People are like plants --- they grow up healthy and strong in a healthy envirnoment

   A gardener knows that a plant needs the right environment, the 
   right climate, the right amount of the right things in order to 
   grow up strong and tall and healthy and give good fruit.  They 
   must have the right type of soil, the right kinds and amounts 
   of foods and minerals in the soil, the right amount of 
   sunlight, the right temperatures in the soil and air 
   surrounding them, the right amount of water, etc. in order to 
   thrive and do well.  In other words they live in an environment 
   and if that environment is friendly to them and warm and 
   helpful and conducive to health they will grow up strong and 
   healthy.  If, on the other hand, they are deprived of this or 
   that or they live in an environment that is poisonous to them 
   they will grow up twisted and dwarfed and sickly or they will 
   die. 

   People are like plants.  To grow up strong and healthy they 
   must have a friendly, healthy, proper environment.  If it is 
   healthy, with the proper amounts of all the right ingredients, 
   they will grow up strong and healthy;  if it is deficient in 
   certain of the important ingredients, or if it contains 
   poisonous elements, they will grow up dwarfed and twisted and 
   sickly.  This is true, I am sure, of the physical growth and 
   development of man, but more importantly, it is true of the 
   spiritual and emotional growth of man. 

   What ingredients and elements are important to the emotional 
   and spiritual development of man?  What kinds of elements are 
   negative and poisonous to his development? 
   
   In today's America children are growing up in an environment 
   where they are surrounded by such negative and poisonous 
   influences as rock music, MTV, pornography, drugs, marital 
   instability, divorce, etc..  We live in a sick culture, a sick 
   environment.  What can one expect the fruit of such an 
   environment to be?