By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS: I reflect on the internet’s evolution from a joyful tool for connection and faith-sharing to a platform spreading moral confusion, proposing that ordinary Christian family life has become a radical witness.
I got online in 1998 and never looked back. What a wonderful invention the internet is.
Before the WWW came into our lives, in the 1980s I never would have thought that photos of normal families with a married mom & dad, doing normal things, would be radical, but there you have it. When the 1990s came along and with it, the global connectedness, I and most people were charmed. We could correspond instantly with far-flung family and friends. We could see far-away cities. GPS provided us precise mapping. Google answered our questions. It was great.
When I was saved in the early 2000s, the internet was even better for me, because I could share verses, encourage others, witness to one or to a multitude.
Satan roams up and down the earth and he does not rest. He soon began using the internet for his own evil purposes. Porn, Dark web, rumors, and lies. And in the faith, false teachers now had a bigger platform online. The same witnessing solid Christians could do was evilly done by false teachers with evil doctrine.
We began seeing photos and stories about drag queens, homosexuals, sown doubt and liberal ideas into the faith, feminism, and a shift in the nuclear family, where the normal pattern had been mom, dad, married with children, all living under one roof. Now we see throuples, bigamy, surrogacy, homosexual men buying babies, fully made up grotesque ‘drag queens’ interacting at libraries with impressionable children. The internet provided for all of it.
This isn’t anything we already don’t know.
As I surf my little world online, I post scripture, I write about Jesus, I re-post edifying material, and I message others that I am praying for them. Then I turn from joyful duty to relaxing, by seeing the pictures of friends happy family, or their children achieving something good, and it is satisfying.
Because I am analytical, I recently began to ponder why I’m so satisfied by seeing simple family photos posted online. The ones that are staged for Easter or birthdays. The candid ones where the dad or mom or kids are just joking around. SAHM moms cooking. Dads playing outside with their children. Why are these so fulfilling? I mean, beyond the enjoyable, eventually I noticed something deeper.
Finally I came up with an answer. Not THE answer certainly, but one that makes sense to me.
It’s because family photos of a heterosexual married couple with children being happy and doing normal things is radical now. It’s flipped. At least online, the heterosexual, happy family is the inverse of normal, which has become all the filth mentioned above. We are living an inverse life.
During my lifetime, from the thick photo album of the 1980s to the social media phone pictures in the first quarter of the 2000s, we have seen an aggressive intrusion of the weird, perverted, and biblically repugnant and its attendant hostile assertion that this is normal, not that.
A patriarchal dad with a stay-at-home mom with children who engage in normal studies and normal activities are part of a rapidly shifting norm that engenders intense scrutiny, hatred, even, from the sinning segments of society, social media push-back, and constant whataboutism.
We as Christians see words like ‘radical’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘amazing worship’, and we may begin to think we are missing out. But the Bible says to be self-controlled, disciplined, constant. Those aren’t alluring words, but they are solid words. Those who cling to those words have a solid life and yes, a radicalness that is out of the ordinary these days. Far from being a flibbergibbet always seeking ‘the next thing’ a solid man or woman of God is steady, even (especially) in the mundane. And now, the mundane is revolutionary.
Social media is a window to the world. A microcosm, to be sure, but a highly influential one. In fact, an entire new job sphere emerged after social media embedded into our lives, one called “Influencer.” Satan is restless and relentless, he never rests, and neither do his minions, and certainly not his influence. Sadly, we Christians sometimes flag, get lax, even apathetic about witnessing online. We don’t think it’s important to keep presenting Jesus and His standards lived out to the (microcosmic) world of social media. But we should always be vigilant to do so.
Ladies, being content to live an ordinary life of washing dishes, cooking meals, folding laundry, movie nights with the kids, birthday parties in the backyard, walking the dog…are radical now. Keep posting posts that respect your husband, not complaining about him. Keep posting photos that show your joy as a mom. Looking to the positive of a biblically grounded life IS ‘doing big things for God’. Keep posting those pics. Not as performative! but as a real life person, living what is by now a radical life of the ordinary.
the-end-time.org 