If you listen to constructive criticism, you will be at home among the wise. Proverbs 15:31
My phone interrupted the silence with a text notification and it was about the time of day that my granddaughter usually drops me a message. Sure enough, it was Rachel and she was excited. She’d finally gotten the SIM card she’d been waiting for.
It’s the conversation every parent wrestles with and the answer is not an easy one to discern; When should my child get a phone? In her case, Rachel’s iPad had been acting up, as computers do. It was older and had quite a few miles on it. She was also wanting a camera at the time. So about a year ago, she bought a phone with her own money, but with the condition that she could only use it on WiFi and a parent had to approve any apps she wanted to download. When they felt she had reached the appropriate level of maturity, she could get the SIM card and make it what she calls “a real phone.”
She’s heading into seventh grade this year and her parents had obviously reached the decision to let her make this pivotal change in her life. And trust me, it is pivotal. Of course, as in almost any life change, along with the joy and privilege of having a phone comes much responsibility. I had to wonder if she really understood that a phone, with all of its vulnerability to scammers, criminals, and a thousand ways to land in trouble, can be a real hassle at times. For now, it’s just the excitement of having it that matters to her.
And wouldn’t you know, a couple of days later, she sent her grandpa a chain letter. The content was offensive because it tried to convince the reader that if the instructions were not followed to the letter, not only would the reader have bad luck but they would also not be loved. And it suggested that if the reader were killed by another person, the sender would be in jail for having killed the person who killed the supposed friend, a kind of live together, die together pledge. But the thing that really bothered me most was that our granddaughter said she didn’t want to send it but her friend pressured her and she went along. Peer pressure reared its ugly head a mere two days after her phone was activated.
We know that love is not measured by the number of chain letters that come back to us. Nor is it measured by the number of likes we have on social media accounts or the number of friends who gather around us cheering us on when we’ve behaved in the way they want us to. Our culture is caught up in the belief that following the crowd is a normal way of life. All the young people in our life relish staging selfies, each competing with another to be prettiest, have the strongest abs, or the best hair. We’re so busy “posting” positive shots to make our lives look wonderful that we forget the things that really matter. And too many times those perfect lives depicted online are just a sham. Yet we measure ourselves by the way others appear on their social media pages and we continually fall short. We will always fall short of human expectations.
God sees us as He created us, as His perfect children. It causes Him pain when we try to change His own creation into something that will please other humans.
Wisdom isn’t learned overnight—it comes through curiosity to learn, the ability to admit wrongdoings,
and the capacity to ask for forgiveness. The Daily Proverbs Devotional
Hopefully, with age comes wisdom….our kids need a guiding hand to fortify them when times are tough and society demands behaviors that contradict their immerging faith. Ask yourself, “Who am I when no one is looking?” Living a Christian life will not always make us popular. In fact, most of the time we’ll be flying solo. The temptation to follow the crowd will always be there and it will be strong, but if we’re asked to do something that just doesn’t feel quite right, it probably isn’t. I’ll borrow an old slogan from the anti-drug campaigns of yesteryear, “Just say NO.”
Wisdom is doing now what you are going to be happy with later on. Joyce Meyer
