Setting examples for the next generation

It shouldn’t surprise me but it still does. A few weeks back my wife had gone to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things and as she was checking out, she noticed a lady behind her.  It really wasn’t the lady she noticed but what the lady was wearing. This woman was wearing a vulgar shirt that said “Don’t blank with me I @#$* back.”  Now the shirt didn’t say “blank” but I will let you use your imagination to know what it said but it would have made even a salty sailor blush. My wife quickly checked out trying her best to not say something because my little girl was with her but she came home mad as a hornet telling me all about it. To make things worse, she told me that this woman was holding a little baby.  My wife said, “What chance does that child have when this is the kind of decisions that her mother makes?”

Now this got me to thinking about that woman and about our society as a whole. First, I thought about what business decided that making a shirt that said something like this would be a profitable venture worth investing your money in?  I don’t know how successful they were at selling these shirts, but I know that they at least sold one and that was one too many.  This led me to my second thought:  Who buys a shirt like that?  Was it a gag gift?  I hope so but even then, who is going through a rack of clothes and thinks of a friend and thinks, “Oh, I saw this shirt and I immediately thought of you.”
And third, I have to wonder what was going through her mind when she decided to wear the shirt out in public?  Was she going through her closet thinking, “Okay..now what goes good with my pajama bottoms (yes…she was wearing pajama bottoms out in public in the middle of the afternoon)…oh, this shirt looks good.”

 
I thought about all this and about what it said about us as a people and I thought about her child and what her home life will be like. I thought about all those parents in the store who saw that shirt and had to explain to their child what that shirt meant.
But then another thought came to me. It was a thought that almost knocked me to the floor. What was that thought? It was this: It was for such a person that Jesus Christ died for.
(Barry Robinson is the pastor of Williamstown United Methodist Church. He can be reached at brobinson@williamstownumc.com or call 859-823-5171.)