top of everything else and the Trail of Tears on top of everything else. It gets in your DNA and you pass it to your descendants. Random fits of grief are the price you pay for the thousands of years of racial memory that it triggers. But the Brits did it to the Irish and the US did it to the Cherokee but I've never heard of people doing it to themselves!
I genuinely believe this is why we must work to teach young Christians the Sermon on the Mount. The way Jesus shows us to treat other people as image bearers of God, made in His image, is so different from what the world teaches.
Every nation has been built on the bones of people from other nations. The Kingdom of God is the only truly different nation in the world, one that spreads not with bloodshed or the sword but with love and the Word of God.
I think this is truly the right thing. Sermon on the Mount leads to many passages if you follow intuition.
Do it!
Thank you. This spoke to me deeply🙏💙
I'm happy it helped!
A wise reminder for folks in every generation. We have all been pushed into this realm of instant attention demands.
I resonated with this strongly as a preacher. I feel pressured all the time to talk about the latest news event and always find people upset when I instead focus on teaching what the Bible is saying, rather than using the pulpit for a soap box commentary on current affairs. Thank you for sharing this encouraging piece.
It's always so bizarre to me when people want their pastors to be dispensers of political commentary rather than dispensers of biblical truth and spiritual formation!
Don't we already have enough podcasters, YouTubers, and talk radio hosts?
Don't we have enough pundits on the news?
The local church should be a place that is above and beyond these things, where we are taught to view what is going on in the culture not through the lens of the left or the right, but through the lens of the kingdom that is above.
I completely agree. I used to send out an annual anonymous evaluation survey to my staff and key volunteers to help me see some blind spots and areas for growth for the next year. I stopped doing this when one year I got more than one response that asked me in my preaching to step away from the Bible and get on a soap box to share my thoughts on some current political issues. It was so depressing to read. But I have seen fruit more in staying the course and since then a greater hunger in the church to get in the Bible and discover what it is actually saying. I don’t believe that desire would have awoken in my context if I had started doing what was wanted of me.
One thing that was absolutely shocking for me to see over the past several years between COVID and several of the other things that have happened is how much people want their pastors to affirm their biases on a Sunday morning.
Like... it's been absolutely blatant.
I saw so many posts from both people on the left and right who are saying if your pastor is not addressing xyz you need to find a new church.
And again it's like do we not have enough pundits on YouTube and TV and radio?
Why must we require our pastor to tell us what we want to hear?
I would much rather have a pastor that challenges me to think about a situation differently than somebody that just affirms what I already believe.
I'll tell you you a story about my trip to Ireland. I had 2 chapbooks my US publisher had put out and I was showing them around and I was up North for a week or so. I was invited to read for a wee evangelical fellowship in the heart of Protestant Belfast and I signed up for music open mic in a pub in the heart of Catholic Derry. Both loved it.
Man, I miss Ireland. We had the opportunity around 2018 to travel through the whole country. We started at the bottom and worked our way up to Northern Ireland, hitting a lot of cool towns: Cork, Galway, Waterford, Belfast, and many more. Oh, and of course Dublin. What a gift. I hope I get to return!
Your life sounds very adventurous, Ed.
Great post. Please keep talking about this, I am doing the same. God Bless!
Very well written! I echo your sentiments completely. I tell my Gen Z son the same thing constantly. When I was growing up, there was no social media. We didn't get bombarded with terrible news constantly. We were outside playing sports, games, reading books, and we went exploring outdoors, etc. Social media began to take a toll on my mental health the last few years so I got rid of most of it. My mental state improved and I devoted more time to reading scripture and prayer. God never meant for us to live depressed, sad, and anxious. Thank you for this Aaron! 💙🙏
Thank you, Tiffany! I agree. When I was growing up, I didn't know what was going on in the news. I didn't know what was going on with the politicians. I didn't know how bad things were. I actually got to enjoy my childhood and my early teenage years.
Back in the day, people were largely focused on what was going on in their own town and in their own country. All you had was the newspaper and the radio.
These days, a teenager can literally open up their phone and be bombarded with every single horrible injustice, war, genocide, murder. It is just blasted in their face constantly. Not only that, on top of it, you have everyone rushing to make memes and jokes about all these horrible things that are going on.
Think about the cognitive whiplash going on there, being faced with horrors and then faced with a group of your peers that are basically profiting off of making a mockery out of it. It is just too much for young people to bear, I believe!
And the news was terrible! Vietnam. Race riots. Antiwar protests. The Cold War. And yet I had an idyllic childhood by doing what you were saying and my teens were filled with rock concerts. The music was our voice in the middle of all that madness.
YES!! If I may ask, who were your favorite musicians from that time? I'm a weird duck. I'm 38, but when I was in high school, I was obsessed with 60s music: The Beatles, The Who, The Zombies, The Kinks, Etc :)
This is why your work is so important Aaron. Now you can post or not post. You don't have to issue a statement because you're not some spokesman. Silence can mean steadiness. Boy I was attacked by some liberal because I got disgusted with the Dems and said so. 30 years of voting faithfully for change with nothing to show for it but major mental illness and malnutrition. And yet they still hound me for donations and and volunteer work as a foot soldier when every day I meet people who count the months and years. If the dems had been representing them then Kamala Harris would be president, but they didn't think voting was worth losing hours for. So I'll never lift a finger to help the party instead. But look at my own FB page Aaron. It's fit to show your class. I post my artwork and good pics I took. I'm about to jump off and finish waking up I'll start my day. That's when the phone goes in my pocket and only comes out when I see a good pic. It's not about following and influencing. It's about showing the beauty of things. It creates a good emotional effect which is badly needed. It transcends political, religious, racial, and national divisions. There are those in India who think highly of my poetry indeed! I have a nice collection on my Substack page ed lyons poetry. It's all a positive alternative.
Thank you for affirming my work, Ed! Also... The fact that people in India are moved by your poetry is proof that genuine expression impacts in ways that outrage never really can! :)
Outrage eats at the outraged. Aiding the victims feeds the soul with good substance. Bobby Sands said the laughter of our children will be our revenge. There's a wall mural in Derry. I find a lot of value in retreat. All I can do about the world is let it drive me crazy. I want to engage society from the bottom but I won't organize so much as a weekly Bible group since they all work different hours. I'm almost ready to put my native American books away. It was good to read the words of the medicine men and women and I'm a better Christian for it. I've made a place for my visionary capacity and all my pretty crystals are calmed into a harnonic resonance field or whatever it is they do which fills my room with something that has a healthy effect on me and those stones know what they're doing and I've decided not to try to understand. I'm not Etowah Band, I'm just Wolf Clan. My ancestors weren't initiated into the priesthood. They knew about it and knew I have a knack with all kinds of stones and have a lick of sense when handling crystals. So I worked diligently in tough ceremony and arduous testing all for the sake of getting the crystals settled in comfortably so they can be a balm. I'm a better Christian for this. Concentrating on Matthew nice and sharp.
I like that old time rock and roll too. I spent the 90s chasing after local bands and I met some good people through it. In the 70s I followed a lot of current bands, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are faves.