Hi all you readers out there! After another 2-month state of inactivity - ugh! - I'm back on this blog again! If you check out my other blogs sometime soon, I'll probably be updating those later on. I hope you've all been doing well and it's really good to be back online. It's been a bit busier for me with school starting up a couple of months ago - I'm in 10th grade this year so the workload isn't as light as it used to be. I also have youth group to attend on Thursdays and serve in our church's AWANA program (a youth group for kids age 3-6th grade) program. So it's been a bit busier, but not entirely too busy. So I hope that I'll be able to visit and post here often!
This post was intended to be more serious, though. All of you that read this blog use the Internet. I know that because if you didn't use it, there would be no way to access this page. Being online can be very useful and convenient for you, and it also serves as a way to pass time. But, it can also be bad as well (I will be focusing primarily on social media).
Today we're living in the age of technology and where we have anything we want at the push of a button. I'm not saying that being on social media is bad, as long as it's handled correctly. Yesterday I was on one of my favorite apps, Pinterest. There are topics and people that you can follow to get creative ideas. Topics on Pinterest usually have a photo displaying the kind of content in that topic, and they change the photo from time to time. I followed one particular topic that I thought to be ABSOLUTELY harmless, yet when I got on last night there was a very inappropriate photo on that topic, so what I did was unfollow it. Things come into my home feed that I don't like, and I don't know where they come from. I've been considering taking down my account or at least unfollowing most if not all of my following (if you're not on Pinterest you won't understand what I'm talking about). Something came into my feed the other day that I thought was just a funny joke, but when I started reading it aloud, my mother said that it was mentioning drugs. I didn't know that because it didn't mention the word "drugs" directly and I would only have known what it meant if it mentioned drugs directly. There was no profane language in it at all, so I thought it was perfectly all right. What happened is I had also shared this thing on Facebook, so I rushed my fastest to delete it before any of my friends saw it. Thankfully, only one had, to my knowledge.
And another example is YouTube. No, I do not have a YouTube account and wouldn't really be able to use one, but sometimes I still look things up like funny animal videos (haha!). Even those I watch without the sound because I don't want to risk listening to bad language if there's any in the video. That is one site on which you could probably find any video you wanted, whether good or bad. You can also use the Internet illegally, which will REALLY get you into trouble.
Several members of my house have stumbled upon inappropriate content accidentally, and it's happened too many times. That's why that on most of our computers, we have a program called K9 Web Protection, that blocks much of the inappropriate content that's out there. What my point comes down to - don't ever mess around or use the Internet undiscerningly. If you allow yourself to go see anything online, you will regret your carelessness sooner or later. What you see will be planted into your memory, sometimes forever, depending on the extremity of it. In this world of technology, there's nothing wrong with using the Internet, but we must use it carefully. We will all be better off if we don't underestimate the World of the Web.
"The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." - Luke 6:45
