Just about 10 minutes ago, I gave a few words of encouragement to a friend of mine --which inspired this new posting. Another fellow student-parent that I know (we’ll call her Terry for the blog sake) recently got her IPod stolen out of her car. The reason Terry is so distraught is because her iPod had all the pictures of her daughter in it since the baby was a newborn. She placed the pictures on her iPod due to her laptop crashing and the father lost the SD card so the iPod was her primary source to hold the pictures. Besides the fact that theft is very petty, disrespectful, and basically…. a sin-- as a parent, I completely understand how she feels. I have almost 2000 pictures in my phone. 80% of them are of Addy alone. She brings home artwork multiple times a week from daycare and I attempt to save as much as I can in a shoebox. I saved my baby shower balloons, bracelets I wore in the hospital during delivery, and even the stub of her umbilical cord in her keepsake box. She is my firstborn so I try to keep as much as a can.
When trying to give words of encouragement to her, I came to my own realization. I told her how much I understood why she was upset and that I was sorry but I also told her not to be attached to wordly objects. Yes our pictures and items from different times in our life are important to us, but they are of the world. God willing, I will always have good memory to remember all the precious moments of my child. We are not here to develop emotions over wordly objects. Our homes, cars, clothes, jewelry, cell phones, money, electronics…list goes on. All these things are important to us but when we tie emotions into them, they become idols.
All things we put above God are idols. We can spend hours looking at our Twitter TL (people don’t be talking bout nothing!) but rush through our prayers...if we pray at all; we can stand in line for some hours for some J’s or a video game but complain when church is going past it’s typical hours; working multiple hours a week just to skip church Sunday because we are too tired.
We put so much worth and power into these wordly things not realizing God is a jealous God and has the power to take it all away in the blink of an eye. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions-is not from the Father but is from the world 1John 2:15
I am not saying that Terry lost her iPod because she loved it so much and God decided to remove it from her life. It inspired me to talk about how we as humans tie our emotions into worldly things and how it can weigh heavy on us when we lack those worldly things.
It is okay to place value and worth onto things we possess. But as I just figured out, Money is not the root of all evil- The LOVE of money is the root of all-evil. You can replace the word “money” with any other noun we tie emotions to.
When trying to give words of encouragement to her, I came to my own realization. I told her how much I understood why she was upset and that I was sorry but I also told her not to be attached to wordly objects. Yes our pictures and items from different times in our life are important to us, but they are of the world. God willing, I will always have good memory to remember all the precious moments of my child. We are not here to develop emotions over wordly objects. Our homes, cars, clothes, jewelry, cell phones, money, electronics…list goes on. All these things are important to us but when we tie emotions into them, they become idols.
All things we put above God are idols. We can spend hours looking at our Twitter TL (people don’t be talking bout nothing!) but rush through our prayers...if we pray at all; we can stand in line for some hours for some J’s or a video game but complain when church is going past it’s typical hours; working multiple hours a week just to skip church Sunday because we are too tired.
We put so much worth and power into these wordly things not realizing God is a jealous God and has the power to take it all away in the blink of an eye. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions-is not from the Father but is from the world 1John 2:15
I am not saying that Terry lost her iPod because she loved it so much and God decided to remove it from her life. It inspired me to talk about how we as humans tie our emotions into worldly things and how it can weigh heavy on us when we lack those worldly things.
It is okay to place value and worth onto things we possess. But as I just figured out, Money is not the root of all evil- The LOVE of money is the root of all-evil. You can replace the word “money” with any other noun we tie emotions to.
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