Posted in School Life
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When Charming and I were dating, and talking about the kind of family we wanted to have, there was one thing at the top of our list: to Teach Our Children How To Think. Now, you may be surprised that our number one goal for our family was not "to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." I think that's because that was a "given" for us--we were both raised in that kind of environment, and maybe didn't think it needed to be stated? It also may have to do with how we defined Christianity. Early on, Charming thought of a beautiful description: Christianity is The Way Things Really Are. After all, Jesus said that He was "the Truth," (...the Way, the Truth, and the Life...)and isn't that the way things really are? Of course, allowing that you believe in absolutes like Truth. This definition gets rid of moral relativism, and the "end justifying the means," and all of those things that cloud the truth in a given situation. It also disallows the notion of "all ways lead to heaven." I don't say that in a mean or disparaging way, but if I say that I believe the Bible is true, I have to believe the part where Jesus says, "no man comes to the Father except by Me." While we were on vacation, the cottage we stayed in faced west, and we were treated to seven glorious sunsets. Lake Huron gave us an unobstructed view, different from our "town" sunsets where we can't get a full view of the horizon. Each night we watched the sun "slip over the edge of the world." As I watched the sunsets, I thought about other peoples who came before me. The Greeks and Romans, who, observing the world they lived in, developed gods and goddesses to explain the things they could not understand. They had a "sun god" who rode a golden chariot across the sky from east to west everyday, and attempted to pacify him so that he would "come back" the next day. Then my mind traveled to the Middle Ages, and the controversy between Copernicus and Galileo, and the rest of the scientific and religious community. If all I had to see was what my eyes saw every sunrise and sunset, it would be easy for me to believe that the sun traveled around the earth. And, frankly, I would probably brand anyone who thought differently as crazy. But, as we now know as Truth, the sun is the center of our "world," and the earth travels around *it.* What we see as the "sun going 'round" is, of course, the earth rotating on its axis every 24 hours. So, then, we have What We Can See as opposed to The Way Things Really Are. Do you see that describing God's Creation that way, leads to our definition of Christianity? This is how it works, guys. This (what is revealed by God in His Word) is how I relate to my world, and how you can relate to Me. The Way Things Really Are. So, anyway, back to our goals for our little family. Thirty-three years later, we have six grown children in their twenties and thirties who certainly know how to think. [There were those teenage years where, many times, we thought to ourselves, Why did we ever want to teach them how to think? They're using it against us!] And, still at home, Blackeyed Susan, 15, and Alvin Fernald, 13. They are "on fire" youth, who want to know all there is about the Lord. (What a blessing on our vacation one night, to see them huddled over their Bibles, with a list of verses on a paper, looking them up and comparing them!) We attend a large Pentecostal church, with different "stripes" of believers. They range from very conservative to very "experience-oriented." So, Susan and Alvin get a lot of input from different friends as to how their Christian walk is "supposed" to look. So, a big part of our job as parents right now, is to teach them how to sort it all out. I caught Susan and Charming on the porch yesterday, mid-morning, having quite a discussion on this subject. (Such a blessing to homeschool, leaving this opportunity open for the taking!) I got the video series, How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer, from the library. It was first a book about the Christian worldview, and he made it into a video series. We watched the first portion the other day, about the Roman civilization. About how the civilization was built upon what a group of men thought was "good ideas," but how, because of that unstable foundation, what was considered "good ideas," changed from emperor to emperor (think about how at first, the emperor was just an emperor, and, during some emperor's reign, he/the people decided he was a god, as well), and, as heart of man is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," as it says in Jeremiah 17:9, things go downhill when men are in charge. By the end of the empire, of course, men were killing men for sport, and there were entire cities devoted to sexual perversions. Incidentally, when we turned the vcr off and the television came on, there sprang a commercial for Fruit of the Loom ladies undergarments, and we saw twelve ladies dancing in their undies. The children caught the "resemblance" to the Romans right away! Then I asked them where they got the notion that all men were valuable (think slavery, ab*rtion) and they said that the Bible says so. How do they know that Christianity is the right religion? Same answer. It began to dawn on them, that they are looking at a "firmer foundation" than that of any culture built on Next discussion: this year's political races. They already know what Mommy and Daddy think, but now we're going to look at God's ideas versus men's ideas. Thinking, thinking. Good stuff. |
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Posted by Anonymous
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