Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. PROVERBS 4:23
What if I told that every day a legion of competitors was lining up to enter your home, your workplace, your car and even your phone to seduce you and your spouse?
They are. Each day assorted voices and images lure your spouse and you away from each other: television, cable, Internet, email, blogs, chat rooms, radio, magazines, newspapers, music, movies, books and video games. Media is competing with you for your spouse's attention and affection!
Media takes time away from your relationship with your spouse. Keep track sometime of how many hours you spend each week just watching television. Then think of what you could have done together during that same time.
Media twists your sense of reality, creating unreasonable expectations for your spouse.
The media usually present a distorted picture of relationships. For example, how often in a movie or on a television program do you see a man and woman fall in love, get married and remain committed for a lifetime? More often, the norm is two people falling in love and into the sack without much thought about moral issues. If you constantly feed these images into your head, doesn't your spouse stand to lose in the long run? Competing with fantasy is difficult.
Media facilitates emotional adultery through pornography and Internet liaisons. Although the benefits of using the Internet are obvious, its costs and risks are not always so plain. Pornography is a click away on computers and now phones. It can be as damaging to the mental and emotional health of a marriage as a physically realized affair. And just as bad, people use Internet chat rooms to meet strangers and engage in intimate, sexually oriented conversations.
With all these temptations lining up outside our lives, isn't it time you took an inventory of your media consumption?
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