Please excuse the ginormous watermark across the middle of this photo.  I couldn’t figure out how to purchase this image and decided that an Oprah photo wasn’t worth jail time.  You can still get this gist and luckily, I can still walk free.

On New Year’s Day morning, my hubs woke with the kids and allowed me to sleep a bit longer.

Until 10 a.m.

When I roused myself from this deep slumber, I  panicked a bit when I saw that the clock read 9:51 a.m.  On my bedside table was a now-cold pancake and a piece of bacon along with a now-cold cup o’ joe and the morning paper.

After getting over the fact that 1) I had slept as late as I used to sleep when I was in college and 2) I was so deeply asleep that I didn’t even hear him deliver breakfast,  I reached for the paper and began to peruse.

On the second page, I was greeted with an article about Oprah’s new cable station OWN – the Oprah Winfrey Network.

The above Associated Press photo caught my eye because wow…What do you think of when you see this?

I don’t have much against Oprah. I think she is a bit lost and searching for answers in unreliable places but that’s her personal journey.  It’s our society that’s really lost.

They think she’s Him.

Once I laid eyes on this photo,  Casting Crowns’ song “What If His People Prayed?” popped into my head, particularly the part in which lead singer Mark Hall croons “What if the family turned to Jesus – stopped asking Oprah what to do!”

However,  as I laid in bed devouring my cold but delicious blueberry pancake, I realized that I had a log in my own eye.

We are told by God that we “shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) and it’s easy enough to think that I’m not doing this because I’m not worshiping Baal on a hill.

But am I worshiping something else?  Have my iPhone, my laptop, my blog, my family become gods above Him?

Idolatry is defined as something that interferes with our relationship with God.  Ouch.

Though I hate to share this horrid part of my being, there are many o’ mornings that I reach for my iPhone before my feet hit the floor to check my emails, assess the weather, to connect with the “world” before the tornado of life with three children under five whisks me out of bed for the day.

(Clears throat.)  Shouldn’t I be talking to Him first?  You bet your bottom dollar I should.

Susie Larson, author of the book Growing Grateful Kids spoke at last year’s “Hearts at Home” Conference and I remember her mentioning she taught her children that when they feel something taking over, becoming more important to them than God, they know it’s time to abstain.  She shared of a time when her son gave up the computer for a few days because he felt it was becoming an idol and he needed to “re-center”.

I just spent some time doing just that.  For ten days, I didn’t write.  I didn’t do much updating on Facebook and didn’t Twitter at all.

The world continued to rotate on it’s axis.  Imagine that.

Oprah is not my God.  My iPhone, my blog, my computer, and even my beloved, precious family?  No, they’re not either though admittedly I sometimes forget this.

And yes, our families CAN be an idol.

Can you imagine the pressure placed upon people who are our idols?  They absolutely cannot fulfill the innate need He created us to possess because they are, after all, human.  It’s in realizing that I was doing this to my husband a while ago that I concluded in  essence, I was  setting the very person I love the most up for failure because he will never be able to fill the “God-shaped hole” that resides in me.

And it resides in each of us.  God did that for a reason.  Clever man.

I can’t rely on JJ or my children or my iPhone or this blog or my laptop or my friends or Facebook or Twitter to fill that hole – He’s the only one that can do it.

It’s in this that we begin to chip away at achieving peace within the soul, a peace that assures that while those aforementioned things can all be taken from us in an instant, the filler of that hole, that Wonderful Counselor, will always remain.

I’m pretty sure my iPhone can’t boast the same…

I’m joining in with Jen from “Finding Heaven” for the Soli Deo Gloria Sisterhood – hope over and visit some of these gifted women!

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