Jun
11
52home
Filed under Biblical Womanhood | 52home3:26 p.m.
When Kristin and I were little, our room was decorated in the then “hot” colors of bright orange and yellow. I still vividly remember that room: the yellow bed spread, the handmade desks from grandpa by the window, the big cabinet in the corner on which sat our books and record player (yes, it really was that long ago!). On our wall was a framed poster with some bunnies on it that said “Rejoice in the Lord always.” Now as anyone who knows me will tell you, I have a terrible memory, but I still remember that picture, and the verse underneath it.
Even the small things in a child’s environment can make a big impression; and as parents we want to God’s Word to make the biggest impression of all. Janelle has created some new prints for children’s walls that are considerably more attractive than the bunny rabbit poster and provide one more way to help our children hide God’s Word in their heart. This week we’re featuring a trio of prints for boys—great for the play room or bedroom or nursery.
Our friend Debbie sent us the following Friday Funny to go along with our current series.
See ya Monday!
Janelle for the girltalkers
Social Networking Breakthrough
SILICON VALLEY (The Borowitz Report) – A new social network is about to alter the playing field of the social media world, and it’s called PhoneBook.
According to its creators, who invented the network in their dorm room at Berkeley, PhoneBook is the game-changer that will leave Facebook, Twitter and even the much anticipated Google Buzz in a cloud of dust.
“With PhoneBook, you have a book that has a list of all your friends in the city, plus everyone else who lives there,” says Danny Fruber, one of PhoneBook’s creators.
“When you want to chat with a friend, you look them up in PhoneBook, and find their unique PhoneBook number,” Fruber explains. “Then you enter that number into your phone and it connects you directly to them.”
Another breakout utility of PhoneBook allows the user to arrange face-to-face meetings with his or her friends at restaurants, bars, and other “places,” as Fruber calls them.
“You will be sitting right across from your friend and seeing them in 3-D,” he said. “It’s like Skype, only without the headset.”
PhoneBook will enable friends to play many games as well, such as charades, cards, and a game Fruber believes will be a breakout: Farm.
“In Farm, you have an actual farm where you raise real crops and livestock,” he says. “It’s hard work, but it’s more fun than Mafia, where you actually get killed.”
Why do our lives—which should be simpler and easier—seem all the more complicated? Centuries before the Internet, Blaise Pascal answered that question: Our lives are busier because we want them to be.*
Peter Kreeft summarizes Pascal’s perspective:
“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”
“Diversion” explains Douglas Groothius, “serves to distract humans from a plight too terrible to encounter directly—namely, our mortality, finitude, and failures. There is… [a] tension between our aspirations and our anticipations and the reality of our lives.”
Every day we face difficult, even heart-breaking realities: Our sin and failures, the disappointments of life, the difficulty of relationships, the unanswered questions, the tension between the way we want things to be and the way they really are. And our tablets and smartphones seem to open up a portal of “escape” from whatever it is we don’t want to think about. By going online we can, for a few moments anyway, forget what is troubling us or ignore what should be troubling us. So we give ourselves over to our online diversions.
“Postmodern people are perpetually restless” observes Dr. Groothius, “they frequently seek solace in diversion instead of satisfaction in truth.”
Where do you seek solace? Where do you find satisfaction?
Our hearts are restless until they rest…online?
(*Much of the content of today’s post, and the idea for yesterday’s post are from “Addicted to Diversion and Afraid of Silence,” a post by Justin Taylor. I highly recommend you read the entire post.)
Not that long ago my mother kept in touch with friends and family via a telephone tethered to the wall in the kitchen. She bought the longest cord available so that maybe, if she worked it right, she could reach the coffee table in the living room. But basically, if she wanted to connect, it had to be in the kitchen.
To find the best stroller, she had to ask each of her friends for a personal recommendation, look up the stroller in a borrowed copy of Consumer Reports, and drive around to local stores to find the best price. And if Mom wanted to go somewhere for the first time she had to call for directions, write them out by hand on a piece of paper, and then hope she wouldn’t get lost and need to stop at a gas station or pay phone.
It’s only been twenty-five years, but compared to my mom, I have the equivalent of a full-time personal assistant. I can connect with friends anytime, anywhere. I can research, purchase, and schedule delivery for the latest stroller in five minutes without getting up from the couch. I never have to ask for directions. My smart phone redirects me when I’m lost, instantly provides me with reviews, tips, and solutions; and if I wanted it to, it could even babysit my children.
It still doesn’t clean the toilets. But in truth, there’s something comforting about that.
So why is my generation of women more busy, overwhelmed, and anxious? We should have vast amounts of time on our hands in order to rest, read Scripture, ponder and pray. And yet our lives seem increasingly hectic compared to the world in which we were raised. Why?
Think about it, and let’s talk more tomorrow.
The messages from Next are online and I’m working my way through all of them. I love how the Internet makes it possible for a thirty-something mother of four children to benefit from a conference for teenagers and twenty-somethings that happened two weeks ago, a thousand miles away.
But I wanted to mention one session in particular, because in his message The Church and Friendship, Kevin DeYoung touches on a topic we’ll get to later in our series—that of technology and friendship:
“Friendship is wonderful when you can get it, but it is frequently hard to come by…There is a real sense in which that technology can foster friendship… And yet as good as the technology is…the danger with friends today is that we have friends everywhere and friends nowhere. We have a lot of relationships but how many friendships? We have more acquaintances than ever before, we have more people in our networks than ever before, we are known by more people and can know more people than ever before and yet have no friends.”
Do you have friends? Or, more importantly, as Kevin asks, “What kind of friend are you? A fake friend, a foul friend, or a faithful friend?”
Listen and learn how to be a biblical, better, friend.
