How Dot-to-dot Can Save Your Life

Many thanks to my friend Jan, who started me thinking about how easy it is to ride an avalanche.  And how ugly it can be for the people at the bottom;)

I am writing this to my children, who are living in a culture of death, and who--should the Lord tarry--will one day be raising my grand-children in a culture of death.  Listen up.

There are very few value-neutral decisions you will ever make.  And I mean from the books you read, to the friends you choose, to the clothes you wear, to the movies you watch, to the way you spend your money, to the way you spend your time, to the thoughts you entertain, to the words you speak (or do not speak), to the places you frequent.  This is a partial list, which I only ended because I could sense your eyes were glazing over.  

Wakey-wakey!  I got more to say.

Life is less of a mystery than we make it.   We are what we believe and we all put our faith somewhere.  (It even takes faith to say that you have faith in nothing.)  And out of your belief system will come your choices--the actions and reactions which will shape your destiny. 

So you NEED to THINK about how you are building your worldview.  What builds a worldview?   I'm glad you asked!

Religion
Lack of religion
Parents' Examples (good and bad)
Parents' Words (by absence or presence)
Teachers
Friends
Books
Movies
Mentors
Twitter (you think I'm joking, but I'm not)
Music
Cultural climate
Oprah
Video games
Coaches
Facebook
Colleagues
Professors

Again, a partial list, and some of these sources are more effective than others, but all of them wield power.  The good news is that you have a modicum of control over how much power they will hold over YOU.

First, I think I need to remind you that despite what you might think in unguarded moments, you did not come out of the hopper with the fully awesome life skills you now possess.  

That is because you do not actually possess fully awesome life skills yet.  

You just think you do because you are young, inexperienced, naive, and being raised in a nurturing environment surrounded by people who enjoy you and express that to you in affirming ways.

The skills and beliefs you do have were given to you (see above list).  And now you are in the precarious position of deciding what to accept, what to reject, and where to bend the knee.  

Because everybody bends the knee.  

Now, our prayer is that you bend to the One who made you, who knows you best and loves you more than anyone else ever will, and who has given His life to save you from the tragic power of your sin (and from His righteous anger over your sin).  So we are training you to that end, praying over you, surrounding you with evidence to support what we are saying and with people who demonstrate the beauty of faithful lives.

But you could bend other ways and lay your heart before the god of a different religion, or the god of wealth, or fame, or sensuality, or hedonism, or cynicism, or pseudo-intellectualism, or self.  

And actually, all the other gods have at their core that one god of SELF.  

Ahh!  The lure of being able to live in the "Build-a-Belief Workshop", where all the gods are cute and cuddly and you can dress them up to suit your fancy.  

What they don't tell you, is that they are infernally over-priced and they fall apart (or turn into monsters) when you squeeze them during the night.

Your problem is two-fold.  

A) You have a heart that inclines toward evil (as do we all.) 

Jeremiah 17:19

Romans 3:23

Romans 3:10-11

Isaiah 53:6

 B) You are living in a culture that is no longer supportive of the "Judeo-Christian ethic", i.e. life lived according to the tenets laid out in Scripture.  

 

Not only is it not supportive, it is actively hostile, openly condemning, and violently intolerant.  

 

This can be hard on a person of your tender age, who has been protected from so much of the "mean and ugly" side of life and people.  

 

You are naturally trusting, open, and full of wonder, grace, and forgiveness, so it will be jarring to hear yourself called ignorant, dangerous, intolerant (funny how those who sling it are most often those who bring it), backward, anti-intellectual, brainwashed, fanatical extremists.  And those are just the words I can print.  

 

My Dear Ones, some of you have professed Christ.  How will you withstand that abuse?  Think about it. Because it is coming.  And not just from the culture, but sometimes from the church (which is in many ways doing a very convincing imitation of the culture.)  

 

Sometimes the ridicule will even come from your friends.  What then?

 

Here is just a taste of what you can expect.  

 

From the church:  a growing chorus of whispers in your ear.  "Hath God Said?" they say.

 

"Why so intolerant of different lifestyle choices?"

 

"God made us this way.  Celebrate His beautiful diversity."

 

"God wants you to live in the ways that make you happy."

 

"Don't be all hung up on the infallibility of Scripture.  What difference does it make if Genesis is poetry or history?  Are you anti-science?"

 

"Those silly gender roles are so 1st century.  How quaint!  How culture-specific!"

 

"Pay attention to your felt needs.  They are paramount!  Comfort at all costs!"

 

"How dare you judge my personal decisions?  Who asked you to keep me accountable for anything, you Holy Roller?"    

 

From the educational establishment you will hear (as I have heard):

 

"What makes you think those children are yours?  We want them as young as possible, as many hours as possible, for as many years as possible."

 

"You are not qualified to mold those young minds.  Leave it to the experts."

 

And just what do they plan to do with you (my dear children) for all those years?  They'll start by stealing the best hours of your day, 40 hours a week, nine months a year.  They'll fill your growing minds with just the things THEY want you to know--many good things...

 

...and just a smattering of lies.  You will never quite know which teachers are giving you whole truths and which are feeding you tidbits from the perversity of  a twisted mind--because there are always a few bad eggs. 

 

 And somehow you will be expected to know the difference.  

 

During the years when you have not even figured out HOW to discern truth, you will be expected to see the tiny deceptions that are fired at you from all corners, recognize them as deceptions, remember to bring them up at dinner to discuss them with your parents, and then put them in their proper place--even when faced with ridicule from peers and respected authority figures.  

 

You will navigate a labyrinth of hyper-sexualized peers, bullies, haters, and the pull of the popular crowd.  On your own.  So you will find a group of (hopefully) like-minded friends and look to them for validation, acceptance, and protection from your very normal feelings of youthful uncertainty.  

 

Just like in any long-distance relationship, those absent hours will draw your affections away from us, your parents, who love you more than life, and cause you to bond with and become imprinted by a parade of paid strangers and half-civilized peers, even if you have the awareness to TRY to prevent such a thing.

 

Which you won't.  

 

Because God designed you to be trained up in His ways in an intense discipleship process that lasts for years and includes daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, intimate, loving, purposeful interactions, conversations, and opportunities to observe what faith looks like when it is lived out in the minutiae of life.  

 

He designed you to bond to and imitate and emulate your (hopefully) godly parents as they bond to and imitate and emulate Him.  There is no shortcut for this.

 

I am making some people angry here, which is regrettable.  But I am speaking in love out of a concern that is deeper that my desire to be liked.  I watched my own heart be pulled from the teaching of my wonderful family in high school.  I still have scars from it.  I don't want to see it happen to anyone else.

 

Maybe other people are able to be such spectacular parents that the loss of all those teachable moments with their children can be overcome.  God is very big.  Just know that if you go that way, you might be making your job harder than it needs to be.  

 

So!  If your young faith makes it through those trials, it will still have to contend with the popular culture.

 

And it is with great sorrow that I have to expose you to this next truth.  

 

I want this world to be full of people who love children and desire the best for them--and some people do!  

 

But unfortunately, more and more adults look at your youth, innocence, sweetness, vulnerability, and purity with a ravening hunger.  

 

And I am not just talking about the pedophiles.  Pedophiles are evil, but they are evil exposed as evil, which make them easier to fight, so in some ways they are less insidious than the group I refer to.  

 

I am speaking here of grown-ups who have made careers out of raping the souls of children.  

 

Does that sound harsh?  I hope so.

What else would you call an "artistic community" whose members make the destruction of innocence a badge of honor, who take turns churning out vomitous literature, music, movies, and video games filled with the most graphic and sordid details of scatological, sociopathic, violent, graphically sexual, and aberrant behavior--often bereft of moral context or value judgements--and then market them specifically to children?

 

If you parents think I am exaggerating, I cordially invite you to spend 15 minutes in the "young adult" section at your local library.  Choose 10 books at random and you are likely to enjoy a smorgasbord of curse words, play-by-play depictions of coitus and sodomy (and every other type of "activity" imaginable by man or beast), as well as graphic explorations of defecation, rape, torture, self-mutilation, and murder.  

 

If you don't leave with the burning desire to cover the shelves with yellow caution tape, then you have somehow lost the protective instinct that every parent used to come with.

 

Children, your young adulthood is a beautiful time in your development.  Your hearts are still so very innocent and fragile--and yet beginning to be aware of a world of wonders. New emotions are being born almost daily, possibilities are blossoming before your eyes, and experiences are tinged with the sharpness of novelty.  

 

And because everything is felt so deeply, THIS is the time that the adults who already transitioned to full maturity should come alongside you as friends and mentors, helping you to understand the strange mixture of beauty and pain that goes along with being human.  This is the time for discretion, gentleness, and sensitivity, and wisdom.  It is the time for discussions about context and meaning.  

 

Evil will also break onto the horizon for you during these years (if it hasn't already), and it also needs to be handled with discretion.  As you stare with incredulity over an abyss you hadn't realized was there, you need a hand on the shoulder, not a boot in the rear.  Darkness is there to be pushed against, not wallowed in.  

 

In my generation (or slightly before), there were those who started crying out for the death of all things sacred.  They marched in with their brutal words and images and tore down every veil they could find.  They ridiculed the use of modesty, euphemism, subtlety, and the ideas of mystery and wonder.  

 

The doors to bedrooms and bathrooms, psych wards and prisons were ripped off their hinges and every private act, bodily function, shameful thought, unspeakable crime, and secret horror was dragged out into the open and reveled in--first among adults, and then in children's literature, movies, music and video games.  

 

The perpetrators rejoiced in the shock and disgust of the general population and crowed about how courageous they all were.  Parents who didn't want their children to have access to the gory details of illicit affairs or clinical descriptions of every aspect of puberty in children's literature were ridiculed as prudish censors or book banners. 

 

The intellectual elite congratulated one another on their open-mindedness, but really it was just naughty one-upmanship and sick voyeurism. (Ever see two toddlers leaning over a potty daring each other to touch the poo?  You get the idea.)

 

Soon, due to surreptitious curiosity and a successful campaign to portray the new openness as brave and progressive, sales were soaring and--voila!  We now have a veritable army of horrors climbing over one another to achieve new lows in "artistic" prurience.

 

Where does that leave the children in your generation?

 

 Psychologically ravaged by sadistic literature.  

 

Robbed of their innocence by lurid images.  

 

Enticed by the gyrations and intonations of pop starlets into emotional intimacies without preparation or context.  

 

Stripped of the "wonder-full" and sacred and holy elements of human interactions and left with animalistic impulses alone to guide them.   

 

And when they are crouching wild-eyed and bleeding in the corner, the sadists offer them ideas of how to cope with their despair through the cultural normalizing of teenage drug, alcohol, and porn addictions, self-mutilation, suicide--and sometimes even recreational murder.  http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/teenagers-allegedly-murder-college-baseball-player-boredom-article-1.1431445

 

 I am sorry to sound harsh, but you need to know your enemy.  He will try to slide in through your i-pod, slither into your Kindle, jostle for a place on the screens before your eyes, and you need to know he is not there for your entertainment.  He is there to stick a chisel into the beautifully cohesive, protective, instructive rationality of the biblical worldview we have been trying to help you build.  

 

So when you feel a poverty of spirit, the crush of oppression, the sting of despair, do a spiritual dot-to-dot.  Pray for discernment, and then try to draw a line back to the source of your unrest.  Often you will find that you have inadvertently left your heart unguarded and allowed the enemy to set up camp in your thoughts or habits or pursuits--basically let him move into God's territory like a grubby spiritual squatter.   

 

So, I will close my letter to you, Precious Ones, with a torrent of Scripture, for it is a love letter from God to you, and contains everything you need for life and godliness, even in these dark days.

 

"Guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life."  Proverbs 4:23

 ***********

The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
    and whatever you get, get insight.
 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
    she will honor you if you embrace her.
 She will place on your head a graceful garland;
    she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.”

 Hear, my son, and accept my words,
    that the years of your life may be many.
 I have taught you the way of wisdom;
    I have led you in the paths of uprightness.
 When you walk, your step will not be hampered,
    and if you run, you will not stumble.
 Keep hold of instruction; do not let go;
    guard her, for she is your life.
 Do not enter the path of the wicked,
    and do not walk in the way of the evil.
 Avoid it; do not go on it;
    turn away from it and pass on.
 For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong;
    they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble.
 For they eat the bread of wickedness
    and drink the wine of violence.
 But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,
    which shines brighter and brighter until full day.
 The way of the wicked is like deep darkness;
    they do not know over what they stumble. "

 Proverbs 4:7-19

 *********

 "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 

 ^"Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.  Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.  

 "In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.  Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

"And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people."   Ephesians 6:10-18