Jitterbugging for Jesus

Plant the seed by taking the children to your House of Worship, carving out a morally upright home for them–and hope and pray for the best.

SCRIPTURE READING: Deut. 6: 6-7

KEY VERSE: “Talk about [these commandments] when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

The Rev. John Takac, one of my supervisors and mentors in my chaplaincy and pastoral-care training, one told me when I was depressed and stressed over a problem with someone over which I really had no control, “When I have that kind of problem I remind myself of this–there’s John-size problems and there’s God-size problems.”

Indeed, there’s some problems that you can agonize yourself into a wrinkled-up prune about, or you can hand it over to God in hope and prayer.

There’s just no such thing as the ability to “fix” somebody else–family members nor anybody else you care about.
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I mentioned previously in one of these postings that theologian Len Sweet attributed his success and that of his two brothers largely to the intentional “home schooling in Christianity” that their mother gave them while sending them to public schools.

But we’ve all seen or known children from the most Christian or morally upright homes imaginable who seem to be born with rebellious streaks in them that most kids outgrow if they’re able to survive the “rebellious” years in crossing the wildly swinging bridge from the teen years into adulthood.

I knew a married couple years ago who were quite intentional in creating what I imagine was the sort of Christian home environment that Leonard Sweet was reared in by his devoutly Christian mother. The couple had something nine kids, all of whom turned out to be the adults and model citizens you’d be glad for your own son or daughter to marry.

Except, that is, for the one boy who was so rebellious and incorrigible all of his life that he ended up with a lifetime sentence in prison.

“He was never the kind of kid who hung out with the wrong crowd,” my friend the father of the prisoner once told me. “He was the wrong crowd.”

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Carving out a devoutly Christian home environment is no insurance policy against bad things happening to otherwise good people–including the way in which a good kid from an exceptionally good home can turn out bad. Being Christian simply some kind of permanent vaccination against bad stuff in life. You don’t have to look far to see that the rain really does fall on the evil and the good alike, as Jesus so accurately pointed out.

I have to note, though, that the errant son of my friends straightened up in prison and ended up leading a ministry for other inmates in the lockup with his father and some of his brothers from that large, Christian family.

In creating a Godly home for your children, as Deut. 6-7 advises, you are planting seeds in the mind, hearts, souls and spirits of the kids–and you hope and you pray for them.

If a seed turns out to produce one who is less than fruitful–even seemingly rotten to the core–it might be a good idea to remember that some problems in life are simply too God-size for mere mortals like ourselves to try to solve.