Invisible Love

Currently, there is lots of media attention being paid to online relationships – especially ones where it turns out the people have never even met but have fallen deeply in love. These relationships have lasted for years and are real in every way: deep sharing occurs, trust is established, the other is valued, life is celebrated, gifts are exchanged and lives are impacted. All without ever having met.

People are eager and willing to enter into and continue relationships based upon information presented online. They open their lives, hearts and wallets – all without ever having met the other person. (The skeptic in me pictures the person on the other end as some nut living in his grandmother's basement with his PC parked next to the water heater.)

What amazing trust – offered without question sometimes even more quickly than face to face relationships. People investing in these "invisible" relationships confidently defend their actions by declaring it is “love”.

At the core of everyone is a deep need to be loved and cherished. The fact that people would search where there is no complete answer tells us how desperate humans have become. They have completely missed the reason why God created humans in the first place.

This has me thinking about God’s “invisible love”.

What about that? God’s love is not only invisible in today’s economy it is not even valued as much as that invisible love from a keyboard miles away typing into our souls. Why, I wonder, are people so willing to engage in an invisible relationship online rather than develop a real relationship with God through Jesus Christ? Trust is given these online “friends” while real relationships wait on the side lines. And both are equal? In today’s culture I guess so. But not in God’s eyes.

Let’s focus our kids on who is real and investing in their lives. Even though they can’t see God, he is real. Even though they can see the internet icon, faceless “friends” are not real. We’ve got our work cut out for us, haven’t we? Especially with younger kids who are still concrete thinkers.

This is the question parents of today must face. They must know who else is competing for their children’s attention and they must balance that with everyday life. To fail in this is to lose another generation to self-focus and regulate seeking God once again to an option on some life-menu of our own design.

The thing that should shake us to our core is the "menu". When we order, we think we can go back another time and pick something else. We’re fooled into thinking that all choices are equal. They’re not. What we do with our relationship with God is truly more important than anything else. Our kids need to know what that looks like and how much more real that is in their techno-online-CGI-instant world. Just because they cannot see or touch it, does not mean we can not point them to the evidence of how real God is.

This will look different for each child. My prayer is for each parent to find that ah-ha connection where you are able to communicate the real love of a real God to your child. For me, it means I have lots of conversations with God. He loves our kids more than we do, so I’d say we have the best resource available. And we don’t even have to Google him.