Psalm 72

When my kids were very young, I remember having conversations with my mom about modern children’s toys and the concerns I had with giving too many of them to my girls at too young an age. Nowadays, kids grow up with so much to entertain them. Especially with the baby toys, it seemed like everything blinked or beeped or played music. Not to mention, most of the electronic toys we ended up with talked in more than one language! It was quite overwhelming even to me, and I remembering wondering if there would be room for my kids’ imaginations to grow. I had the urge to raise them in as “unplugged” an environment as possible. And we tried to do just that.

Around that time, I particularly remember an online column I read written by the mother of a six-year-old child who had been watching the television program Glee. That he had been watching it wasn’t the thrust of her article at all, but I found myself disturbed that parents allowed their children to watch something so completely inappropriate for their age.

It’s all about desensitization, isn’t it? If your kids are bombarded with toys that light up and sing and talk and move and entertain from the time they’re born, what can there possibly be to hold their attention down the road? Will they even have an attention span in five years? And the same goes for television programs and movies. When children are exposed to adult themes at young ages on such a regular basis, what sort of entertainment will they look for as adults? No wonder our children are growing up over-sexualized and under-educated.

These are not the only ways we experience desensitization. We also experience it through language. Have you noticed how many things in our culture today are classified as awesome or wonderful or amazing? Most of the time, the things these words are used to describe aren’t really worthy of such descriptors. As we go through “language inflation,” we become desensitized to what is truly awesome and wonderful and amazing. (And I’ll include myself in the list of the guilty on that one — culturally, it’s hard not to get sucked into that practice!)

I think that’s why this verse in today’s psalm stuck out to me: “Praise be to the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds.” (vs 18) Marvelous means “causing great wonder; extraordinary.” And God alone has the market cornered on such things.

This made me think of when Jesus said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (Mk 10:18)

God alone is marvelous. God alone is good. Everything else in earth and heaven pales in comparison to Him. Only in His character do we find things to be described as awesome and wonderful and amazing. Anything else is a matter of desensitized language inflation!