Open Minds
While I was chatting with a friend recently, we discussed with sadness a modern cultural phenomenon that we both believe is harmful to people, especially to children. She quoted a saying and said that she thought it was perhaps attributed to Christian author, G. K. Chesterton. I don’t remember her quote exactly, but it went something like this: “We have opened our minds so much that our brains have fallen out.”
I wanted to share it with you, so I searched to see if G. K. Chesterton did indeed say it. I found a variety of similar quotes. I also found that though G. K. Chesterton did not say those words, he did say something else profound about open minds. In The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton are these words about a person with whom Chesterton had been acquainted:
But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
As homeschooling mamas, you interact with the precious minds of your children every day. When a child is being stubborn, you interact with a closed mind. A mind can only take in new information when it is open. However, as mamas you must be careful that what you put into your child’s mind is something solid, something he or she can depend on for the rest of his life.
The only “something solid” he or she can depend on forever is truth. We must be careful that we can distinguish between what is eternal truth and what is touted as truth, but is in fact popular worldly foolishness.
The Bible teaches that:
- “The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God” (1 Corinthians 3:19).
- Some wisdom does not come “down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic” (James 3:15).
- We must not be wise in our own eyes, but instead must “fear the Lord and turn away from evil” (Proverbs 3:7).
- “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 16:25).
God warned the Babylonians through Isaiah, saying:
“You felt secure in your wickedness and said,
‘No one sees me,’
Your wisdom and your knowledge, they have deluded you;
For you have said in your heart,
‘I am, and there is no one besides me.'”
Isaiah 47:10
God warned the Colossians through Paul, saying:
See to it that no one takes you captive
through philosophy and empty deception,
according to the tradition of men,
according to the elementary principles of the world,
rather than according to Christ.
Colossians 2:8
God also warned Timothy through Paul, saying:
O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you,
avoiding worldly and empty chatter and
the opposing arguments of what is falsely called “knowledge” . . .
1 Timothy 6:20
And God trusts us to warn our children.