By Name · Week 1 · Saturday · SCREENS

My thirteen-year-old is in a group chat that is about one video game. Him and a bunch of his friends. When it gets going it can run for hours, and the phone does not stop buzzing.

One day he told me mutes most of the conversations; its too noisy LOL.

He takes care of his homework. He works on photos and videos of sports. He can pull away from the game when he decides to. That is all true.

It is also true that he still fights the phone, we all do. He mutes a lot of conversations. He is thirteen, and the phone is very good at what it does.

The one rule I can actually try to enforce

At our house the phones go down at dinner and at the things that matter, trying to make us all conscious of how to be present with people (boy is that hard these days). I think of it as getting back to the way it was in the nineties, when you were just in the room with people.

That rule is not only for the kids. I said it on Sunday: my wife and I both work on our phones, and it can look like we are on them more than we should be. If the rule only applied to the boys, they would notice. Yea we scroll into the nonsense as well, but still try to be present.

So for an hour, around a table, nobody is listening to the crowd. That is a good hour. I would not trade it.

But it is an hour.

I cannot mute it for him

“Everything is permissible for me,” but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me,” but I will not be mastered by anything.1 Corinthians 6:12 (BSB)

The last part of that verse is in the first person. I will not be mastered. Not, my dad will make sure I am not mastered.

I cannot mute that group chat for my son. I cannot police him twenty-four hours a day, and if I tried, I would only teach him to get better at hiding. The chat will keep going whether he is in it or not. Whether he listens to it is his call. It has to be.

That is what this week cost me. Not a moment I get to feel proud about. The part where it stops being mine to decide.

Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?Matthew 7:9 (BSB)

So if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!Matthew 7:11 (BSB)

I am a father who gets plenty wrong, and I still know how to give my son bread. So I can ask the Father who gets none of it wrong to give him what I cannot: an ear for a different voice than the crowd’s.

My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me.John 10:27 (BSB)

Next week the voice gets louder. It stops being a crowd and starts having a name and a target. We will look at a man who was building something good when the people around him decided to tear him down.

By Name · Week 1 Complete · The series continues