Sitting and watching people in an amusement park can be very enlightening. For instance I now know exactly which tattoos to avoid. I have deduced which footwear is perhaps the most comfortable to wear around an amusement park (maybe this is more from personal experience). But I have also noticed a few things that have disturbed me a bit; a shirt with a request for hot girls on a boy no older than 10, a dad singing along to the lyrics of “We Are Young” to his five year old daughter and young girls more scantily clad than should be decent in any setting to say a few. What has happened? Did we stop having standards? Or is it something worse…did we stop paying attention?

I know you may say, ‘How can not paying attention be worse than not having standards?’ That’s just it….one involves a conscious decision and the other does not. As humans we have been given the gift and the ability to reason, to discern and when we don’t exercise that we become no better than lower animals and that becomes scary. And I think that is what has happened. We don’t think about the things we expos ourselves too. We don’t think about how the way we let our children dress could define their behavior and how others define them. So where does it end?

1 Peter 5:8-9 reads, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” I don’t want to give the devil too much credit (he already gets way too much in a lot of our churches) but you can’t help but see all of the evils of society that do easily prey upon us. Even if they are of our own creation, if we don’t pay attention and work through our lives with sober mind and judgment we find ourselves being subject to those very things we consider base and are called to avoid. So wake up! Think! And then maybe you will find yourself in a better place the the intrigue of a pastor sitting on a bench at Cedar Point.