Over the past year or so, I have jumped into Instagram for a few different reasons, and what I found surprised me.
Like a lot of other parents of teens, I’ve seen all the warnings about the ill effects of social media on our kids, and how it can damage their sense of self worth and spawn depression or worse. So when I started spending more time on the Gram, I was bracing for the worst.
But I found something completely different. I became active on Instagram to stay connected to my two teen boys who are on IG mostly through their sports teams. I got active in posting sports highlights of them, but I also found deeper and more meaningful messages on Instagram. There is a unique nexus between sports, religion / spirituality, and purpose - driven living where I found many inspirational reels. These reels promote values that I’ve been trying to instill in my boys as they’ve grown. So I’ve been posting and remixing these reels on Instagram and texting them to my sons. It just seems like the next stage of communication for us - or, at the very least, it gives us something to talk about.
One of my favorite people in this realm is Deon Sanders. Yes, Prime Time, the flashy, all-star professional football and baseball player and now Coach of the University of Colorado Men’s Football Team is also a deeply religious man who is guided by a strong and abiding faith. In the video above, he’s in his first year of coaching with a losing team and getting grief from the press. He tells them that he doesn’t really care what they think about him because of his faith and how his connection with God makes other people’s opinion of him irrelevant. (“You ain’t make me; so you can’t break me…God established me; so ain’t nothin’ you can do to me”). I love this message, and I love the accesability of it as an Instagram reel that I can send to my boys. That is a tremendous message to deliver to a teenager - that if you have God at the center of your life, you don’t need to fit in - “You be you”!
The reel below is another great message from Prime Time about being aligned with God and living with Purpose
I love how Deon talks about being “On Assignment” and being aligned with the Lord to drive his Purpose. That’s a powerful message to anyone, but to young boys playing sports (Prime’s primary audience) and learning to apply these deeper values of Purpose to their lives, that can be transformational. Too often in youth sports, boys are simply taught to dominate and bully, but being on assignment and walking with purpose switches things to a higher plane that doesn’t get taught enough in sports. How can you be fiercely competitive but still compassionate? How can you fight tooth and nail in a competition, but still have the grace to see when it’s not your day. How do you have the resilience to suffer loss? For teens working through intense emotions, this grounding provides tremendous reserves to draw from.
Another inspirational speaker I really love is Inky Johnson. Inky was a college football player at the University of Tennessee who had a tragic on-field accident that resulted in him needing to have his arm amputated. He gives motivational talks to college sports teams and talks in this reel about the importance of holding yourself to a high standard - something all teenagers (and everyone, frankly) need to hear.
This is a powerful message for anyone to hear, but taken in the context of teenagers playing sports, it becomes directly and tangibly relevant. The standard you set for yourself, personally, is such a more powerful driver than any external expectation that may be placed on you.
This particular reel spoke deeply to me as a father since Inky talks about the standard he has for himself as a father and husband. The thing I loved the most about this reel, though, was after I posted it on Instagram, it only got one like. And it was from my son.
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