Colossians 3:20
“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this
pleases the Lord.”
Obedience is doing what you are told, the moment you are
told, and anything else is rebellion.
Should that truth be taught at a very early age to our children? Should it be taught that doing it with
a right heart attitude is a must, that doing it with a wrong attitude puts you
in the camp with the older brother in the story of the prodigal son?
We have all been to a store where the mother tells her
child or children no, and we see and hear the child throw a fit, and it seems
as if it will never end. Often,
the mother gives in and at that point we understand who is in charge of the
house. What has happened does not
mean the child is bad, but what you have observed is a parent who has not trained
the child by being consistent with them.
If we look down the road, to what a generation of this
kind of parenting leads to, we just might see America in 2010; no respect for
authority, me first attitude, I want what you have, but I do not want to work
for it. What has happened to children? Not one thing, they are still children,
doing what children do. The
question that should be asked is what has happened to parents?
While driving to Colorado, Jan and I listened to an
interview with two young men, who at the age of sixteen began to ask questions
about our culture, and what should be their role in that culture? The twins were sixteen and like many
that age, did not have any plans for the summer, so their dad gave the twins an
assignment. He gave them a stack
of books, all very adult types, the first was titled “The World is Flat” by
Thomas Freeman, and this led to these boys doing a blog that thousands read,
and they wrote a book, “ Do Hard
Things a teenage rebellion against low expectations,” by Alex and Bret
Harris.
These young men’s story captivated us as we made that long
drive; one of the things they discovered was that the first time the word
teenager came into print was in 1941.
Prior to the use of that word, a child went from being a child to
adulthood, taking responsibility for their future. I looked this up, “It is an Americanism; the earliest
known published use of the word was in 1941 in Popular Science Monthly, but
Auden used the word shortly thereafter (in 1947) so it was probably used in the
U.S. much earlier, perhaps the 30s. There is no documentation earlier than
about 1941.”
What the Harris brothers found is that thousands of
teenagers were in agreement with them; that our culture was making us fall
behind other nations, because other cultures were not wasting the teenage years
with game boys, video games, and cell phones, but they were preparing for a
future.
Did we begin a new path in 1941, a path of making sure our
children had fun and lots of stuff, but little or no responsibility? How has it worked out? What can we do about it? I believe the answer can be found in “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this
pleases the Lord.”
From the Back Porch,
Bob Rice my blog; http://fromourbackporch.blogspot.com/
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