My Tech-Wise LifeSample

A Dad Responds to a Daughter’s Pain [by Andy]

Dear Amy,

I have to admit this is so hard to read. I’ve never for a moment seen you as anything other than beautiful. It’s painful to realize you were so distraught about how you looked to others, and maybe above all to yourself. It’s wrenching to know that technology amplified all that insecurity, in spite of everything our family did to limit its effects, and that you had to bear so much alone.

Although I wish I could have spared you the pain of insecurity, I’m not sure that’s actually a proper or godly wish—because it doesn’t seem to be what God chooses even for his own people, or for that matter His own Son.

This is part of growing up. It’s not the fun part. But it is essential. Somehow I think even the stories in Genesis are essential in that way—they show God’s people, Abraham and Sarah, coming to terms with who they really are. On the one hand they’ve been singled out by God to bless the whole world. That ought to give them a sense of security and purpose. But they keep acting in ways that undermine the whole thing.

And though their foolishness wasn’t broadcast in real time the way some of our worst moments can be today, it was somehow all told and retold until it ended up in the Bible. Imagine having your meanest, pettiest, ugliest day, or the day of your greatest humiliation and shame, put in the pages of the bestselling book in history! It happened to Sarai and to Hagar and her baby. We remember them today most vividly by some of their worst moments. And yet, this story is there because it is a part of a larger story of rescue. 

I’m so glad your terrible Instagram weekend ended that way too, with a rescue: dinner with Bethany that started with tears and ended with laughter. It’s really striking that though the shame and pain could happen when you were all by yourself with just a screen, the rescue had to happen with someone else, in a real place, no screens involved.

I think this is the real way out of insecurity: not actually being protected from it in the first place but being rescued from it by love. Once that’s happened, we can never be quite as insecure again.

Love, Dad

Screens aren’t the fundamental problem; they often heighten our other struggles and fears. How can you learn to look beyond screens?