 Thank you for the opportunity to be here in the studio and thank you for the opportunity to get gospel preaching out on the air. We're very grateful for WTLN and very grateful for our listeners appreciate their engagement in our ministry. And if you're listening out there, we pray these segments will be a blessing to you. One of the ways that as a part of this ministry we wanted to bless our listeners is by providing a conference that we want to tell you about now. It's May 29th through May 31st. The conference is a ministry of Cornerstone Baptist Church entitled our Call for Discernment Conference. And the conference is going to be about protecting children and families from media's menacing dark side. The conference is called A Call to Arms and you can register at our website protectthefamily.net. And the reason for the conference is we've got so many parents I think and children who are being influenced today in our culture by media and technology. The growth of technology, the advancement of technology has been staggering. And also it's infiltration if you will, it's advancement into our families, into our homes. And so we see that one one side is a great blessing from God that all the resources we have available at our fingertips. But on the other side, as the Bible says, what God often attends for good men corrupt for evil. And so we see also a menacing dark side that can cause serious problems in the home. And so we want to have this conference to inform you and also to help give you the tools necessary to protect your children and family. And for that conference, we're very, very blessed to have a guest speaker with us. His name is Trace Embry and Trace is a nationally syndicated radio host of License to Parent. And he's also the founder of Shepherds Hill Academy, which is a residential counseling program for troubled teens. We look forward to Trace providing the content of that conference for you. It's going to be extremely good. And very blessed to have Trace on the air with us today. How are you doing today, Trace? I am blessed brother. We're blessed as well and really looking forward to this conference. Thank you for devoting the time. I know you're a very busy man. We look forward to having you come. And I thought while we were talking on the air, we've got opportunity with our WTL and listeners. I might ask you a question real quick and give them some information about what we're going to be discussing at the conference. I know that you've got a lot of experience many years running Shepherds Hill Academy, which is again a residential counseling program for troubled teens. I know that many of the teens that come into your care for that program are coming from homes where because of technology or because of the influence of culture or the company that our kids are keeping, whatever the case may be, that a breakdown has happened in the family where sometimes parents feel ill-equipped or just unable to have any influence with their teen or any influence to make the circumstance better. Tell me about the program that you run there and maybe some experience that you've had with teens that have come into the program and the success that you've had for helping that family get back to a healthy family environment. Sure. Shepherds Hill Academy is a Christ-centered Biblical-based, probably a politically incorrect residential program, therapeutic program for troubled teens. And we have kids from all over the country and around the world just did our three-day weekend here with parents from Brazil, Japan, California, New York. I mean they're all over the place. And they come to Shepherds Hill with all the issues that your garden variety teenager who's going to jail or the grave would have. And there's a common denominator in so many of these kids which is there are their addictions to digital technology and of course among others. But this is one reason why when a kid comes to live here at Shepherds Hill for a year, we have a fully accredited junior and senior high school too so they're getting their education while they're here. But they're living in the woods with no running water or electricity for a year. They build their own communities out there. It's like Gilligan's Island in the woods and they work with their hands, their feet and their back, their heads. They're getting their critical, constructive and creative thinking capacities we built so that they can then receive the deeper things of life, the issues of origin, meaning, morality, destiny. Questions that we all have to answer that but because these kids are so pleasured into imbecility they don't really have any margin in their lives to really contemplate these things. And of course parents are just as busy really more in the professional vein rather than the entertainment part of things but the bottom line is so you know we only have 18 years to raise our kids and train them in the way they should go but boy those things like James said it's like a mist. Our lives are like a mist. 18 years is maybe one quarter, one fifth of our lives and that goes by very very fast and we have to ask ourselves as we talked about before if we don't train our kids then somebody else will and who's that someone going to be and that's what we need to determine. Yeah thank you brother. I know, I know and any of our listeners out there would also agree that you just blink your eyes and 18 years is gone and that time with our kids is so precious but you know one of the things that impressed me about Shepherd's Hill Academy is just the stark contrast between the living conditions there at Shepherd's Hill without any technology and often the living conditions that take place in our home where we're technology inundated or technology saturated. You know what advice might you give to a parent living in a home like that where they they go out to dinner and everyone's on their phone or they're in the home and everyone's in their own room on their own computer the family is just disjointed. What general advice might you give to a parent who's in a home like that that is concerned and wants to go in a different direction? Well they're going to have to decide. They have to be intentional about this. They have to come to grips with the fact that it is the problem that it is and they really do need to get an outside objective opinion from some people to take an assessment of their family because I think sometimes we're so in the forest we don't see the trees but you have to say hey listen you know at dinner time you know we're gonna we're gonna eat together and we're gonna put these things away. We're gonna shut them off there'll be a curfew at night when these things will be checked in at a particular location so we're not taking them to bed with us and texting our friends at two in the morning and allowing Larry Flint and Hugh Hefner to to come into the privacy of our kids own bedrooms it's ridiculous. We haven't thought thought through a lot of these things the implications and I think first and foremost until we as parents get our act together with these things we really can't expect our kids to do to do a better job than they're doing now and I think that we've we've bought hook, line and thinker that our kids should have some of this stuff at all. For instance a smartphone that's an adult toy folks there is no reason that your kid needs a smartphone and I still have a 17 year old at home she will not have a smartphone living under my roof not even if she can pay for it we have not thought through the implications of this and this is some radical stuff and if you come to this conference you're going to hear some radical stuff because we have some radical problems in our nation and you know drastic problems require drastic measures to to rectify some of this stuff you know we've never really in American history had to suffer too much for being Christian and I think the time has come or we're going to have to to struggle a little bit be ostracized boy that's a lot better than getting your head cut off over the minute yes yes but there's some things that we're going to have to do and make an entirely different a paradigm shift and how we how we look at parenting today because we're dealing with issues and things that no other parent in human history had to deal with that's right and so consequently there'll be some things to to balance that out as a parent that maybe parents haven't done in human history as well yeah fantastic and Trace thank you so much for your time and we're really looking forward to your expertise at the conference and so we want to again encourage our listeners please sign up for call to arms protecting your children and family from media's menacing dark side our 2015 call for discernment conference at protectthefamily.net protectthefamily.net you can call our offices at 407-971-7685 and Trace for those families out there that want to get busy investigating this trend this cultural issue where can they go to find more information about you and your ministry well we have a nationally syndicated radio broadcast licensed to parent they can go to licensed to parent.org licensed to parent.org and from there we can give you some updated information on on how to deal with some of these different technologies video games things like that hear what the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying about television and time spent on these things was doing the brain chemistry or you can go to shepherdshillacademy.org shepherdshillacademy.org if you don't know how to spell shepherdshillacademy go to I'm sorry go to helpmytroubledteam.org helpmytroubledteam.org you'll get to the same place thank you Trace and thank you to those of you who are listening we pray that you'd register for the conference at protectthefamily.net feel free to call us for more information at 407-971-7685 and we look forward to seeing you may 29th through the 31st at our 2015 call for discernment conference a call to arms god bless you