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Jul 09, 2023 06:00am

Dear Daughter

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Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.

Proverbs 4:23

Dear Daughter,
As you enter this season of life as a teenager, quickly changing into a young woman in a digital age, I want you to know I do not want to hide you from the world so that you don’t know how to function in it later (although, with the many scary things out there vying for your heart and mind, it is tempting). I know you think I’m old-fashioned. The truth is, there are simply things I didn’t have to think about until a little over ten years ago (and you were so young then that I didn’t worry about them yet)—like how to navigate relationships with people in a digital world where messages can be private, hidden, or deleted at the swipe of a screen.

I admit, there are things you are dealing with that I didn’t experience as a child or teen. If you wanted to talk to someone then, you had to write them a letter (yes, by hand) or pick up the phone and call them out in the open where the rest of your family could hear every word. If you were lucky enough to have a cordless phone or a phone in your room, people could still pick up another phone in the house and hear your conversation. Private conversations were not a huge fear.

We didn’t have tablets, smart phones, or personal computers (until high school). I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was in college, and it couldn’t even text.

Today, it is so much easier to hide things. As you live in a world that seems almost 100 percent digital, I am still learning the best ways to help you navigate it safely. Like I said, I don’t want to keep you away from it and isolate you. I also know I can’t shield you from everything. But I do know the dangers out there, and I want to help protect you.

Regardless of whether getting to know someone is done digitally, in person, over the phone, or by letter, there are some truths that are timeless, like the Word of God, that I want you to know:

1) Guard your heart
It is easy to think the first person (or any person) who tells us we’re beautiful or they love us is the key to our lasting happiness. It makes us feel valued, special, loved, like nothing in the world could hurt us as long as we have this person’s affection. Those feelings are wonderful. But be careful—our feelings can easily trick us into thinking we have found life’s true satisfaction, as well as our meaning and worth, in being adored by another person. Our feelings can make us think we have found perfect security in the arms and understanding of another. Have you ever thought, Wow, he really gets me! or, I feel so much better after talking to him? We must be careful before another person’s love becomes our whole reason for getting up each day.

2) Emotions can’t always be trusted
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Our emotions can lead us astray. Affection for another person (whether friendship or romantic) can be a wonderful gift from God, but our heart can use those feelings of love or attraction to lie to us. That person, or even just having those feelings, can become an idol to us—something we love and want more than God, and something we are willing to sin to get or sin if we don’t get. The feeling of love can be addicting, and we will often do more and more to get that sensation repeated—sometimes things we will regret later and that are not honoring to God. As our emotions persist, they need their appetite satiated; they want to rule the throne of our hearts, making all our decisions for us. We must check our emotions against the measuring stick of God’s Word, weighing and examining them to see if they are true, right, good, and causing us to act in a way that pleases God.

3) Purity is precious
Guarding our hearts will also help protect our minds and bodies. The heart is the governing seat of all our faculties—if we don’t guard our hearts, we can easily slip into impure thoughts and impure actions. If we give the rights to our heart away to another person, not only may they not care for it well, we will quickly be willing to give them the rights to our mind and body as well.

Think of your heart as the gate of a castle with a key—when you give the key away to someone, there is little stopping them from entering the castle and taking over every room. They now have access to everything, and you gave it to them willingly because you were “in love” or they made you feel beautiful and special. What happens if that person turns out to be a thief or a freeloader? They take from the castle and leave behind destruction, or they just want to use all the castle’s resources for their own pleasure-seeking and temporary fulfillment before they’re on to the next castle.

Our bodies are temples (or castles). We want to keep them pure and unbroken-into by thieves and squanderers. We want to keep our emotional and physical attachments safe and special for the person they were made for. Humanly speaking, it means your spouse—if God plans for you to marry—but most of all, it means Christ.

4) Christ alone can satisfy
Our hearts and bodies were made for Jesus Christ. Not only did He make us, but He also purchased us with the price of His life when He died on the cross for our sins. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

We should want our feelings, thoughts, and actions to be pleasing to Him, guided by Him, and for Him supremely. Our hearts were made with a need for love that only Jesus can satisfy. Human love, while a beautiful thing to be treasured and enjoyed, will never truly fulfill our deepest desire to be known, loved, and seen as valuable. Only God fully knows us, loves us unconditionally, can be perfectly trusted with our hearts, and gives us our worth.

This stage of life is tough—and even more so with the challenges and temptations of a digital world. My prayer for you is to be safe, discerning, and wise. You can do that by knowing God’s Word and following it, having openness and accountability with the people who care about you (that would be us old folks over here—your parents), and by believing what God says about you more than anyone else’s words. Don’t let anyone else be the determiner of your worth. Know that you are more loved by God than by anyone else and are more beautiful in His sight than in the eyes of anyone else. Live in that love, drawing close to the One who loves you every day.

I love you,
Mom