We are a connected generation. Because we’re always connected, it seems life is busier and more and more people are pulling at our shirt strings. Whether it is work, ministry, volunteer places, or even friends and family, everyone has access to us all the time. And it is stressful.
There is a lot of joking, laughing, and even sincere articles making the rounds on the Internet. A lot of those articles are well meaning and discuss the crazy, overwhelming life of a mom. It is true, raising children each generation gets harder. For one, the generation we are raising right now has never known a world without smart phones, smart TVs, or smart watches. Everywhere they turn answers can be found in a few short clicks and keystrokes on Google or now asked verbally of Alexa and Siri. We don’t even have to type now to ask our questions. Can we talk into our watches and get answers, too? I honestly don’t even know that response but it doesn’t seem far-fetched.
But why does all these seemingly beneficial technologies make us feel stretched to our maximum capacity at all times? It’s because we weren’t built to connect with people twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. Instead, our father created us to be fully connected to him. In this day and age, though, we(I) put more weight on the tangible things pulling us in all directions away from God. Our very real enemy knows the goodness and positive aspects of technology can also be used for distraction. Distraction is his game and he’s good at it. He’s so good it’s like in the days of old, watching the likes of Michael Jordan or Reggie Miller’s bodies move with a basketball in hand up and down the court so systematically that their bodies take over and it becomes who they are, distracting the opposing team’s players, scoring baskets, and it looks like art.
The enemy is much the same way. We are told he is crafty (Gen 1:3, NIV) and he “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour,” (1 Peter 5:8, NIV). Everything about him is systematic. He is so good at distraction it is who he is. So when we see ourselves falling into this pattern of busy-ness and overly connected to others, we might look at God as another relationship with have to check off the list of appeasement. We may even start to doubt our worthiness because we forget where our worth lies. We’ve missed the mark of where our connections need to be. Yet, in many of those “good enough” articles, we’re not encouraged to go back to God. We stop to say, “Yes someone gets me,” and then we move on to our next text message or next article shared on Facebook.
Somehow this idea of “good enough” became the norm. It’s like saying it is okay to drown yourself in all the busy-ness. It’s normal. My Friend, it is not normal, nor is it how we were created. We weren’t created by a good enough God. We weren’t created to just be good enough or do a good enough job. Hear me out.
God created Adam and then he created Eve. He didn’t create Adam and say, “Well he’s good enough.” He didn’t take Adam’s rib and say, “This rib is good enough to create Eve.” No he said his creation was very good. Looking at the original Hebrew language of the word very, it means “muchness, force, abundance.”[1] We weren’t created as good enough; no, we were created as plentiful. Let that sink in for a minute. Dare I say, we were made to be a plentiful force for the kingdom of heaven.
We were not made to allow good enough to be good enough, especially in our marriages and our families, and definitely not in our relationship with God. Don’t settle for a good enough marriage. Instead, have a vibrant, fun, laughing, and open one-ness with your spouse. It is possible. Our children, they aren’t a burden. They were created just as we were—they are abundant, plentiful, and deserve more than good enough. And you should spend time with them helping to form them into human beings you want to be around when they are adults.
Our relationship with God shouldn’t be what Anne Graham Lotz refers to as a “holy hobby.” Showing up on Sunday morning, journaling and collecting cute bibles isn’t a relationship. Relationships take work, take effort, and take time. If we aren’t giving time to God we cannot have a relationship with him. We cannot live in this freedom we hear about all the time in church.
Imagine what rejoicing the enemy does for each time we ignore our time with God, our husbands, and our kids. There is no furthering of the kingdom with force. What’s left is fighting, fatigue, and a frenzied home life.
You know, the most important relationships do not include our social media time lines, Alexa, or Siri and yet we give them the majority of our time. We’ve started giving our kids our phones or tablets at dinner instead of talking to them. We stare at our phones and laptops instead of our husband’s eyes hearing how his day went. We’ve stopped cooking for our families because we’ve run out of time and now we are eating from boxes.
I’m in this battle, as we speak. I want to step away from social media, yet as a stay at home mom, this is one way for me to socialize. I also want to step away and then I realize so much information goes out through Facebook. How do we manage it all? How do we allow technology to enhance our lives instead of taking over our lives? How do we slow down this systematic design to destroy marriages, family relationships, giving us this mentality that good enough is somehow good enough with the very real people in our homes?
Let’s not let the good enough is good enough mentality extend into the relationships of the very people we are doing life with together. There is kingdom work at stake.
[1] Bible Hub. (2004-2016). http://biblehub.com/hebrew/3966.htm
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