I have had my rescue dogs for 9 months now and walking them multiple times per day has become a regular part of my life.  It’s tick season so I have to check them often.  Those nasty little pestilence hide quite well beneath the fur of my black and brown babies.  Yesterday I was holding Blanche and felt a tick in her ear.  It appeared to have been attached to her for a few days and when I pulled it out, it was dead as a door nail.  Sundays usually find me exhausted so I didn’t get up and immediately get rid of the tick.  Since it was dead, I actually plopped it on top of my phone screen (I know ewwww right?) lying on the coffee table and hung out with my girls for a while.  After about an hour, I picked up my phone to look at a text and the dead tick dropped onto my open bible.  After a few minutes I noticed that Blanche was quite agitated about something on the coffee table.  When I looked up, the tick was alive and attempting to escape!  I quickly killed it and that was the end of that, however, I couldn’t help but think of the irony of how the Word of God brings light and resurrection life to our bodies, and heals our minds, souls and emotions if we are taking time to read it!

While the tick was lying on the cell phone it had no life.   Someone at church yesterday made a great point.  They said that as parents we are not going to be able to get our kids & young adults to stop using their phones all the time so we need to empower them to use them for the Kingdom.  I agree with that statement.  We have to remember that kids don’t have any sense of their mortality and really don’t care about the harmful effects of something until it’s way too late.  If you have somehow managed to not hear some of the dangers of cell phones, indulge me while I give you a few examples.  An 18 year old girl carried her cell phone in her bra had a cancer tumor in the identical spot within a year.  People’s hip bones are becoming brittle and breaking from carrying phones in their pockets.  That’s the physical danger of low level radiation.  Bluetooths direct the radiation into the brain.  It is predicted that the new form of dementia will be social media dementia and it will begin when people are in their 40’s & 50’s.  There are so many studies already about this stuff and we are really just getting started.  That’s why it has become so trendy to learn to be mindful and single focused.  We have to learn to do one thing at a time again because our phones have made us zombies.

So how can we use our phones for good and teach our kids to do the same?  Here is just one tip.  If you haven’t already downloaded a bible app on your phone, do it today.  There are some great ones that are free.  My favorite is the Youversion.  I love it because not only do I have the Word at my fingertips whenever I need to reference a scripture, (after all it’s our instruction manual for life) but I can have it read the bible to me out loud while I am driving, cleaning, falling asleep, etc.