1859 Holy Homework

Holy Homework

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephisians 6:12

I try to avoid mirrors these days.  Not that I can see myself in the mirror but I rather hate for the mirror to see me.  The estate planners call old people like me, in the autumn of their years.

I offer up to God, just as I have done with my blindness, my age, and anything God can use at this time in my life.  I offer up my pain, my loneliness.  I must remind myself everyday of my life of the sufficiency of God.  In old age, doing holy homework we know that family, associates, neighbors, are not always there.  God whispers to me in these times of disappointment, "I am all you need."  Remember, King Saul threw a javelin at his own son,  Jonathon.  Almost daily, we hear about some mother or father killing their child, driving a car into a lake with children in the car or leaving a child in a car to cook.  When I was in school, we were embarrassed to even discuss abortion.  It was inconceivable that a mother would kill her own child in her own body and yet, America, 21st century, more black babies are killed in the mother than are given birth by a mother.  When this army medical officer worked in the emergency room of a hospital and there was a terrible wound, I would say to the victim "This is not going to be a picnic."  My anatomy professor, Dr. Rafalko, would say, "Men, women are much tougher than we are...can stand much more pain.  The human race would have disappeared long ago otherwise."

Every mother, every father is directly responsible for how you present God to your child.  The greatest child abuse, especially among evangelicals, pushing your child to "join the church."  Like infant baptism, too many children are "persuaded" into something which they do not understand.  The best lie of Satan and the "world", the indifference of your fellow man not realizing that every child is different.  God only had to say it one time, "Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it." - Proverbs 22:16.  Look it says, child not children.  It makes no difference how many children put their feet under your table, each child is different.  This writer  has two grandsons, each very different though raised by the same wonderful parents.

And, it is so important that parents realize that a child's relationship with God is different.  Before we had the baptistery in the church we would go to the fish pond for baptizing, the solemnity crashed when two of my young cousins, who were to be baptized, took the  urge, jumped in the pond and began swimming around before the preacher and the others went into the water.  Another form of child abuse, in the training process, trying to be a friend instead of a father but, perhaps the worst of all child abuse, and we see it over and over attempting to fulfill your life's ambitions...what you wanted-what you desired, in your child instead of allowing your child to travel his own pathway.

In the military, so obvious, the difference in attitudes-passions between those who wanted to be there and those forced to be there, the difference in the draftees and volunteers.  So it is at the church house, the courthouse, the schoolhouse, the attitudes of those concerned and serious about their jobs compared to those who just, in some way, got a position.

It is so easy to ascertain, the person with a real conversion-belief system, one great Christian said, "I left the church because it was my parents' belief system.  I thought I had become an atheist, but then God got his hands on me and the faith, action based on belief-sustained by confidence, I have now, is mine."  So many Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses leave those religions because their children's knowledge is a product of a parents desires.  Christian faith like patriotism, is only refreshed by the nutrition of conviction. 

My seminary professor's son takes seminary students to Japan each year in a Southern Baptist missions program, he finds just as I found on my several trips to Japan that the Japanese people have no time or talent for religion.  Their own Shinto shrines go unkempt.

This is the difference we find with other false religions, such as the false religion of the Middle East.  When will we learn that Muslims, historically, has been a belief in hatred...not just Christians-Jews-Buddhist but mostly of one another.  Thousands of fellow Muslims were killed in the Iran and Iraq wars of the late 20th century.  The wars in Southern Sudan have been going on for three years.  I have been to these places; these countries are so poor and do not have the technology to build a bicycle.  Where are they getting all these munitions-warfare equipment?  Is it to the benefit of capitalistic countries that these undeveloped nations are killing one another?  From Bamiyan in Afghanistan to Morocco, every place in between I can tell you without fear of contradiction that these people do not have a clue about what is going on.  They are just victims of international power.  During WWII, North Africa, the axis and allied armies were bogged down because of weather.  In between those two huge fighting forces, Arabs came out and began to sell fresh eggs to each side.  Making money, other family members began to sell handy crafts to each side.  When will the power brokers of the world learn, as this writer discovered traveling the world, most people, made in the image of God, just want to survive, to be left to their own self determination.