It’s been Romans all year.  Last school year the Romans were the subject of our history curriculum.  For most of this year, the sermons at my church have focused on a close verse by verse study of the book of Romans.

It’s been on my mind; you can see why.

The last part of Romans 16:19 says   . . . but I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil.

This quote was shared when that chapter was read.

I want to see you experts in good, and not even beginners in evil.   
JB Phillips

When I think about raising my kids in a culture of screens and information overload and pornography beaming down to us from every portal, I keep circling back around to that idea.

Because we’ve got it all wrong somehow, don’t we?

We think we need know about all the bad things – be ahead of the curve.  See every bad movie and every bad show and hear every bad song and know every bad word so we can avoid them all.

Except.  Of course.  We can’t.  We can’t avoid them all.  It seems that there is a constant, endless, with an everlasting kind of strength, bubbling caldron of wicked that seems to be always brewing something new that is horrible and shockingly surprising in its badness.

We could never keep up.

I am starting to think we aren’t meant to.

We want to know good.  I want my children to KNOW good.    I want to know good.

To know good so well that when we see any creative new kind of awful we can quickly know right away that it is bad.  Not because we’ve ever heard of this new bad, but because we know good so intimately.

And I think that the path to knowing good so closely is the path of knowing Jesus so closely.

We can never surround ourselves too fully with the saving and the hope filled words of a Christ who died for us.  We can never become too familiar with the good of God.

My mama’s heart wants to protect, to shield and even to hide away my children from the stacks and the towers of the evil that is actively searching them out.  The wicked that wants to devour them.  The bad that wants to have them for dinner.

But even if I could secure them to the nest for a time, it is a rather painfully limited security.  A shadow of safety.  A farce.

Better to spend our nest living days pouring the good into their hearts.  Allowing the good to appear just as lovely as it truly is.  Just as powerful as it rightfully is in its natural state, minus my aid or my reframing.

With the hope that when the evil seeps in the cracks, when the wicked taps on their shoulders and shows up on the screens of their iPhones, when the awful invites them to stay awhile, perhaps they will see it for what it is – a pale imitation of the good.  A shadow of what their heart actually desires.  A veneer that is nothing like what is real and lasting.

And that in the light of truth, the good will shine brightly because they’ve known it for so long and so fondly.

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