Weekend Blog. Introduction -murder and sex and strangulation; Blog – the God of mercy shall have all of me

Kishera …… Murdered on
Wednesday April 3rd 10.30pm
In St Elizabeth
Part of a note sent to me by Kishera’s mother. She was not yet 21. Only 20. She received 30 shots. Another person was killed in the brutal attack. The mother was so distraught, that it took her a while to share the awful news with me. Both mother and daughter have been my patients for years. Kishera died leaving a young baby. Last time I saw her was late 2023. How do you respond, how do you help, what do you say, when you receive such devastating news. Again! And again! Tried my best to console her, after listening carefully. As a Christian she was already being comforted by the eternal Word of God, and so we spoke along those lines. Offered to help in whatever way I could, as she was completely in the dark why this happened. Mercy!
Then last night I was moved to post on Facebook, excerpts from an article in the well respected New York Times, how porn in America has invaded main stream sexual activity. Among teenagers!
This is how I introduced the news:

INTRODUCTION
Today on New York Times. Remember “ Believe it or not”! Puppa Jesus…tek de case. And when America has a cold we here in Jamaica get Pneumonia. How do we protect our young people from stuff like this? And can we? Or should we try in this “ everything is everything age? . Where do you draw the line? Or what people do in the privacy of their bedroom is their business.

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
April 12, 2024
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By Peggy Orenstein
Ms. Orenstein is the author of “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity” and “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.”

” For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four…….”

How you respond to this kind of ” scary stuff”, murder most foul, happening on a regular basis in a once peaceful country, and the insertion of pornography into the lives of young people in America, more ” scary stuff”, especially when so many of us have “kith and kin there”, depends on whether or not you believe in a God of mercy. Believe in a God who in Christ Jesus died to rescue all mankind from Sin, and death and evil. And therefore like William Booth, who started the world famous and highly acclaimed until now, the Salvation Army, and which Army of Christian soldiers famously led the charge to rescue thousands of poor people in East London, in the first instance, before going on to become a worldwide organization, we need to declare like him that ” God shall have all there is of William Booth”. And so in that context I wrote a letter to my church, please read it, about the God of mercy. Who alone is, as Helen Baylor sings, able to rescue us from this “generation of vipers”.