Listen to the interview
Frank, I love your show and listen to it all the time. Finally you had a topic that I could address in a meaningful way. It was great talking to you today on the air. Thanks for doing this program on promiscuity, and sexually transmitted diseases linked to the release of the new movie coming out “Friends with Benefits.” It is such a critically important topic. The schools will never address this subject in an effective way so I think it is essential that the churches do. Even my own church is very supportive of me taking mission trips to Africa to address the HIV/AIDS problem but so far have been reluctant to do something like this with our own teenagers.
I went back and listened to the pod cast and I was speaking so fast because I had so much to share and I knew I only had five or six minutes to get my message out. I would so love to have a more in-depth conversation with you about this topic and in particular about the Campus Crusade material (Better Choices) that we use in our training. It is amazing as I listened to your callers giving advice as to what they would say to a teenager to dissuade them from becoming sexually active at a young age and it sounded like some of them were reading from our training manual. This is such an awesome program and it hits all the points that your callers were talking about:
- What are your dreams? What can prevent you from reaching your dreams? Well, AIDS duh! What is HIV, what is AIDS? How do you get it? How do you prevent getting it?
- How do you deal with it if you get it? How do you deal with others that have it without making them feel like a leper?
- Why should I honor God and honor the body he gave me? Because I am “wonderfully made,” I am “amazingly and uniquely made,” I am created in God’s image. He knew me while he was knitting me together in my mother’s womb. He has a perfect plan for me. Anything that is unique and one-of-a-kind is always more valuable than anything mass-produced.
- How do I make life’s tough choices? You learn to love Jesus more than yourself, more than your own life and He will help you make the right choices.
- We are not animals that act on impulse. We are human beings that have critical thinking capability and can weigh the consequences of our actions.
- Life is not an event, it is a series of choices and each choice has its consequences.
- We show the Jesus film and give them the opportunity to start to follow Jesus. We also challenge them to make a commitment to abstain from sex until marriage.
To date we have had more than fifteen thousand student go through our program and on average 30% claim to already be Christians, 50% make new commitments to follow Jesus and typically 60%-80% make a commitment to abstinence. We are leaving on our annual mission trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe in two weeks and I will be gone for from August 8 through September 3.
Please don’t forget about this topic. I think it would be a great program to ask Pastors to call in and comment on whether they are doing anything like this and if not, what is the opposition?
Frank, one last thing. We are doing a Hymn Sing Concert fundraiser concert at our church on Saturday July 30. The proceeds go towards our mission trip. If there is any way you can work in a SHOUT OUT for us on the air about this, it would be greatly appreciated. The details are on this Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=105459749550179 . We are also going to be doing a raffle of various items that have been contributed. If KKLA or Frank Pastore have any items of value to contribute to the raffle, that would be awesome.
Glynn Smith
Beacon of Hope International
