For the second time this week, I was awakened by the sound of my wife talking on the phone. This time, I got out of bed because I detected a little concern in her voice.
I opened our bedroom door and squinted out into the living room and mouthed the words, “Is everything all right?”
She responded by a hand signal, “Yes and no.”
Our son called her at 11:00 our time. That means that it was midnight in Philadelphia.
Why did he call?
To tell her that he was skateboarding through the city while the snow was falling!
It actually sounded like fun…if you can ride a skateboard!
After a few minutes of listening in on the call, I learned that his roommate had a girl in their dorm room the previous night. My son, innocently choosing to believe the best, thought that they were going to sleep. However, when the lights went out, and they started moving, Big A turned the lights on, told them that he was going outside and that she had to be out of the room by the time he came back!
I have two thoughts on this…
First…
My heart breaks for the state of our young people. They are unknowingly digging themselves a deep moral and emotional hole right at the beginning of their life. I know this from personal experience because, at the same stage of life, I lived much more like my son’s roommate than like my son.
There was a time when our culture considered such behavior shameful. But, we left behind that cultural standard of dignity quite awhile ago. Drunkenness and promiscuity are now considered normal. Those who choose to wait until marriage are now the odd ones on campus.
Second…
It is a commendable to walk in moral freedom by choosing to avoid situations or environments that are likely to produce temptation. I live that way. I have been faithful to my wife for 23 years. I have thus far never been in any tenuous situations with another woman.
That might be due to the fact that I am not all that attractive and don’t have much money. I’m not exactly a catch.
But, I also lead a pretty mundane life. There is not much opportunity to meet an “exotic” woman if life consists of work, church and home.
I like it that way. I don’t want to see how I would fair if such an “opportunity” were to arise. Like I told my son a few years ago, “If there is another woman who finds me attractive, I don’t ever want to know about it. Leave me in my ignorance.”
My reasoning is pretty simple. How many men fall into adultery and ruin their families? How many of them planned to do that on the day that they got married? Am I so very different from them? Am I foolish enough to assume that I am stronger than them?
No. I assume that I am pretty much like the next guy. If they can fall, I can fall. Perhaps, even faster and easier than they did. So I just avoid the temptation completely. You can call me weak if you want to…
However, it is quite another thing to walk in moral freedom when the school requires that you spend the first year living in a cauldron of corruption called a co-ed dorm.
My son’s virtue is not the weak product of overprotective parents and convenient circumstances that wilts when it finally encounters temptation. His virtue is born out of an internal conviction. That conviction is being tested and proven under the exacting, disbelieving and sometimes mocking gaze of his peers.
He is definitely a far better man than I was at the same age. In fact, his conviction to moral purity challenges me even now. In this area, he is proving to all that he is a man.
I am proud of him!
