Looking in All the Wrong Places

Yesterday at church, the Father’s Day sermon was about teaching your children, training them up, raising them right. The scripture was from Deuteronomy, a book that, according to my study Bible was written in 1406 B.C., 3219 years ago by my mental math. The scripture was about how the Hebrews were being told to clean up their act and get it together before they crossed into the promised land. The pastor talked about how drastically our culture has shifted recently. A young person sitting nearby expressed doubt that the change has been recent, commenting that the culture has been changing since the sixties.

The further context of this includes the reports from my husband and son about their observations of the prevailing culture in South Africa, where they recently spent two weeks. Some would say that South Africa is just “behind the times” with their emphasis on family, conservative dress and behavior, limited consumption of popular media, and methods of conducting public education for school-age kids. Even though I did not go along on the trip and see all of this first-hand, I have still required quite a lot of time to sit in my rocking chair on the front porch while I try to mentally digest all of the information they have fed me.

While there are many, many reasons I am thankful I live in this era instead of at any point in the past—modern medical and dental care are biggies, the ability of a woman to make her way alone in the world is another, and the ability to communicate instantly with friends and family around the world is a nice bonus—there are aspects of being “behind the times” a la South Africa that look pretty good to me. Above, I mentioned the age of Deuteronomy in order to bring attention to the timelessness of the behavior of humans and the enduring validity of the moral and ethical rules laid out in that book. You do not need to be a Christian or a Jew or any other religion to realize that we, humans, need standards of behavior in order to be effective in life.

On the one hand, it seems that the American culture has thrown standards right out the window. After thinking about it, though, I think the problem is that we get our standards from all the wrong places. All of the media in which we are all up to our necks (television, movies, music, videogames, and internet, for example) seems to be the source of most of our standards. Behavioral science has documented that children who are not being actively taught and guided by parents will adopt what they see in the media as reality and derive their standards from it. Do we really want our every day lives to mirror sitcoms? Or worse yet, “reality” shows? Many of us seem to get our standards from various celebrities. What percentage of celebrities are people of real character or intellect? Many of us rely on lawmakers to set standards for us. Need I say more about relying on politicians to set our standards? The latest legislation signed into law protects the rights of school employees to say “Happy Hanukah,” or “Merry Christmas” to students without fear of legal retribution. How does that grab you?

I am no different and certainly not any better human being than any of you who are reading this. I find myself constantly battling the pull of modern society to conform to whatever the standard of the day may be. The challenge for most of us is to step back mentally from the busy-ness of every day to see exactly what it is that we are doing and where we are heading. An even greater challenge is to swim against the tide by setting and adhering to a solid set of standards, based on time-proven principles. If you decide to swim upstream, know that you are not alone and know that your efforts will be appreciated.