The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
I’ve always loved these lines from the nonsense poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll, and they have come to mind frequently since I first read them as a child. They came to my mind again as I was planning this series of posts on issues facing young people today: the smartphone, social media, the hook-up culture, pornography, abortion, and so on.
It’s a nonsense poem! What do shoes and cabbage and kings have to do with each other?
What do truth and kites have to do with Facebook, porn, and abortion (as in the title of the first post in the series)? Here, there is a common thread.
We human beings were created to love God and to love others as ourselves. But when we watch pornography, or have sex outside marriage, or use the Internet unwisely, or abort an unwanted baby we are not doing that. We are thinking first of ourselves — our own pleasure, our own bodies, our own freedom to do what we want to do. And we are not experiencing the “more abundant life” of which Jesus spoke (John 10:10). We are allowing ourselves to be led astray by the deceptive philosophies of this world (Colossians 2:8) that say that these attitudes and actions are okay.
The Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carroll’s poem didn’t really want to have an interesting conversation with the young oysters as they walked with them down the beach. They wanted to eat them. And they did.
What God created good and beautiful and perfectly functional is in trouble, like the kite lovingly created by the master craftsman when the craftsman no longer held its string.
One evening I was speaking on the biblical teaching on sex and relationships to a room full of young men and women in their teens and twenties. Most of them were new believers. About halfway through the evening, one young man exclaimed, “This should be on Facebook!!!”
God wants everyone to know the truth about God’s intention for male-female relationships.
