The monster in your pocket
Tom was a nice guy, he really was. Hard-working, polite, kind of awkward at times, but still the kind of guy that everyone enjoyed being around. Mary, his wife, was glad to have him, as were their two kids, Charlie and Penelope.
They lived in a four-bedroom ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac. They often had cookouts with their neighbors, who were also very nice folks.
Tom was, in every regard, the very last person anyone would ever have suspected of having a monster in his pocket.
In his defense, the monster started off as more of a pet, really. It would call to him at times, and he would take it out of his pocket and stroke it, and it would in turn hum to him contentedly, or warble and beep in excitement.
It did not take long for the monster to become more demanding. More and more it refused to be in his pocket; it seemed to be growing in his mind. It also became very possessive; only Tom could hold it, everyone else, especially Mary, was an unwanted interloper. The monster so worked on Tom’s mind that any attempt for anyone else to spend a moment with it was met with outright hostility from Tom.
“What is your problem?” he would shout. “Can’t I have any privacy?”
This caused a great separation between Tom and Mary. She especially was getting more and more jealous and suspicious of the monster and its intentions, and was determined to pry Tom and the monster apart.
And then one day Tom made an unthinkable mistake. Distracted by a hard day at work, he got home, quickly jumped in the shower, and left the monster on his bedside table. Mary, seeing a golden opportunity not likely to ever arise again, grabbed it and began to examine it.
The tears rolled down her cheeks as she did. The monster was full of pornography, text messages with another woman, and other filth...
The parable is easy to figure out, isn’t it.
Most every one of us carry a potential monster in our pockets or purse these days. And whether or not those smartphones become a helpful and necessary tool or a voracious and destructive monster truly does depend on one thing and one thing alone: Accountability.
Proverbs 22:3 says, “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.”
In the context of our modern day monster parable, a prudent man realizes how powerful and potentially dangerous a smart phone is, and hides himself from that danger.
And there is no safer hiding place from that type of danger than absolute access and transparency with your spouse.
I have been a pastor and evangelist for more than two decades and have worked with countless homes that were at risk of falling apart. Over the last decade, the monsters people carry in their pockets have accounted for at least 80% of all of the trouble I have had to deal with people about.
Wives texting an old boyfriend and becoming violently angry when their husbands ask to see their phones. Husbands looking at pornography and managing to hide it for years until their homes completely fell apart.
That phone you carry in your purse or pocket has the most amazing potential both for good and for evil. It is a razor’s edge sharp enough to do lifesaving surgery or sharp enough to cut the throat of everything you love.
When Dana and I got our first smart phones, we sat down and discussed this issue. We resolved to be consistently, totally transparent with each other using a very simple methodology; whenever one of us says, “Let me see your phone for a second,” the other one simply hands it over. That accountability has allowed us to have phones in our pockets rather than monsters.
Sir, Ma’am, don’t take that monster lightly.
Bo Wagner is pastor of the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Mooresboro, N.C. , a widely traveled evangelist and author a book about the Battle of Chickamauga, “Broken Brotherhood.” He can be contacted at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.