Help your kids be irrelevant this summer.

The other day I was sitting around a table of students. We were at breakfast together, and we had read the Bible with a devotional and prayer. Then they began to get on their phones and talk about the latest memes that had been around. For my less tech and social media savvy readers, a meme is a picture or video, normally with text, that has cultural meaning, and spreads virally from one person to another over the internet. Popular memes gain traction, promote other memes and take on new meaning as they are shared. Like many other phenomena in the teenage world, you kind of need to be in the group to understand. 

As I was listening to these students talk and share, I started asking them questions about why sharing and looking at memes was so important to them. At first their answers centered around humor — most memes are witty takes on popular culture. But as the conversation continued one of the students remarked that if he didn’t spend time looking at and sharing memes then he wouldn’t be able to understand his peers’ conversations and references. Irrelevancy — what terrifies us all, and most certainly our kids, is that we would be considered irrelevant.

This fear of being irrelevant or behind the trend is common to man but has been exacerbated by technology. Our kids don’t simply check social media because they want to, but because they have to. They don’t just enjoy the relief of boredom they feel from an injection of looking at the newest memes on Instagram, they need to continue to be conversant in the language of images to stay interesting and in the know. Being relevant is one of the cultural currencies in our kids’ false salvation story — it makes them interesting for another day in our throw-away culture.

How do we help our kids lean into the true story of salvation? First, we need to look to Jesus. While Jesus’ miracles and message attracted crowds, celebrity was not what he was seeking. He refused to wow the crowds with his signs. At his trial, when the spotlight was on Jesus, he did not turn it into a platform, but remained faithful to his Father.

As Christians, we are to follow Jesus, who was crucified as a man of no reputation. Jesus was the lamb who stood silent before his captors. He could have pushed his reputation, he could have dazzled the crowds with his miracles, he even could have defended himself and put all his accusers to shame, but the real strength of the gospel story is that the glorified Lord of heaven walked faithfully into the ignoble death that we deserved — Jesus died a common man for common men and women.

When we look to Jesus, we should begin to see that our desire to be relevant and in the know, garnering attention for ourselves and staying up to date, is a sideshow to the story of faithfulness that God has written for us. In fact, the gospel story helps us to embrace our mundane lives. Matthew Redmond says it well:

“Those who follow the man of no reputation pine for one, resumés ready…The reason is easy to see. We think the small, mundane, ordinary things we do each and every day are worth nothing before God because they are worth nothing before the gods of this world…We are not redeemed from the mundane. We are redeemed from the slavery of thinking our mundane life is not enough.”

Summer is a great opportunity to help our kids (and ourselves) embrace a mundane faithfulness. Help your kids turn off their phones this summer. Carve out space for them to miss what’s happening with their school friends. When you’re on that vacation, talk to them about resisting the urge to post to Instagram about it, or even impose a moratorium on social media. What you may find is that after a couple of days, they’ll have a true relief from the constant pressure of relevancy.

We are not going to live in a world without social media, and I don’t want us to. But a practice of shutting it down for a season will help your kids to live into the gospel story that we are ordinary men and women, redeemed by an extraordinary God. Or, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, "The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children."