Dr. Rick is the fictional self-help coach on the Progressive Insurance commercials who tries to help a group of people avoid “parentamorphosis,” morphing into their parents as they get older. I can hear his counsel about today’s celebration. On this day in 1993, the World Wide Web was launched into the public domain.
Twenty-one years later, if you refer to this by name or tell someone that the URL begins with “www,” – worse yet, if you said the URL begins with “http,” Dr. Rick is going to shake his head and say, “Nobody says that.” And he would be right! In fact, people don’t usually say “the net” or “the web.” Today, we GOOGLE it or ask Alexa or Siri.
Any way you slice it, www._______ opens us to a vast world of knowledge and it all comes to us at lightning speed – mostly depending on your internet connection. Yes, it is true that there are a lot of bad things out there. There is the dark web. There are thousands of pornographic sites and Covenant Eyes reports that “28,258 users are watching pornography every second and spending $3,075.64 each of those seconds.”1 Do the math on that. That is nearly $266 million per day or $96.9 billion per year spent on porn!
According to bloggingwizard.com, “the internet is ever-expanding, and there are currently around 2 billion different websites in total. Only a fifth (about 400 million) of all of the websites on the internet are actually active. The other ⅘ are inactive meaning they haven’t been updated or new posts have not been updated for a long time.”2
While some may look at the internet as nothing but a tool of Satan, it’s no different than anything else in life. There is good and bad and the decision rests squarely upon our shoulders whether we will choose wisely. With 400 million active sites, there are many that are good. Much positive and useful information is available along with helpful tools and resources.
Every day is about making choices. Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” Joshua challenged the Israelites in Joshua 24:14-15 with these words, “Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the LORD. (15) And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
In the New Testament, Hebrews 11:24-25 records, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; (25) Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.”
Some of you are like me and you will spend a lot of the day in front of a computer screen. Others might be using their computer to read this devotional and then will go on to surf for other things. There are more choices online than if you went shopping at Mall of America.
The choice is yours and mine. Are we making good choices on the world wide web? Sorry Dr. Rick!
1https://www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats/
2https://bloggingwizard.com/website-statistics/
Images are taken from https://pixabay.com/, https://www.pexels.com/, or https://unsplash.com/images or created in Windows Copilot. According to the websites, they are Royalty Free and free to be used for our purposes.