Sunday, January 14, 2018

building on rock or sand


Well, I'm still dealing with symptoms of my cold, so CLICK HERE to listen to someone else read today's selection from the One Year Bible.

What's interesting from today's reading is how we see a whole different way of looking at the world in the OT reading. Jacob has been promised many children - and he sees this as a great blessing. His wife and many other servants in his life also see this as a great blessing - and they're jealous of one another in their ability to have more children. They all plot and scheme to produce as many children as possible. And through all of this plotting, after several different women sleep with Jacob and have his babies, all of these children become the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel. Kind of an ignominious beginning.

But the interesting thing is to see how much things have changed between then and now. In those days, and even 75 years ago in THIS country, children were seen as a great blessing. They lightened the work load. They helped raise the children who came after them. They brought great joy to their large families. And most studies today show that the happiest people on earth are those who have many relationships, especially in large, stable families.

However, in today's society we have all bought into the belief that small families are better. That not having children at ALL is the best way to go, so you can spend all of your money enjoying life and leisure rather than spending all your time and money on children. We have come to believe that children, rather than being a great source of joy and resources, are expensive. That they cost us more and more money, the more of them that we have. Especially when it comes to the "mandatory" college education that all of them require, and which parents are expected to pay for.

That's quite a shift, isn't it? Really in ONE generation, we've gone from seeing children as great blessings, to seeing them as a burden. And we have also bought the idea that the earth is being overpopulated and we must decrease the number of children we have or we won't be able to feed them all.

Now, it is of course important to be wise in how we are fruitful and multiply. And it certainly is the case that our society has increasingly made having children more and more expensive, from the hospital costs when they're born until the time they graduate from college.

But I think it's important that we return to the truth of what God taught our ancestors - that children are a blessing from Him. Maybe we need to find inexpensive ways of taking care of our kids, rather than buying into the ubiquitous consumer mentality that makes children seem like a financial strain. Maybe we should learn how large families can work together to take care of the needs of the little ones and the older ones at the same time, rather than leaving people to fend for themselves.

It's not an easy change. Our society has done a great job teaching us the opposite. But we are still choosing to build our society on either rock or sand. And I think we can look back over the course of human history and see which is which.

God, give us wisdom in how we plan our families, and help us to see children as the blessing that You teach us they are.

2 comments:

Julie said...

Amn

Julie said...
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