Charles Morris spoke this morning of the Prodigal Son, only this time the Prodigal was a pastor's daughter who ran away from home in her teens, proclaiming to her shocked family her rejection of God and declaring her atheistic stance. I never physically ran away from home, but I might as well have.

Our family was pretty strict, Mom having decided that TV wasn't good for us, while most TV shows in the 50's and early 60's portrayed families saying grace at the table, going to church on Sundays, and petitioning the Lord for help, reading from Bibles on a regular basis. When she was a teen, couples would go to movies to make out, not watch the big screen. Even to her at her early age as a Chritian, she felt that romanticism was not delivered in a sensible way, but that Hollywood was dishing up love on the run, hinting at one night stands, and divorce by film. In a large way, she was right. Bible stories were being replaced by pulp novels on celluloid, B fare which made lots of money, providing no direction in circumspect living. The Biblical films made by Cecil B DeMille such as the Ten Commandments, she decided spent too much time dwelling on the sins of Israel and not enough effort on Biblical truth, though DeMille was the last of the faith filled directors for decades. Mom had heard of casting couches and that was the turning point for her to declare visual media of the devil.

In a very real way, she was right. Today, while there is a rebirth of Christian films, there is a decidedly dirty underbelly of entertainment ranging from salacious public fare, to the extreme pornography of distributed child sexual abuse for the millions of hungry men and women, even children to get their prurient appetites satiated. Only, they don't. There are an estimated two million kids each year abducted from residential streets from Washington, DC, to the quiet suburbs of Kansas farm towns, where young children are trafficed into the movie industry, slavery overseas, and even high levels of government.

That day I returned to the Lord, at the age of nineteen, marked the beginning of God's pardon for my sins, and my family's blessing. I was very afraid my sins would be visited upon my children. The prayers of my wife and I during her pregnancies were fervent, intense, and frequent! God answered with the early salvations of all three of our progeny!

Mom wasn't so wrong, though I have worked in the Religious Broadcast community for seventeen of my 45 years of professional life. I left one job because of a contract with a company which solely produced sex films and distributed them worldwide. After three blessed years engineering, we left the city altogether when God called us out and led to a series of jobs in another state, eventually opening a door into faith based television. There is pardon for our sins and and love aplenty from God!