By Lisa Cherry
Times are changing in America. Watch the evening news and you will see stories such as the high school track team that was disqualified from advancing to state championship after one member pointed toward heaven. What is happening? In a word.....persecution.
All be it, the persecution or pressure we are experiencing does not in any way match the level of pressure faced by our brothers and sisters around the globe, but nevertheless it is very real.
It is no longer considered politically correct or lovingly polite to stand on traditional Christian values. And our children must be equipped to stand if they are to make it through the cultural flood of dissipation.
Over the last month our 17 year old daughter Hannah has experienced firsthand some persecution for her faith. What started out as a simple English class at our community college, turned into an opportunity for her to stand for Jesus.
Hannah is a very diligent student who completes her assignments with great care. Her instructor was a very thoughtful and hard-working teacher who took great care to hone the students’ writing skills. All seemed to be going well for the class until the teacher made her final assignment of an eight page persuasive research paper.
The teacher asked her students to pick from a narrow list of banned or censored writing works and argue whether the online or print works should be censored in their respective domains. Most of the teacher's topics had something to do with the issue of homosexuality. And after careful consideration, Hannah chose the bookcalled King and King, a book for 5-8 year olds which was on a banned list from many schools in America.
Knowing she would need to argue against a book depicting two homosexual princes kissing and marrying, Hannah was nervous from the start of the assignment. "Mom, what if my teacher does not like my Christian view?" she asked me.
I assured her that a clear, well-documented paper was what the teacher seemed to be asking for. I urged her to walk in confidence as I figured (wrongly) that the teacher was expecting papers on both sides of these controversial issues.
Thus began a very trying month for my high school junior.
As Hannah completed the early phases of the research, I became increasingly alarmed by the comments coming back on the teacher's notes. It became evident that her teacher was no longer just commenting on sentence structure and research citation. She clearly was out to change Hannah's reasoning points...by a non-disguised form of criticism and intimidation.
How would my strongly opinionated, faith-filled, high achieving daughter handle the fact that her grade for her first semester of college level work was on the line? That will be the subject of this series of posts. For what I witnessed coming toward my daughter was truly astounding. No wonder we are losing so many of our kids!!
Are you and your children ready to handle the increasing wave of pressure heading our way? Tune in over the next week as I share Hannah's story and how we as parents helped her through this challenging experience!
