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Keeping A Pure Mind
Not every garment in your closet compliments your looks! I see how my friends dress to paint the house or change the car's oil. Did they buy those clothes on skid row? Mind you I love to do minor repairs when I'm in my best attire. Some of my shirts can now only be worn under a jacket.
Readers who believe clothes are a statement of your daily mood are dismayed right now but I'm dressed before any of them. Some of your duds are seasonal. Spring and Fall derails my wardrobe methods. In the other two seasons I can regulate the warmth potential of my garments. So your apparel is designed for protection against the elements, statement of fashion and taste, modesty and variety of function. Despite what the proponents of nudist colonies say, the people around you are fond of their clothes. Unless you're their doctor they are not going to disrobe at your command. Our society frowns on any attempt to inflict nudity on another. Respect for your neighbor's modesty is a long held tenet of a culture with roots in the Bible. What if the neighbor's daughter has no care for her own modesty? At the end of spring I got caught behind a school bus returning high school kids to their homes. I wondered if the style of the girls' outfits might be one reason for boys getting bad grades! If you think the lads shouldn't be looking you've missed the point of why those clothes are cut the way they are. A man in the Bible said: "I have made a covenant with my eyes not to look with lust upon a young woman." It takes that level of internal conviction to respect the immodestly clad. God made human sexuality to be a sacred trust between a woman and a man within the security of daily commitment to marriage vows. He calls both sexes to loyalty with purity. Every other relationship must approximate the honor given to a son, daughter, brother or sister. This is the bedrock from which Jesus taught that scheming how to have another's partner is as bad as the act of adultery itself. The greatest preventative of immoral deeds is a clean mind. Villains in recent years have confessed how their brutality and murder began years before as thoughts of lustful disrespect. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, was under the influence of pornography. Americans are interested in trends. Surveys have become an industry. Two results came to my attention last week. Teenage visits to Internet pornography sites rose 15% in the last 3 years. In that time the number of sites multiplied from 1.3 million to 4.2 million. A staggering 12% of all web sites are "adult-orientated." What about porn "pop ups" on your computer? These were banned in 1996 when the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. The Supreme Court has since used the first amendment to strike down that law. You cannot depend on society or legislation to keep your mind pure. That responsibility is yours - if you have the backbone to shoulder it. Take charge of your own mind. Establish boundaries. If you find you can't, make it a prayer priority to seek God's help. Whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable should preoccupy your thoughts and dress accordingly. |
I have almost no dress sense. I don't waste time gazing into my
closet grumbling that "I have absolutely NOTHING to wear." My time-saving system is to hang clean clothes at one end of the bar and wear whatever appears at the other end that morning.