Blaise Pascal described a universal hole in the soul as a Godshaped vacuum. Alister McGrath describes Pascal’s model as “a God-shaped emptiness within us, which only God can fill. We may try to fill it in other ways and with other things. Yet one of the few certainties of life is that nothing in this world satisfies our longing for something that is ultimately beyond this world.” Teenagers are no different from anyone else. Their great need is to have this God-shaped emptiness filled by God. If you listen and look closely, you’ll see and hear that their music, films, social media, and very lives are crying out for spiritual wholeness. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of teenagers. I can’t remember a single one who didn’t exhibit this thirst for God. Each of us can look directly into the eyes of the teenagers we know and love and be certain this is their reality, too. Even when they don’t recognize it as such, we can rest in the assurance their hunger is for heaven.

The folks at Defend Young Minds have released some new data telling us that social media is now the most common way that kids are exposed to porn. Six out of ten minors now say they were exposed to porn by accident on social media. This is up from almost four out of ten in 2023. Thirteen is the average age of first exposure, with reports of first exposure even at six years old. And the four most common social media sources for exposure are X, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. The report also states that even if your kids are not searching for sexual content, the algorithms will deliver it to them. Defend Young Minds tells us that the best way to protect your kids from pornography, predators, and other harmful content is to, in their words, delay, delay, and delay your kids access to social media. In addition, we need to teach our kids that pornography is a form of sexual immorality, which takes God’s good design for sex, and destroys it through encouragement to sin.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is all the buzz right now. It’s come on the scene quickly, and so many are enamored with what it can do. For those of us who have engaged with AI through the growing number of apps that are out there, we are generating songs, videos, images, and even text in literally a split second, and what we see is so amazing that it can draw us in just as quickly as it responds to our prompts. Dartmouth University professor Scott Anthony has been watching his students to discern what they’re feeling about a future saturated with AI. In an article in Fortune Magazine, titled “They’ll lose their humanity: the professor says he’s surprised just how scared his Gen Z students are of AI”, Anthony says he’s noticing that his students fear losing their critical thinking skills to the AI Machine. The late media philosopher Marshall McLuhan saw this coming. He said this, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Parents, exercise caution in how you embrace AI in your life and home.