U is for Uh-oh

For the first time since 1999, or ever, I finally listened to the document The Lost Kids of Rockdale County.  This PBS special hit the fan when I was a freshman in high school in Rockdale County at the time, and at that time, the super-perverted happenings were a fringe of the town's elite teenagers. 

I listened to these people who were teens in 1999 talking about their misadventures from 1996 when a syphilis epidemic struck the town's health department.  These kids come from squeaky-clean upper middle class homes.  They have everything they ever wanted, no boundaries, and parents who are never home.  These kids are basically feral with nobody to talk to.  When they get to puberty and are figuring out who they are, they run to the next best thing: their crazy peers who are also curious and starved for true love.  These kids ranged from some parental involvement in life to no parental involvement in life to having everything on a silver platter, but still starved for love.

On girl in the video did have an involved father.  I'm not sure why she started participating in the orgies, but the trigger was when she lost her best friend.  This is just proof that losing best friends in very traumatizing and true tragedy in growing up.  This can be more painful than boy/girl relationships breaking up.  I realize how easily this could have been me.  In 1999, I was in the middle of a crumbling best friendship that occurred simply because my friend cared more about the band geek culture and I wanted to stay faithful to the Lord.  I was very lonely throughout high school.  Living in Conyers again, I'm still lonely, but I know the difference between me and the kids in the video.  I had parents in my life.  My mother and father always talked theology with me at the table, in the car, mom talked with me every night about God and life, and I don't think I'd even know as much Bible if it was not for my mother influencing me to start reading devotional books.  I'd probably not be involved in youth ministry had my parents not been super-involved in my church life.  So, although I have an ache from broken friendships and introverted loneliness that continued even into college, I still had the backbone of my parents and their teaching to hold me together.

And I have friends now, although they are all in other states or really busy.  I have one I see weekly, and I even have to work to make that one consistent, but even if I should lose them, I know that my heavenly Father will never leave me, nor forsake me, and by his grace I'm still a virgin, have stayed away from drugs, and only time will tell if I learn to depend on him alone for all my emotional needs.