My Grandmother Had a Bible, a Rocking Chair, and a Heart of Gold...

Your Kids Have TikTok and Anxiety Meds.

Every Sunday afternoon, like clockwork, my grandmother would settle into her rocking chair with her King James Bible (the one with the cracked leather cover and her handwritten notes in the margins going back forty years) and call me over.

I was maybe six years old when this started. I did not want to sit still. I wanted to watch cartoons. I wanted to play outside. I wanted to do literally anything except listen to some old lady read ancient words I barely understood.

She did not care what I wanted.

“Come here, Lily.”

And I came. Every single Sunday. For YEARS.

She would read to me. Not the kid-friendly Bible story books with the cartoon Noah and his happy zoo animals. The actual Bible. Genesis. Exodus. The Psalms. Proverbs. The Gospels. Revelation. She read it in that old King James language that sounds like Shakespeare if Shakespeare was also giving you life advice that could save your soul. “Thou shalt not” this and “it came to pass” that.

I complained. A lot. I whined. I fidgeted. I asked if we were almost done approximately nine thousand times per session.

She kept reading.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you about sitting in your grandmother’s living room listening to Scripture for hours (and yes, it was HOURS, she read slow because she was going blind but refused to admit it): it gets inside you. The words embed themselves in your brain like muscle memory. You don’t even realize it’s happening. One day you’re seven years old barely paying attention while she reads Proverbs, and fifteen years later you’re in a college classroom listening to your professor explain why moral relativism is actually very sophisticated and enlightened, and something in your brain goes “nope.”

Because you remember. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not the fear of your professor’s opinion. Not the fear of seeming unsophisticated. The fear of GOD.

My grandmother died when I was 22. She left me that Bible. The one with her notes. The one we read together every Sunday for eleven years. I still have it. I still read it. And I am starting to understand what she was doing.

She was vaccinating me.

When Everyone Around You is Sick and You’re Not

I am 23 years old. I am a journalism student at a secular university (not naming it because I still have to graduate without being expelled for thoughtcrime, and also because the last time I mentioned where I go to school, three different middle-aged men found my Substack account and started sending me messages so frequently that I stopped logging in altogether, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes you understand why women lie about their location on dating apps). I am watching my entire generation lose their minds in real time and I am one of maybe six people in my program who can still think straight.

These are not dumb people. These are smart, capable, talented young adults who got straight As in high school and scored well on their SATs and got into competitive programs. They can write. They can research. They can construct arguments.

They just can’t QUESTION anything.

A professor tells them that gender is a social construct. They nod. They take notes. They write papers affirming this. Nobody raises their hand and asks “okay but what about biology” because asking that question will get you socially executed faster than you can say “there are two genders.” (There are two genders. This is not controversial, it is CHROMOSOMES.)

A professor tells them that America is systemically racist and irredeemably evil. They nod. They feel guilty for being white (most of them are white). They write papers about their privilege. Nobody asks “if America is so evil why do people literally die trying to get here” because that question makes you a fascist apparently.

A professor tells them that Christianity is oppressive and patriarchal and responsible for most of the world’s suffering. They nod. They turn in their crucifixes (if they had any). They feel very enlightened. Nobody says “wait, Christianity literally built Western civilization and the concept of human rights and hospitals and universities” because historical facts are now considered hate speech.

And here is the part that breaks my heart: they are MISERABLE.

Every single one of them. The ones with the blue hair and the nose rings and the pronoun pins and the “question everything” (except their professors) bumper stickers. They are anxious. They are depressed. They are on medication. They are in therapy. They are having panic attacks about climate change and their student loans and whether they used the right pronouns in their essay about deconstructing the patriarchy.

They have NOTHING to anchor to. No foundation. No Truth with a capital T. Just vibes and feelings and whatever their professor said this week.

Speaking of professors, I had one (a woman in her fifties with gray hair and Birkenstocks and the emotional stability of a wet paper bag) break down crying in class last semester because a student (not me, but I was thinking it) suggested that maybe we should be objective in our journalism rather than activist. She literally CRIED and said “objectivity is a white supremacist myth” and then canceled class because she was too emotional to continue.

This woman has a PhD. This woman teaches journalism. This woman is training the next generation of reporters.

We are doomed. (Or we would be if there weren’t a few of us who had grandmothers with Bibles.)

The Part Where I Connect the Dots for You

Here is what my grandmother understood that modern parents apparently do not: if you do not give your children God, someone else will give them something worse.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The human soul needs to worship something. If you don’t raise your kids to worship the God who created them and loves them and has a plan for their lives, they will worship something else. And that something else is usually:

1. Themselves (narcissism).

2. Their feelings (emotional instability).

3. Their professors (intellectual slavery).

4. The state (totalitarianism).

Their identity (obsession with pronouns and labels and making their entire personality about being “queer” even though they have never dated anyone of the same sex, they just like the attention).

Social media (validation addiction).

Celebrity culture (worshiping people who would not spit on them if they were on fire).

Notice what all these false gods have in common. They make people MISERABLE. They promise fulfillment and deliver anxiety. They promise freedom and deliver slavery. They promise happiness and deliver depression.

The God of the Bible promises something different. Peace. Purpose. Truth. A foundation that does not shift when the culture changes (and the culture ALWAYS changes, ask anyone with a tribal tattoo from 2003).

My classmates do not have that. They are building their lives on sand. Every new social trend, every new political movement, every new academic theory, the sand shifts. They scramble to keep up. They update their beliefs like they update their phones (constantly and without thinking about it). They are exhausted.

I am not exhausted. I am watching this circus from a position of stability because my grandmother spent eleven years reading me a book that never changes.

She gave me a foundation. These kids have nothing but sand and anxiety meds and a deep spiritual hunger they are trying to fill with activism and identity politics and TikTok trends that will be irrelevant in six months.

What Your Grandkids Will Remember

Parents. Grandparents. Anyone raising children right now. Listen to me.

Sunday school is not enough. Dropping them off at youth group once a week is not enough. Sending them to Christian school is not enough (some of those are worse than public schools, trust me). You have to actually TEACH them. You have to actually TALK to them about God. About Scripture. About what is TRUE versus what is popular.

Because if you do not, I can tell you EXACTLY what will happen. I am watching it happen to my entire generation.

They will go to college. They will meet a professor who is very smart and very confident and very wrong. They will not have the framework to recognize the lies. They will accept everything they are told because they have never been taught to test ideas against Scripture. They will become activists for causes they do not understand. They will destroy relationships over politics. They will put pronouns in their email signatures. They will get face piercings and dye their hair colors not found in nature and join protests against things they cannot define.

And they will be miserable.

I am not exaggerating. I am not being dramatic. I am describing what I see every single day in my classes. These are lost, hurting, confused young people who were never given an anchor. They are drowning and they do not even know it. They think the drowning is just what life feels like.

Your kids do not have to end up like that.

Read them the Bible. Take them to church (a real church, not one of those hip trendy churches where the pastor wears skinny jeans and talks about his feelings for forty minutes). Teach them to pray. Teach them that God is REAL and that His Word is TRUE and that feelings are not facts and that truth is not determined by a vote.

Give them what my grandmother gave me: a foundation that will hold when everything else collapses.

Because everything else WILL collapse. The culture is collapsing right now. The institutions are failing. The schools are teaching lies. The churches are compromising. The media is propaganda. Everything is chaos.

But the Word of the Lord stands forever. That is not a metaphor. That is not poetry. That is FACT.

My grandmother knew that. She made sure I knew it too. And because of her, I can sit in a classroom full of people who think men can get pregnant and I can think “no they cannot” without having an existential crisis about it.

That is the gift she gave me. That is the gift you need to give your kids.

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The Part Where I Ask You For Money (But Like, In a Nice Way)

If you made it this far, you are probably either a parent trying to figure out how to raise sane kids in an insane world, or you are one of the six other people my age who still believe in absolute truth. Either way, thank you for reading.

The Wolf (the guy who runs this publication and lets me write under my own byline even though I am still in college) made me a deal. If my articles can raise $2,000 in paid subscriptions in the next 60 days, he will give me that entire amount as a down payment on a used car.

I would very much like to stop taking the bus. The bus in my city is not charming or quaint or a fun little adventure. It is a roving theater of human despair featuring people who scream at invisible enemies and smell like they died three weeks ago but nobody told them yet.

A used Toyota Corolla would change my life. (I have low standards. I am not asking for a BMW. I just want a vehicle that runs and does not require me to plan my entire schedule around bus routes that may or may not actually exist depending on the driver’s mood.)

So here is what I am asking: if you can afford a cup of coffee a month to support real Christian journalism written by people who still believe men and women are different and that truth matters, please consider a paid subscription. If you cannot afford that (and I get it, inflation is real and we are all broke), at least share this article.

Send it to parents. Send it to grandparents. Send it to anyone raising kids who need to hear that cultural insanity is not inevitable. Your kids can come out of this okay. But you have to actually RAISE them.

My grandmother did not have money. She did not have a theology degree. She did not have a platform or a podcast or a ministry. She just had a Bible and a rocking chair and a granddaughter who needed to know the truth.

That was enough. More than enough.

It can be enough for your kids too.

Love, Lily