Tip of My Iceberg

She has watched her older sister and her cousins as they lose themselves in the blue tint of the tiny screen.

And then, during a time when her mom was in a meeting with Thea on her lap, she introduced Ms. Rachel to her.

For those of you unfamiliar with this new screen icon, Ms. Rachel is a popular children’s educator and YouTuber. Her videos help with speech and language development for toddlers, especially those with speech delays, prompted by her own son and his speech issues.

Kids love her.

My daughter wasn’t excited about her girls being on screens. She’s seen the effects of screen usage on nieces and nephews–it’s not always a pretty picture. Screen time has a way of capturing the minds of the young, negatively impacting their ability to process the world around them and interact with other people. It can even cause developmental delays.

We’re all attracted to new and shiny things. It’s why everyone wants to get the newest iPhone or the next-generation game console. It becomes even more desirable if an authority figure tells us we shouldn’t get it or that it’s not good for us. We want to do what we shouldn’t do.

We have a natural tendency toward disobedience and outright rebellion. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova Scotian politician, judge, and author, once said, “Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.” Children are the best reflections of this truth, whether at home, in the classroom, or on the playground. If a set of rules is presented, it’s only a matter of time till some child tries to break them.

It’s what we’re prone to do, a dilemma that we’ve had to deal with since the beginning of time. When God created the world and filled it with all kinds of wonderful things, man was His last creation, and upon seeing what He had made, He declared it very good.

God made man to have a relationship with Him, a sharing of His bountiful love and grace. After the Lord had created Adam, He took him to the Garden of Eden, “and commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’” Genesis 2:16-17.

Adam was alone in the world, with no one of his kind, and God knew that wasn’t good, so He made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.

An enemy existed in the garden, a serpent that was beautiful to look at. His goal was to cause the man and woman to disobey God, to break the relationship they had with Him. The serpent spoke to Eve, twisting God’s words just enough to confuse her. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” Genesis 3:1.

Eve responded that they couldn’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden or even touch it, or they would die.

She didn’t get the rule right.

The serpent tempted her with the beauty and tastiness of the fruit, and he also said that God was keeping things from them because eating it would make them wise like God. It made sense to Eve to eat something that appeared to be so good, so she ate the fruit and gave some to Adam to eat.

Consequences came with disobeying God. They’d worked before, but it became harder. They were forced to leave paradise. And they brought with them that desire to disobey and rebel that every human being who has ever lived has to deal with.

Like Thea’s mom wanting to withhold something that wasn’t helpful for her daughter, so God has tried to protect us from all the darkness that can hurt us.

It’s our choice, however, to obey or not. When God says no, it’s often for our good. He has our best interests at heart.

That’s what real love does; it protects us from what we don’t fully know.

God loves us enough to tell us no.