continued...
When a Christian young girl is not cultivating habits to
quietly observe older girls and older women, she becomes wise in her own eyes
as she ascertains through a default self-focus that she knows what there is to
know. She in essence places herself as a
peer with them, and sometimes through posturing as hip and cool, indifferent
and disinterested, she postures herself above them. She then becomes effectively immune from their
influence. She has her friends with whom
she is impressed and whom she seeks to impress, and that is the boundary of her
world.
When this other world becomes more real, more compelling,
than the mental world they find at home, their allegiance crosses over from
their parents and the church to their peers.
Their boundaries become what their peers find important, interesting,
fashionable, desirable, wonderful and wonder-filled.
Thinking on those things becomes more natural than being
enchanted with the glory of life in Christ and the wonder of God’s character,
creation, reality. Seeking out an
increase of those things becomes more natural than seeking out an increase of
knowledge of their Lord and Savior and a closer walk with Him, and a more
defined and familiar progress in becoming a godly young woman who shines with
His countenance on her face. Thoughts
turn inward to the collective world being created by the peer group.
At a young age, this starts with an avalanche of silly talk
and mindless, empty chatter. But the
human heart does not operate in a vacuum.
The human heart wants to know, to experience, to be shadowed by
wonder. If that wonder ceases to be
satiated with knowledge of God, wonder of God, and the intense joy of being in
relationship with Him, that wonder goes to the crevasses of the world and
begins to look in.
Because of the content of the pre-teen books (most containing
coming-of-age angst, self-focus, power plays, and at least some references to
occult, sex, and all containing worldviews at utter war with godliness); and because
of the content of the movies, whether that which is inane and foolish at best, or
that which does systematic violence to our life in Christ; because of the
content of the stories and the culture that surrounds us….the progressive next
step for the empty and silly chatter of young girls is to begin to be drawn
into the false realities of these influences.
These stories tell them of the world around them, they titillate their
imaginations, they captivate their thoughts, and slowly the reality of their
group-think becomes an interest in the bolder things of the world. Each girl has her particular bent—power,
sensuality, dark things of the underworld, love of money, daring exploits—but
in the “sleep-over world”, where hours of talk amongst peers has to have more
fuel for the fire, more topics to discuss, more shock value to add to a lively
interchange, talk begins to turn to these things, because those are the seeds
that have been planted by the movies, books, stories they’ve imbibed corporately (each girl
has had her exposure to this or that and it all comes together in a toxic brew
of chatter).
Then, those thoughts become more dominant in the mind and
heart. Then, girls who are in the church
begin unconsciously, and without any desire to do so at all, and no understanding, to live dual lives. Their spoken priorities are church-oriented
and their heart’s desire is still to live in Christ and know more of Him but
they are feeding the other side of their heart more regularly and their heart’s
captivation is leaning toward the world and they don’t even realize it. But the trajectory of their thought life,
their discussions as a group, will be consumed with worldly things. And as a teenager, actions will begin to
follow this reality.
Some of the telling signs of this transfer taking root and
“becoming” are, flippant postured behavior that has little sense of otherness;
constant empty chatter seasoned with foolish content; disinterest in beginning
to understand and assimilate deeper godly instruction; talking about wild
things as the fun, the desirable, the “I love---”s; lack of truly engaging or
responding attentively/lovingly to the people they’re with; lack of enjoyment
of quieter, good things, done together socially; increasing lack inability to
exhibit a one-anothering attitude of interaction; and random pop-off comments
about things from the world of darkness.
If a girl has a known rebellious heart, and a practiced
disinterest in the things of our Lord, yes, I would say she is an unfit
companion to be in constant influence with a daughter; for her talk, thoughts,
and actions will assume, over time, a normality to her close companions. The Word warns us against this…
Continued tomorrow...
teasing the longsuffering brother
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