Adolescence is evidence that God has a sense of humour.
At the very time in life that people go through the greatest amount of physical, emotional, social and spiritual change, they also have the least regard for the consequences of their actions.
This fact has been reiterated with the impact of so-called 'sexting', where a person takes a sexually-explicit digital photograph of him or herself, and sends it as an MMS via their mobile phone.
As reported in Sunday's Sun Herald, this collision of technology and adolescence is serious, not only for the present, but especially for the future.
In the significantly lower-tech world in which I endured adolescence, the only equivalent action would have involved the mediation of a technician at a photo lab. Even a one-hour 'instant' photo lab would have given any amateur porn-star enough time to repent of their actions.
However, today everything happens faster. A quick click on a mobile camera phone of private parts can be sent to anyone around the world immediately. Even worse, this image can then be forwarded to another person, or group of people, and easily loaded onto the Internet.
In response to this growing problem, Community Services Minister Linda Burney is going to begin a campaign warning parents of the harm of this practice, and alert them to the future consequences.
As quoted in the Sun Herald, the minister said that: “These pictures… become part of a young person’s ‘digital footprint’, lasting forever and potentially damaging future career prospects or relationships…”
Like the threat of sexually transmitted diseases, our government rightly steps in when the consequences of an action have proven to cause harm to an individual or to others. But as we would expect of a secular institution, such ethical statements are based on adverse consequences, not from an appeal to any absolute standard.
We should certainly warn the youth in our churches against the impact of texting upon their present and future reputation. We should lovingly rebuke them when we see that they have uploaded sexually unhelpful images on their social networking profiles or blogs.
But the more important thing we must do to the young people in our care is to promote the joy of sex in the security and privacy of a married relationship. The consequences of warning them against spoiling their future marriage through premarital sexual encounters must come from our passion to help them experience the goodness of what God has created for humans to enjoy.
Lest we fall into the trap of simply copying the consequentialist ethic of our secular world, we should also keep telling our youth (and ourselves) that God expects us to flee from sin in every area of our life.
Even our duty to obey our heavenly Father must be seen in the context of his love for us, and his desire to give us good gifts"”such as sex within marriage.
