WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 28

On raising children in a culture you cannot filter — and why a sealed room was never the goal.

““I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.””
John 17:15–17 · KJV

Every parent I know is losing somewhere. There is a phone you cannot fully see into, a group chat you were never in, an algorithm that has more hours with your child this month than you do. The arithmetic is genuinely against you, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

So the instinct is to build higher. More rules, fewer devices, a tighter circle. That instinct comes from love and it is not wrong, exactly. It is just aimed at the wrong target.

Because look at what Jesus prayed on the last night of his life, for the people he was about to leave in a hostile world. He had every reason to ask for their removal. He asked for something else.

Not that thou shouldest take them out of the world — but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

Protect them, and then sanctify them — set them apart by what is true. Not extraction. Formation. He was not praying for a bubble; he was praying for people who could stand up inside the weather.

Which reframes the job. You are not trying to keep the world away from your child. You are trying to keep your child long enough for them to become someone who can meet it. Every wall you build is on a timer, and the timer is shorter than you think. What you are actually building, in the time the walls buy you, is a person.

Three things that follow from that, none of which require you to win a fight about screen time tonight.

Look at who is shaping them, not just what they are watching. Children are formed far more by the people around them than by the content in front of them. You cannot pick your child’s friends — try it and watch how well it goes — but you have enormous say over the rooms they stand in. The team, the group, the table, the Sunday. Choose those on the quality of the people rather than the quality of the programme, and friendships form inside a circle you chose.

Look at what you model, because that is the curriculum. Your children are not learning your values from what you tell them about your values. They are learning from your calendar and your reflexes. If they have never seen you open a Bible, no amount of insisting it matters will land. If church is optional and practice is not, they have received a clear teaching about which one is real. This is the part that stings, and it is the part with the most leverage, because it is the only one entirely within your control.

Prepare them to be different rather than to fit in. Somewhere along the way we started treating normal as the safe target. Look honestly at what normal now means for a fifteen-year-old — anxious, exhausted, comparing themselves to strangers at midnight. Normal is not a refuge. A child who knows their family is deliberately not normal, and knows why, has something to stand on when the moment comes that you are not in the room.

And that moment comes. It is late, they are somewhere you did not choose, and everything you built has to hold without you. This is the honest part: it might not. Faithful parents raise children who walk away, and that is not a verdict on the parents. You are not running a machine with guaranteed output. You are raising a person with a will of their own, which is exactly what makes love possible at all.

So do the protecting. And do the sanctifying, which is slower and less satisfying and matters more. Then keep praying the prayer Jesus prayed — not that they would be taken out of it, but that they would be kept.

This Week’s Prayer

Father, I cannot build a wall high enough, and I am tired of trying. Keep them. Not away from everything, but through it. Where I have taught them something I did not mean to teach, forgive me and give me time to teach it again. Make our home a place where truth is ordinary. And when the night comes that I am not in the room, be in it. Amen.