www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall HELP! IN OUR SCHOOLS!

I volunteered at my son's elementary school for five years and as a crossing guard for three years. I prepared my son for what he may encounter upon entering middle school. I was right on the nose on about 90% of the topics, however, his friends often talk to me about their hopes, dreams, problems, and at times ask my opinion on how they should approach their parents about a trip, date, etc. One that has come to my attention and I feel many reading this can help, I will not use thier real names, Angie asked me one day if she is "fat", I admit I was taken by surprise as Angie is Captain of the Cheerleading team and a great student and wonderful teenage girl. I asked why she wanted to know and was asking? It was related to me by Angie that Tommy, a boy that's really cute and she likes told Angie she "has to lose 8-12 pounds before she can go out with him." I told Angie to talk to her mom and my opinion is nobody should tell her she needs to lose weight let alone another 13 year old boy. I realize with today's TV, (I had cable disconnected due to wrestling and the so called reality TV shows) and also fashion models being paper thin gives our or least some of our young people the idea they need to lose weight. And what I find most difficult is teenage boys with the "arroagance" that they can tell a girl to lose weight. So I have heard this same thing at our other local middle school and this seems to be a growing trend! Open to suggestions on how to prevent this as I wouldn't want to find out girls my son knows are Bulimic or Anorexic. I find it heartbreaking, so can the church help in anyway?

Seraphim, this is indeed a problem. I heard that girls in the elementary schools here who were skinny as rails, were 'on diets'.

Then again, there is an alarming and growing crisis of obesity in children across the nation too. This has recently been the topic of many news articles and shows.

What we are seeing is the polarization of a nation in everything, from politics, to religion, to faith, to morals, and even: to weight!

I think that healthy eating in the home AND schools is important for BOTH of these extremes to be neutralized. Food in all its forms, natural and junk, is almost TOO abundant in this nation. It is almost sinful, and the results of this 'sin' are the two extreme weight problems we are hearing about.

I don't know that there is any solid answer for the problems you mentioned in our youth, as it surely goes hand in hand with the statistically VERY young ages they are engaging in all types of sexual activity, and the overall obsession with sex that they are exposed to just about everywhere in our culture.

All we really can do is pray!

In Christ,
Alice

Alice, you are an angel! This is going on in the elementary schools also! Four years ago, I was 11 pounds shy of weighing 500 pounds, I was having heart palpatations, I have Obstructive Sleep Apnea-now I have to use a C-PAP machine after a Sleep Study revealed I stopped breathing for almost two minutes. Sleep Apnea is horribe I am glad to be here to tell everyone. Sometimes during sleep I will knock or remove the mask and if the sound of rushing air through the nose pillows doesn't wake me up-my two cats: Tigger and Pepper will wake me up. Pepper jumps on me as you would see "Garfield" doing to "John," Tigger-the 15 year old queen in the home her has actually put her paw in my mouth so I wake up choking (I haven't decided if she's helping or trying to do me in LOL!) I'm Obese, partly due to my disability and also due to my depression as well as not having the will power to stop eating. As my son got older and the fact I weighed in at almost 500 lbs. I realized I might not be here to see him grow up, go to college, marry, see my grandkids (I'm an ex-Marine and we are always planning!) so I decided I had to "eat to live" not "live to eat" now today, I weigh in at 340 pounds and I didn't have the stomach surgery where they staple your stomach so you can consume less. I did it myself and I'm still working at at. Through a friend went to www.bodylastics.com [bodylastics.com] and purchased their rubber band exercise bag, you can take this anywhere and it is well worth the money.

Dear Scott,

May God bless and give you strength to continue your weight loss efforts. You have made incredible progress! I KNOW that you will be able to continue, and that as the weight drops, you will also find much better health!

In Christ, our strength against all our temptations and weaknesses in a stressful world,
Alice

P.S. God has blessed you with two little angels to watch over your sleep, in the form of his creations, the animals we love!

Seraphim,
Telling that girl to talk to her mom was a great idea...she might want to talk to her counselor at school as well. I can't believe the ages this stuff is starting at these days. I began to develop an eating disorder in late teens/early twenties because of some guy that I thought I was soooooo in love with, who thought I needed to be thinner. As my family and friends were warning me that I was getting too thin, he was encouraging me every time I said I had a few more pounds to go. If the jerk hadn't dumped me and if my saint of a husband hadn't come along , I probably would have developed full blown anorexia.

Vie

Hi Ladyhawke1017, I welcome your reply to my plea! As well to know you are in NC, I am in Eureka, CA, but I was born and raised in Hickory, NC. Small world and glad to know the folks in NC are on this Forum! You made my Monday alot brighter!

hummm...

As a kid i used to watch about 8 hours a day (+) TV. Lucky my that half of that time was on "Super Book" and the "Flying house" (stories from the Bible). the other half was JUNK.

Today, when i am about to start my life, i ask myself, how much time will my children invest time on Bible or Bible related items? Will TV or the PC (today i spend 10 hours daily on a PC, gaming and internet and work combined) take most of their time?

i doubt we can control this - however what we can control is what our children watch, what they think and what will they spend time.

I turned to be a very strict man and a very jelous one - whether that is good or not i know not - but i know this: the TV and PC content will be christian for my children - even if i will have to sit and write a pc game or search on e-bay for old DVD's of the "super book" ...

They said all the prepartion in the world would not have prevented the incident that happened in Minnisota yesterday, in a high shool with guards, and on an Indian Reservation.

But they are saying that parents have to take responcibility. I thought wow, everyone is so worried about political correctness they are afraid to discipline there children. The government seems to have made people temid, also they have come to the conculsion they are just their kids friends, and oh it is ok, they can make their own choices. WRONG!

Then this young man ask a child if he believes in God and shoots him when he says yes. He saw himself as a dark angel protecting the world from Christians. Had he gotten involved with the wrong video games, run with the wrong crowd, or the occult? That he killed his grandfather, one life wasted is one too many. Interesting he wore a long black coat all the time, what does that remind you of.

Oh well the only true answer we have is to bring Christ back into the schools, into the heart of man, and into this nation.

GOD HAVE MERCY ON US ALL!
Pani Rose

Amen and Amen

Christ back to schools NOW!

YET,
even Christ here is under fire - when you say Christ, do you mean the Christ that taught about money or about souls.
I was shocked by the teaching of a preacher who took the following part of the Bible: (Luke 19:11-27) the one with the nobelman giving the pounds ...
and said that what Jesus meant by that is that if you INVEST in your Church CHRIST with GIVE THE INVESTMENT BACK DOUBLED TEN TIMES - well i thought that this preacher was calling his people to invest in love and faith - but it seems that i was wrong - he started giving examples of people who INVESTED 10$ in church and GOD gave it back 100$ (salary raise etc.) and those who invested MORE got MORE ... Hear Hear - God is a capitalist. this was a WELL KNOWN preacher in America, this program was a part of the "700 club" ...
Holy Lord, God have mercy, I do not want my child to even think or make any connection bitween the God of Light and Life and money.

YES I WANT CHRIST IN SCHOOLS - the loving Christ who shed his blood on the cross for my sins.
YES I WANT GOD IN SCHOOLS - the God who loved me and the whole world so much that He gave his only son so i may live.
the last thing i need is a capitalist god of money who gives me back the money i invest in church or the good deeds i do in money ...

our children must be raised on our heritage that sees CHRIST as the Head and the Church as the body (compared with God the banker and Church the client in the protestant church)

God, help us see your light,
hold our hands as we walk in your way,

Eli

Dear Eli,

In America until the 60's and 70's the first thing they did in school in the morning was say the Our Father, read a Bible verse, then say the Pledge of Allegence. When prayer was taken out of our public schools things started going haywire. They have removed there being any nativity scenes at Christmas, teachers can't mention Christ. You may have noticed in Califoria a teacher got it trouble for teaching what the Declaration of Independence said simply because he told them our founding fathers believed in God.

So we traded God in our schools for police officers, metal detectors, and drug sniffing dogs. A young girl was handcuffed and taken out of the school because she brought a pair of sissors to school. Some school systems are much better than others. However, things are not right and until they put God back in school, things are not going to get right.

Pani Rose

Dear Pani Rose,

I agree with all that you have said. It has become much too easy for our young people to flirt with Satan these days.

Who said that demonic possession isn't alive and well? I will repeat what my priest once said: the biggest joy the evil one has is when we deny his existence.

Do y'all remember the Son of Sam? I lived in NYC at the time and was of the age he was seeking out, so I remember how fearful I was. Then, the friend of an acquaintance got shot by him. Well-although he has become a born again Christian in prison, Mr. Berkowitz attended Satanic Masses in a park right here in the county where I now reside. He heard the evil one speak to him and tell him to kill, through a black dog.

Lord have mercy on us, and save us!

In the most powerful name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
Alice

You might want to remember, as I do, that those Bible-reading, Our Father-praying, schools were little more than state supported Protestant schools in the 1950s and 60s. There was little in them that was favorable to Catholicism or Orthodoxy in this part of the country. Some of the teachers actively tried to convert kids to their churches. Now granted, things have gone to the other extreme where religion is not mentioned at all. But that rosy past was only rosy if you belonged to the right religion. Otherwise, your beliefs were not respected at all.

Excuse me for my ignorance - last time I checked Americans still fed the world with "we have freedom - we are the free world" etc.

Why can't private schools teach nor have Christ in their classrooms?
Doesn't the Catholic\Orthodox Church have private schools of their own? We raise money to build churches - we may as well raise money to build schools, can't we?

Here, in this country where I live, they took our land, blew up our Churches and we are cast out many times coz we live our Christianity proudly.
However, they can take our homes, they can take our lands and they may as well take our Churches and make it a military bases (as they did to many), but one thing they cannot and will never be able to do, they will never be able to take Christ out of our private Christian schools.

I was raised in an Anglican Church (as weird as this may sound), we had 60% Muslims in my school (this was a primary school till the 8th grade), as well as many Muslim teachers. Still we entered Church every morning for 15 minutes and sang hymns, said "Our Father" and then went to classes; even the Muslims went to Church. That who did not wish to live the Christian life was welcomed to leave school because education was based on Christ and it all started in Church.


If Christians in a non democratic country could do it,
If "cast out" Christians could do it,
If voiceless Christians could sound their rights,
WHY can't Americans, living in a democratic country, respected for who they are and have a voice that is worthy a senator or two, do it?


Please do excuse my over-enthusiasm,
I am sorry if I sound rude,
it is only because I am hurt by what I read ... what is a man without Christ? I am only a Christian who is hurt when his brother Christian is hurt.
We share the same blood, we are the same body � when will we really see it. When was the last time we felt the pain of others because we simply share the same body? Is that not what Christ is all about? Love?

Lord fill me with Your compassion so I may serve you well,
Eli

Forgive me Eli,

I have to run now, but I wanted to clairify my statement.

Our shools that are Catholic/Orthodox or Protestant are free to teach religion, and also the home schools. I didn't claify my statment to mean the public schools.

Like ByzanTN said the school system, which I was a part of and also Protestant (I didn't come into the Ruthenain Church until I was 30) order was there and it was kept because of God in the schools.

Got to go be back later.
Pani Rose