When you face difficult gender problems, you need to know where to find help. You need helpers who can stand against the cultural tides. You need helpers you can trust to guide you from their experience in helping others on the real-life scenarios that people don’t want to talk about. One of those places to get help is a click away, in the AffirmingGender tab above, labeled “Help!” Another place with all the above is found in the great folks of Pennsylvania-based Harvest USA, a trustworthy ministry that has been around for over thirty years.
The most recent issue of their magazine, entitled, “Giving Parents and Families a Voice on Sexuality,” gives a sampling of crucial help. In articles entitled, Your Child Says “I’m Gay,” and Necessary Conversations About Sexuality and 4 Key Strategies for Parenting Children in Using Technology, they give sound and needed counsel on facing some difficult sexual/gender problems. All this in a slim booklet or as a pdf that they let you download!
The articles contain nothing flashy, but convey the kind of practical answers that reveal how the authors have been helping many people through their counseling ministry in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Their advice is just what is often needed in those situations, like when you find proof of your son using pornography and first ask him about it and he denies it. Then what?
Which brings us to how Harvest broaches topics that are left undiscussed in so many churches. Topics undiscussed is a principal reason why many youth eventually wander away from their churches. You can tell Harvest’s courage by browsing the article titles in previous issues of their magazines. Very real stuff. For example, the issue cited above contains a testimonial, A Father’s Story-My Child Hooked on Porn. Another previous issue has My ‘Mixed Orientation’ Marriage. Do you see how Harvest in interested in equipping people where they desperately need it? The discussion of masturbation and pornography, is so needed in the church (which is why the apologetics speaker, Josh McDowell, has gone on a crusade about it).
I especially like what Harvest is doing because as parents we sometimes go missing in action. We may feel helpless in face of these problems. Or we buy into the idea that just putting bread on the table fulfills our responsibility to our kids. Don’t get me wrong. Putting bread on the table is a big deal. Sometimes it is difficult enough just by itself. But that is not where parenting ends. It is only the beginning. Harvest understands that and is helping.
|It is good to be able to praise an effort these days in the area of gender problems. Harvest lends a very needed shoulder to this plow.
Are there other places you have found help?