Prioritizing Values Without Love

People can prioritize some values over others in ways that don't seem to make sense.

Now, Caspian’s mother seems to see 15 minutes on YouTube as a serious problem, but she hardly tries to restrain herself from laughing with her son about emotionally painful problems that other people are facing.

Christians,

You may have noticed that people can prioritize some values over others in ways that don’t seem to make sense.  For example, they might consider something to be harmful that you don’t think is bad in moderation while hardly seeing anything wrong with something you feel is obviously unkind.  The reason is often that they don’t prioritize their values based on love, and this problem can often involve emphasizing certain values primarily to fit in with a certain crowd. A Christian and a non-Christian can have this problem alike.

To better understand this problem, consider two twelve-year-olds talking to each other in a school gym while waiting for their bus to come.  Caspian sees Julian on his tablet and condescendingly asks him if he is always on his tablet because he doesn’t have any friends. Julian says he has plenty of friends but that he likes how much there is to do and learn on his tablet.   Caspian says his mom won’t let him spend more than 10 minutes on an app like YouTube at home; she wants him to be out with friends.  Then, Caspian adds on a tangent that while he was at his friend’s house just yesterday, he overheard his friend's parents talking about how worried they were they weren’t going to be able to keep paying the mortgage on their home.  Caspian said he told his mom about this when he got home and they both laughed about it because his friend’s parents are both supposed to be some kind of financial consultants.

Now, Caspian’s mother seems to see 15 minutes on YouTube as a serious problem, but she hardly tries to restrain herself from laughing with her son about emotionally painful problems that other people are facing.  She is part of a social circle who have influenced her view on children using devices, and she hasn't thought too much about what a more balanced viewpoint might be on the topic; she mainly tries to follow the lead of people she sees as socially respected in her community without ever spending too much time trying to see things with her heart.