Raising the Wrong Child
Danny Conn forwarded me a story about a South Korean couple that has been charged in the death of their three-month-old daughter. Quoting from the story:
The baby was found dead last September 24 and an autopsy showed her death was caused by a long period of malnutrition.
The couple had “raised” an online girl character while neglecting their own prematurely born daughter, feeding her just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood Internet cafe, Yonhap news agency said.
It quoted police as saying they had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl character called “Anima” in the popular role-playing game “Prius Online”.
“The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap.
“They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.
Incredible story, don’t you think? But it prompted a thought. Isn’t something similar occurring when parents immerse themselves in things such as work, leisure, media, or pleasure to the neglect of parenting, marriage-building, and their relationship with God? I’m not saying those things are wrong, each one has a place in our lives; but when things are allowed to overshadow our God-given priorities it results in long-term repercussions.
It all dovetails with my recent concerns that we are, as one author said, “amusing ourselves to death” as a culture. We find a million things to do to “escape” from those things we should be doing. Too often it results in neglecting life’s most important relationships.
Time invested in building your relationship with God, your spouse, and your children pays dividends for generations to come. It’s worth the effort!