Cell Phones & Selfishness

I just spent a weekend with some incredible men, learning how to be a better husband, father and man.  One of the  greatest things about this weekend was that I had no cell service and I actually turned off my phone.  That was so freeing for me. Now it's not that I get a lot of text messages or phone calls anyway, but to be free of it was amazing, and I loved it!

I've noticed something that actually kind of bothers me about cell phones, and that is how much people's noses are stuck in the stupid things all the time.  We've all experienced it, you get together with family or friends and 90% of the people in the room are more focused on the life in that little screen than the life going on around them.  You try to have a conversation with someone, you make a comment or ask them a question only to realize that they didn't hear what you said, because their attention is on that little screen.

To be really honest about that, it makes me feel horrible when that happens.  When this happens to me, something inside feels diminished.  Like I'm not important enough to be heard.  I'm sure you've had that happen to you, how'd it make you feel?  The funny thing about this is how we fool ourselves into thinking that we are being more social.

Distraction is the one tool of the enemy that really works well.  He doesn't have to cause us to blatantly sin to mess us up.  I'm reminded of something from C.S. Lewis's book; The Screwtape Letters.

The following excerpt from The Screwtape Letters is, I think, one of C.S. Lewis’ most sublime arguments. The senior demon, Screwtape, is trying to help his new tempting nephew, Wormwood, keep the new Christian sliding away from his faith. Within this part of Letter XII are several brilliant quotations and key points of subtle spiritual struggles.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

I have to think that if C.S. Lewis were alive and writing this today, he would have added cell phones to the list of things to distract us from the goal.  There will be those who say, but you don't understand I have to stay in contact with so and so, or with this or that.  But I would ask, why?  Why is it so much more important to be on that phone with people who are not in the same room with you?  Before cell phones and internet access 24/7 there was a time and a place for staying in contact with people. We made time to do what needed to be done, and it worked.  Why won't it work now? It will, we just have to make time for what we need to do.  We have to prioritize our time, and make the time for everything that is important to us.

I feel that if relationships are what Jesus is after, and there is something which diminishes those then perhaps it is being used by our enemy to keep us from where we need to be going.  Just a thought.  Strength and honor for the Kingdom and the King!

Man You're Leading No Matter If You're Right Or Wrong

I was reading the story about Achan found in Joshua 7.  It's the story about what took place after the first battle the Israelites faced in the promised land.  God had commanded that they utterly destroy Jericho and all in it except for Rahab the prostitute and the family she had with her.  He also said to not take any of the plunder as it was holy to the Lord.  All the sliver, gold and bronze was to be placed into the treasury of the Lord.

Achan took some silver, a Babylonian robe and a wedge of gold, hiding them in his tent.  When it was discovered, he told Joshua that he had coveted it, so he took it.  On the instruction of the Lord, Joshua and the elders of Israel took Achan, his family and all he had and placed them outside the camp.  Then all of Israel stoned him and his family, then burned everything they had.  Removing the sin from the camp of Israel.

Nothing is said about his wife and children knowing what he had done, but yet they paid the price for his sin. In this age of grace that we live in, so many times we want to overlook this story and think that it doesn't apply to us today, but these stories are given to us for examples, so we need to learn from them, regardless of living in grace or not.

What I see here men, is that what we do, and the decisions that we make daily (right or wrong) affect our families.  They will either bring good to them, or bad, and it's because of us as the leaders of our homes.  This is not to say that our wives and children get a pass on life, and that everything that happens is because of us, no.  They still have a will, and they still have choices to make too, but when it comes to the family, the buck stops with us as President Harry Truman said.

What we do in leading our family may be one of the most important things that we as men can ever do.  Part of the reason for the decline in America's history is due in part I believe to the lack of fathers, and the leaders of the home standing up and doing what they must.  Too many men have either given up, or just never began to lead.  They're too busy working and trying to get a little extra pleasure for themselves.  And families are falling by the wayside because of it.

And not all of the pleasures are sinful; some guys make lots of time to play golf, and a little time to play with their kids.  A man told me one time that he didn't know what to do with his kids, he just was at a loss of what to do.  I told him to just do whatever it was that they liked to do with them.  I remember when my oldest child Micah was a little boy, probably around three, when I would come home from work to eat lunch I would spend about ten minutes in his room on the floor with him playing with action figures.  We didn't talk as much as we just were together playing, and when I would leave to go back to work, he would look up at me with the biggest smile on his face.  That ten minutes I could have been doing what I wanted to do; reading, watching television or napping, but instead I would take that little bit of time with Micah and the dividends it paid were huge.

Now I'm not saying that we should never make time for ourselves, we should.  Actually if you're not making time for yourself, you're going to end up losing it and going off on your family.  What I'm getting at this morning is that you are the leader, right or wrong, and whatever you do is going to affect your family, right or wrong.  And ultimately the decisions that we make as the heads of our families will determine the direction that they go.  I'm pretty sure that when Achan took that stuff he wasn't thinking about his family and what might happen to them, even though they ended up paying the price for his decision too.

You are male by birth, but you become a man by the decisions you make each and every day.  Lean on the Holy Spirit to help you make the right choices.  And if you don't know the Holy Spirit, I'd love to tell you more about Him and what His role on the earth is for you and your life.  Email me at godsfirstknight@yahoo.com and I'll talk to you about Him and get you some information too.  You can do this men, fight for your family, it's who you were created to be!  Strength and honor!