Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the wellspring of life. – Proverbs 4:23
I was born with a particularly acute sense of conscience. As an elementary-aged child, I remember piling into the backseat of my mom’s car and spilling out every single misstep (real or imagined) of my day. I needed to be absolved. I had to know I was still an okay person and whether my actions might exclude me from my parents’ (and God’s) continued graces.
My son inherited the same trait. Never truly capable of concealing any secret misdeed, I assumed this inner compass would keep him safe from harm and me safe from having to worry about him. Ha. How often my areas of confidence become dangerous blind spots.
In late October of his sixth year on this planet, I was putting my boy to bed when he grew suddenly quiet. I asked what was going on, and tears sprang into his eyes. Taking several moments to silently process, he finally mustered the courage to tell me that he’d been sneaking his tablet up to his room at night to watch YouTube.
Time and training have taught me to carefully guard my tone of voice and facial expressions in these situations. Otherwise, my children sense trouble and will not remain vulnerable for long. But I had so many questions.
How long has this been going on? Three whole nights.
Why did it start in the first place? Trouble falling asleep.
Finally, I worked up to the question really burning through my mind: what did you see?
At this point, allow me to provide some additional backstory so you can understand the depth of my despair and fear as I awaited my son’s answer. I was extremely small — about his age, in fact — when I discovered the explicit content channels on late night cable television.
I’ll spare you the sordid details of just how much these experiences warped and darkened my young mind. But I will tell you that the fallout was heavy and far-reaching, exerting untold damage on my relationship with God, my concepts of healthy sexual desire, and my marriage. Carrying such an ugly secret led to years of isolating internal struggle. I did not want that for my kids.
So there I sat, helplessly praying against the worst that my imagination could conjure. He’d seen hours of unsupervised footage on a platform that houses videos of real-life murders, sexual deviances, and God knows what else; a platform with an algorithm built to purposely guide you from shallow, benign interests into deeper, darker waters. What were the odds he didn’t fall in?
A look at his watch history revealed a loop of horror-themed content. He has always exhibited a curiosity about the horror genre, maybe because much of it was off-limits and because it mimics all the emotions of a dangerous thrill ride. I can’t tell you how relieved I felt. The experience certainly wasn’t nothing. We (and he) lived out our share of consequences, including weeks of nightmares after what we now jokingly call “his nightly escapades.”
I’m not saying that God can’t renew and restore our minds after experiences like these. He can and does. He is a good Father. But as a parent, the situation completely shifted the way I approached two fundamental things.
First, i take technology far more seriously.
In theory, I already knew devices were dangerous. But for some of us, it takes harder hits to remember falling hurts. I have seen, time and again, how social media and the Internet are not my friends. In fact, they’re more accurately enemies, draining my focus, stealing my attention, and — in the case of my kids — doling out more harm than help.
Smart phones and tablets offer us access to far more power than any human should hold in their hand. It’s true at the age of 40 and even more so at 10 and 11. We have to soberly recognize the lasting damage this evolving technology can do in a matter of seconds. Our kids’ mental, sexual, and spiritual health is priceless, worth any amount of effort required to protect it.
Which leads me to my second point:
I cannot rely on a guilty conscience to protect my kids.
Conscience, much like human desire, lies to us. We can feel guilty and shameful for doing good (like the Colossians 2 Christians) or perfectly sound about doing wrong. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man: the little human animal will not at first have the right responses; it must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.
This concept is an echo of what Paul writes to both Timothy1 and the early church2 — that conscience is a helpful tool when trained according to the truth.
I used to tell my kids to pay attention to Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder as a means of deciding between right and wrong. Now, I know better. Now, we adventure into the Bible together to search out God’s sound and right views on what is “good” and “bad,” or (even more challenging) “good” and “sort of good.”
Among the most helpful spots I’ve found specifically regarding potential smut questions (aside from my updated take on the ubiquitous 90s WWJD bracelets, would you read/look at that with Jesus standing right next to you?):
1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 Test everything; hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
Philippians 4:8 Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, or praiseworthy, think about these things.
And, of course:
Proverbs 4:23 Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the wellspring of life.
Other translations say, “above all else guard your heart.” Above ALL ELSE. At any cost. That’s how crucial our heart is to experiencing true life, rightly aligning ourselves with reality as God designed it and escaping the “vicious sin-suffering death circle,” as J.B. Phillips describes it.
I want that for myself. I want that for my kids. There is no cost too high, no compromise worthwhile. We cannot live by the world’s standards on this. We cannot send them to the wolves without consciences trained for battle and a trusted process for testing every truth against THE truth. Their hearts are too valuable.
the dirty laundry show 
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