How Is Your Family Doing?

The family is the cradle and custodian of the future.

A famous psychologist, H.A. Overstreet, has defined the family as the place where a child can grow: from ignorance toward knowledge, from irresponsibility to responsibility, from verbal isolation into communication, from sexual immaturity to maturity, from egocentricity to interest in others, and from particular seeing into whole seeing.

If you think the family is not important, then why does the Bible have so much to say about husbands, fathers, wives, mothers and children?

On every hand we are harvesting the crops sown by sick families. A lack of love has produced boys and girls who have not been taught, encouraged, corrected, disciplined or admonished. In turn this unhealthy family life has brought a blight to our schools, our work places, our churches, and our society in general.

We set up metal detectors to screen students bringing weapons to school; we build new prisons to accommodate the lawless; we create drug rehabilitation programs for the addicted; we write new laws governing drunk driving; we contemplate legalizing drugs; we decriminalize abortion; we promote "safe sex;" we search for cures for AIDS; and on and on the story goes.

We find ourselves frantically trying to mop up all the water on the kitchen floor when we should be trying to turn off the kitchen faucet.

In short, our problems are not going to be solved until we make our families whole again.

John Gipson