We are living in a culture that is heavily inundated with altered realities. Its primary clientele? Children. We have our children so "doctored-up" with alternative realities through fantasy, gaming, movies, books and toys that they are hard pressed to know which reality they actually live in. And even worse, they have no idea which reality is spiritually true.
These days, when you attempt to read a Bible story to someone else’s child, if you ask who the angel is who is warning Joseph to take the baby and flee to Egypt, the child is apt to exclaim: "a fairy!" When asked how Lazarus was raised from the dead, young children have answered, "magic!" This is serious disorientation, and we are reaping a whirlwind of future trouble by allowing it, encouraging it, "buying it" (someone out there is buying it or script writers wouldn't be increasingly producing it; how many Christians are among them?) and babysitting with it by the hour. This is misguided parenting and intellectual fraud—mental abandonment at its zenith. Do we care as much about what goes into the minds of our children as we do about what's on their plates for dinner?
The God-head (Christ/the Heavenly Father/the Holy Spirit) does live in another realm—in the only legitimate larger reality—encircling this earthly one. Sometimes God directly invades this three-dimensional realm of earth in a way that we can see, but at all times He influences and is invested in this reality—far beyond what we understand or know. His sovereignty enfolds all of this reality. But there is an enemy, close on His heels, sabotaging that one ultimate reality with invitations to other realities that are filled with tinsel, glitter, falsehood, addiction, titillation, skewed versions of "virtue" (where the bad guy wins), idolatry, witchcraft, rewritten fundamentals (such as, who is a man and who is a woman, and who is a human and who is an animal—and who is something else altogether?), grotesqueness and violence. In the end, these altered realities deliver nothing but delusion. They do not "outfit" a person to handle real life problems and real relationships in the only real world there is.
Your children do not need more time being entertained. Put the brakes on. Instead, their valuable discretionary hours can be far better spent learning life-skills, gaining relational prowess, learning a large conceptual alphabet of how the real world works (i.e. an education—about real subjects like physics, chemistry and biology), enlarging entrepreneurial skills, and maturing an ability to know and deeply worship the One who made them and redeemed them. How many children today know how to pray...rather than to wish upon a star? How many know the Bible as thoroughly as their TV set or their electronic communication devices? Our children might be at our dinner tables these days, but mentally many of them are largely in another realm. This is frightening. Wake up. Say no. Just one walk through the toy department at Wal-Mart could be enough to make a mother go outside and throw up—if she really comprehends what is there.
