June 05, 2014
Epitaph
Every once in a while my adult the kids do something
off the wall and their dad jokes, “I thought I raised them better than that!” A
recent obituary caught my attention when it said, “She was raised as a
Christian …” The phrase speaks volumes — about the parents. “Train a child in
the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it” (Proverbs
22:6 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----The Hebrew word used here for “train” appears three other times in the Old Testament meaning the dedication of a building. It was usually made by announcement of intension and a prayer for God’s approval and blessing. I find it interesting that a word more like discipline or education was not used here. But then, I guess such other words lack prayer for God’s approval and blessing.
-----Certainly we all know many folks who were “trained up in the way they ought to go” and obviously went another way. Maybe there’s some trick to the training a lot of people have missed. In trying to pack this scripture into reality, I’ve always thought the focus should fall upon “in the way”. Maybe the trick was not so much in communicating the way as it was in doing the training while living the way. That is, all of the things done and said and emoted around the child are done, said, and emoted in full congruity with all of the aspects of the way the child should go. This creates a natural, good culture for the child to soak up.
-----That’s nice. But it lacks. I should have looked up this Hebrew word earlier. We’ve all been to dedications. They very much are proclamations of intention, statements of plans. Now I think I see the trick: always proclaiming to the child at meaningful times in meaningful terms the proprieties of life, then living your proprieties and directing the child to live his as well.
-----A very important part of our consciousness is the awareness of plans. Plans are simply intentions thought through unto decisions of action. Then these decided actions getting done “in the way the child should go” means the child sees and feels life being lived reasonably right, plan by plan, action by action. Each plan fulfilled by its action completes a spin of life. Spins are really important to our minds. God created the human mind to be logical. Logic is a process of continuous matching and comparing (oversimplified, but please relieve me from boring you more.) Whether or not we do it consciously, the mind will compare what was done to what was planned. When it finds reasonable congruity in the match, then it perceives the self to mean integrity. But if it does not, well, oh my. It will perceive the self to mean error, failure, falsehood, the lack of integrity. Such perceived self meaning does not feel good. And negative feelings generate more inner discourse than do positive ones. If that discourse does not follow the logistics of repentance, it will follow the irrationality of cover-up through self-deceit. The mental function of planning who you are going to be is continuously important. The behavioral functions of being those plans is even more important.
-----But dedication is not just the process of making and stating plans. Although these are necessary parts of it, so also are asking God’s approval and blessing. We could blunder forth without the latter if our existence were of a material nature only. Lots of idiots think it is. But the material part of our existence is less than the tip of existence’s iceberg. And it will go nowhere the rest of the iceberg does not go. So, if you’re going to be making plans you’d better consider in them the whole of existence, or your plans will eventually leave you hung out in the middle of nowhere. This concept of making and stating plans with obeisance to the Lord makes Him an expected part of the spins of your life. A child growing up within such an atmosphere will learn to always spin with the self-control of dedicated purposes. (Gal 5:22)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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