The Internet is a huge hole in the wall of our children’s protection that we can't ignore. Be aware of any contact your children have via phone, computer, or gaming device.
Transcript:
Sewer Backing Up into My House
Much of my backyard is in a one-hundred-year flood zone, which means that the odds are good that every hundred years the yard will be flooding from the swollen creek. In the last thirty-six years, that has occurred at least four times, once rising just to the point where it affected the basement floor. That’s not good.
In the years since the last flood, I have constructed a concrete wall all around the back of the house, then covered it with a slope of dirt and plants on the creek side. There was, of course, much more to do: plugs for the drains, wells for the sump pumps, sand bags, and so on.
I thought I was well prepared for rising water, but one day it occurred to me—for a variety of reasons—that running UNDER the house and the flood wall was the sewer drain from the house to the main sewer line about 100 feet away.
When the water rises high enough, the toilets and other drains back up, and water from sewer backs up into the house. It never occurred to me that I had neglected a four-inch pipe that would allow flood water to move directly into the house. I had neglected a flood hole straight into the house.
I worked hard, digging a hole to the sewer pipe, and connecting an access to the sewer, so that during a flood I could block all backflow to the house.
The Hole in the Wall into Children’s Lives
And then it occurred to me that many of us have been careful to create a floodwall for our children, so the tide of the evils of the world doesn’t overwhelm them as it rises—which it is doing faster and faster.
We don't, for example, allow alcohol in our home with teenage kids or even younger kids— at least we don't make it available to them. We don't allow tobacco if we care about the health of our children, or disreputable associates, or porn or whatever. There are things we keep outside of our home with a flood wall.
BUT—as with my sewer line—there is a HUGE hole in our children’s protection that we are ignoring, a hole that allows the influence and distractions of the world to pour through the wall and come up right inside the sacred space of our homes.
And it’s actually another kind of conduit, a channel of communications from the Internet that opens our flood wall to the entire world.
With all of its confusion and darkness and misery, all these evil influences just walk right into our homes on the back of all the electromagnetic waves used by our Wi-Fi, our phones and more.
We have to block up that sewer pipe. We have to be aware of any contact our children have with the internet, so they're not overwhelmed by the insidious and cleverly designed distractions that the world has to pull them away from the happiness that we're offering them.
We just have to be more aware. Not afraid, just aware.
