Fix Your Filter

We were changing out air filters the other day when my 11 year-old asked, why we have to use a filter.  “Would the air conditioner stop working if we didn't have a filter,” he asked as he looked up into the black hole of duct work in the ceiling.   We explained that it wouldn’t stop working but the filter helped to trap dust and keep it out of the air in the house.  We showed him the old filter as a visual, filled with the brownish-grey dust of the past three or four months.  I could have expected his next question.  “Where does all that dust come from?”  Hmm…some of it is dead skin, some of it comes in when we open and close the doors. 
 
I recall life as a teacher, having to tell my high school students to fix their filter.  At first that expression was new to them, but I explained, “just because it pops into your mind, doesn’t mean it should come out of your mouth, you need a filter.”  I truly, wondered how some of their unfiltered comments ever became a part of their mind.   The answer, though, is not hard to find.  We live in an era where information is everywhere.  We need only a phone, a tablet, or a computer and a Wi-fi signal.  Immediately we have games with ads for e-cigarettes, pornography, Viagra, and other enticing things showing up along the side.  We have access to all sorts of videos—unfiltered and uncensored right at our fingertips.  I have even noticed that, recently, the news is not much better.  They show cell phone video of accidents and fights; surveillance footage of robberies and shootings; police body-cam videos of suspects running or fighting, or the police themselves misbehaving. 
 
When I was little, there was a song that went, “Be careful little eyes what you see, what you see.   Be careful little ears what you hear, what you hear.”   I looked it up and it is an interpretation of Luke 11:35.  “See to it, then that the light within you is not darkness.”  We must be cautious of what we see and do because those things become a part of us and shape our thinking.   If we spend a large amount of time watching videos of people engaged in sin, sin will become so common to us that we will no longer recognize it as bad.  When we don’t see sin as bad, we allow it to become a part of our thoughts, our speech, and our lives.  If we are not cautious about what we see and hear, the light within us, the light of Jesus, will become dim. 
 
I have found that also with a Wi-fi signal, we have access to many different versions of the Bible, Christian videos, e-books and Christian blogs, such as this one.  What we do online is a matter of choice.  We can choose to consume that which builds or that which destroys.  We must help our children make wise choices, too.  Most phones or tables have parental controls we can set to be filters of content.  We must engage our children in conversation to share the light from our day and find out what they are doing and thinking.  Sin is real, it’s common, and easily accessible.  If we fix the filter of what we consume, we can be sure that what we exude is light.


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Stay positive this week!
Thank you for reading!
​Kim

Copyright 2018 by Kimberly Griffith Anderson