Posted by George Morrison

Gender Distress              Word on the Week          26th June 2021.

We were reminiscing this week about some of the characters we have known and the peculiarities that marked them out from others.   The conversation turned to one called Peter (not his real name) who had a habit of wearing his underwear as outerwear.    He would often visit us at church especially when there was a clean-up day.  He came at other times too when we were closed and would break into the premises.  We would know it was him because he always emptied the tin of chocolate biscuits!

Apparently before he had reached teenage years he was told he was someone else.   This had a confusing effect which never left him.   The bizarre wearing of clothing was one way he attempted to deal with it.    Sadly, we seem to be in a day when there are many suffering from gender distress and feel they have been born into the wrong body.  Although one could be forgiven for thinking that the current wave of gender dysphoria is being encouraged by the media.

Having cast off from its traditional moorings the nuclear family has morphed into variegated arrangements, some looking for stability others looking for excitement.    Children, for economic reasons or else for hedonistic ones are late in arriving and may no longer be greeted with pink for a girl and blue for a boy!    Gender has become fluid!   The medics have the tools in their bag to arrange gender reassignment.    Naming the child could be more complicated.

The sexualisation of Western Society proceeds at a pace.    In a few days we are to have the ‘pride parades’ publicising the LGBTQ etc. movement with its rainbow colours.   It was interesting to hear the RTE’s ‘Morning Ireland’ commentator remonstrate with a Cabinet Minister who had failed, in her eyes, to censure the Football Association for acceding to the request not to festoon the Munich Stadium with LGBT colours.    “We have to be inclusive” she said.

Now we have talk of a conversion ban.   It seems that having turned their back on God, society does not wish to have their form of conversion upstaged by Him!    Imagine if the tax-collector Matthew responded to Christ’s call to follow him today and to celebrate his conversion he held a large party.  The wider society complained to Christ’s followers, “Why do you celebrate conversion?”   “We want to have it banned!”    Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.   I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (St Luke Chapter 5 verses 29 to 32). And He still does.

How we need the winds of Christian revival to sweep through this land and in its loving wake produce from the broken and disorientated lives followers of Jesus.