The things that make the flesh happy are actually those that dampen the soul, and anyone indulging in them only disconnects himself from anything that has to do with God and godliness (Romans 8:6-8; Galatians 5:17; 1Timothy 5:6). We will look at a few common distractions that are strongly pulling the youth today.

The heavy traffic on social media and networking sites these days should be of serious concern to every sensitive youth. No youth who joins this queue comes out the same, be it through chatting, ‘facebooking,’ ‘downloading’ and ‘uploading’ or unending browsing of whatsoever. At some other time, while attending to things that require their attention or even while walking on the road, the hearts and minds of many young people are occupied with music from their phones. No longer are there moments of quietness for the youth to think and meditate on serious issues that can lead to new helpful ideas to better his future. A reasonable youth can see and realize that there is a serious distraction on the way, and that if he does nothing commensurately serious to counter it, he would discover that without his consent, there would be a replay of all he had discussed, browsed, connected to earlier and soon in his quiet moments he would find himself pulled into revisiting those sites and continuing from where he had stopped in his mind. He is often denied of his sleep and his concentration in class, the church and home is tampered with. His priorities are changed. There are many youths that e-appointments, e-dating, e-relationships and other internet activities have kept continually ‘available’ on the net – almost 24/7.

Gradually, the innocence of these young minds is contaminated and impurities like immoral and violent inclinations are craftily introduced. Students are to be most pitied on this matter. The undergraduate, in most cases is allowed free access to phones and the internet every moment since it is believed that they are valuable tools he requires to source information for research work and his assignments. As young adults, supervising them as they use these tools is not always considered necessary even when they are on holidays. Even secondary school students now have need of also using the internet to do some assignments and so must browse the net occasionally and often without supervision. How many youths can say they are disciplined enough to concentrate only on the materials essential to the research they are undertaking? How many are able to cancel every enticing window that pops up on their screen while they are attending to the important work they are engaged in on their computers?