Cutting

I am a boy, so how do I know? Thats the problem, isn’t it? This weekend, I came face to face with a lovely young girl. She has great Christian parents; parents who try hard to find a solution to her pain. Parents have tried everything to alleviate the pain.

I came face to face with the ‘pain’ I saw the pain (manifested in scars on her arms), I sensed the pain, read it in her eyes, and yet I struggled to understand the pain. If I could only understand the pain, perhaps I could ‘reason’ it away?  Thing is, this is what we all think. If I could understand the pain...well, bottom line is thats not true. You can never understand the pain, and even if you did, the pain cannot be reasoned away. What is the solution? I want to say :”Love, acceptance and more love”. I fear those words have been used both as weapons and cover ups for so long, that most girls are beyond mere words. I suspect what these gils need is some real action.

Problem is, I am probably the least equipped male on the planet to deal with this issue. I do not know what the solution is, but I am keenly aware that this is a growing problem amongst our youth. Maybe we need more real youth ministers? Honestly, I don’t know if thats the solution either. Why are so many christian girls happy, well rounded and others in a mess? Sometimes the same girls co-exist in one church. You have the cutters, and the content girls in the same youth program. Figure that one out!

For me, this indicates that the real problem is way bigger than a youth ministry program. It suggests that the problem is multi faceted. Homeschoolers have the problem as do girls in normal schools. S, our education system is not to blame. Fair enough, home schoolers are generally more confident, more socially adept, more mature, but still home schoolers are not immune to this phenomenon. It could be generational curses, but then we blame generational curses on everything we can’t get a handle on.

I really do not know the cause (besides the obvious fact that it is pain based, but why cut yourself? In my youth, we did drugs, vandalism, partied and got smashed.) There is something angry in our youth. Our youth are angrier than any previous generation that I have encountered. Their expression is more apt to violence even if it is self inflicted violence. I just know that some body somewhere will blame this on the violent video games...but thats too easy. No, cutting is serious. There is no quick fix (that I am aware of). We do need to discover the root of this illness and treat it before we loose a generation of young girls.