Dear Miley,

      Bravo, girl! You DID it; you really did it! You lowered the price for selling yourself and to an even bigger audience. What a success story! 
      Thanks for letting my daughter's generation know that price for being on their T-shirts in grade school was too high by lowering yourself to an all-time low of cheap. 
      Clearly you have liberated yourself by owning your body. Thanks for paving the way on that. Thanks for bringing sex down to a child's level with teddy bears and bubble gum, because clearly we aren't showing our children enough sex. Better make it more appealing, kind of like creating drugs that look like candy. That's classy.  
      So is gyrating, jamming things between your legs and showing most of your body to a national audience on an awards program that is watched mostly by teenagers. You are  obviously showing the world true girl-power. And you've taken trashy art to a whole new level. You must be proud. 
      Plus, you clearly outsmarted everyone and elevated yourself to a brand-new category of "thing."
      Thanks for creating headlines so that those of us who have long since tuned you out could see what you're up to, and pray. 
      Sincerely, 
      A mom who still sees you as a beautiful creation, no matter what

      All sarcasm aside, the real question I have is why is this today's "ohmygosh" news feed item? 
      Did this really shock you? 
      Perhaps we should know by now that this is what happens when a child is "sold" into the entertainment business at a young age. She learned early on that she was a product to be consumed. It came with money, lots of it, and fame and boys and stuff. 
      Don't we know by now that sex sells. In fact, it's BIG, BIG business. Here in America, there is plenty to be sold but even more to be bought. Our lovely land of liberty is filled with eager buyers. 
      Maybe we shouldn't be so mad at Miley. Maybe we should look inwardly. Maybe we should be concerned because human sex trafficking is THE fastest-growing business of organized crime and the 3rd largest criminal enterprise in the world. 
      Maybe we should look around in our culture at how we have demasculinized men and glamorized fatherless families. We are raising a generation of boys who have learned that they can buy whatever they want — even physical pleasure. Is it a mystery why so many girls growing up today are seeking to fill a void in the attention/affection/love department? Check out the instant gratification, the unsupervised preteen population online, growing numbers of broken families, the growing pornography business, the way we continually self-medicate...and ask yourself again, was Miley's show really so shocking? 
     According to the FBI, "the majority of sex trafficking is international with victims taken from places such as south and southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union, Central and South American and other less developed areas and moved to more developed ones, including Asia, the middle East, Western Europe and North America."
      Yes, we are really good at building up a culture of object-loving men who stand ready to buy sex and look at women as things, trash, junk, products. And we're not so bad at raising generations of girls with self esteem problems who are willing to go to great lengths to look like the packaged women on the covers of magazines at our supermarket checkouts, many of whom are desperate for love and affection anywhere they can find it. These aren't statistics. They are your neighbors, friends, people in the pews in your community church.
      Instead of lashing out at Miley, maybe we could better expend our energy on something that matters. Change. 
      It's time for change. It's time for girls to see themselves as valuable. It's time for boys to respect girls and treat them like the treasures they are. It's time to sort through the lies, the sexualization, the objectification, the trafficking and begin to align it with the TRUTH. 
      Not even Miley is that far from it. Once upon a time, she stood in an audition and proclaimed her faith. She knows of a heavenly Father who loves her dearly. But like many of us, she was fed lies, a lot of lies — big, beautiful, colorful lies repeated many times over — so much she began to believe this was what was true. 
      Instead of shaming her, and girls like her, maybe we could, I don't know, pray for her. Pray for her and for Robin Thicke. Pray for her generation, for our children. Pray we don't become so desensitized to casual sex that we can't find our way out of the mess it creates. Because I fear that we are sitting in the middle of a pretty big mess already. God created ALL things, sex included, and like all things, we abuse the design of sex when our sin touches it. 
      Pray for the one thing that can deliver us, no matter how far we've gone into darkness. We have a Redeemer, one who can make us new. One who can give us hope. One who gives us eternal life. One who has declared victory for us. 
      Pray that we seek truth and find it in the name of Jesus. 

      P.S. If you are a dad of girls or can forward this to a dad of girls, a friend sent it to me yesterday. It's a powerful way you can build up the confidence in our girls and attempt to avoid her falling for our culture's lies. Despite the prevalence of media in our children's lives, parents are STILL and will always be the No. 1 influence on their children. This is a short read of five very easy tips for dads that you won't regret reading: http://www.covenantrelationships.org/2013/02/5-things-every-daughter-needs-to-hear.html