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When Your Children "Fly
South"
By Pastor Jack Hayford
What is a couple in spiritual leadership to think
when one of their kids, in any way, drifts from the values they
have sought to instill in them? This is a question that faces more
than pastors or other church leaders. Many godly parents also face
the bewildering question, "What didn't I do right?"
I'm not referring to cases in which there have
been obvious violations of good sense in child-rearing. Nor am I
talking about children who were well down the road of having their
personal and spiritual values shaped before their parents
came to Christ. But I'm asking the question thousands of puzzled
parents have asked themselves—many of them pastors.
I'm focusing on the soul-racking bewilderment
that takes place when you've done everything you knew, and had apparent
success...until. Until one day everything "flies South"
and you are taunted by a winterlike chill of self-doubt, accompanied
by winds that whisper guilt into the crevices of your soul.
In the last two years I've prayed with several
top-quality, effective, very family-oriented couples whose parenting
records were proven and whose kids gave evidence of a loving, sound-minded,
healthy upbringing—spiritually and socially...Until. Until
one of them goes wild. In any one of a number of ways, he becomes
a contradiction to everything he has been taught or until now has
consistently displayed.
I'm thinking of at least two cases in which good
kids ended up either pregnant or having impregnated—where the
fires of teen-age passion have been fanned even higher by the mood
and mind-set of the prevailing culture and Bang! And this
"bang" becomes more than a colloquialism for an instance
of fornication. It becomes the "Big Bang" that explodes
into a universe of pain, confusion and complexity for a family,
and often even a congregation.
The pain of a wayward child. There are no limits
to the ways in which this pain can torture the souls of godly, devoted
spiritual leaders. Compounding the questions that one child's straying
may bring about are the wrestlings with the perplexities in the
fact that so often it is only the one. How many times have we witnessed
families in which all the kids "hang tough" to biblical
standards, but one of them chooses otherwise?
Aside from the decided choices for, or even chance
"slips" into, immorality, there are other paths by which
"departure" of a child takes place:
- outright rebellion in choosing friends that
offend everything worthy ever taught the child
- assertive unbelief regarding God, His Word
and His Son, notwithstanding his or her exposure to a history
of well-thought-out instruction in the intellectual trustworthiness
of those things
- an unpredictably sudden left turn from strongly
participative church involvement to a bizarre resistance, or a
refusal to attend or a studied passivity.
These few samples are added to the
cases in which the child is no longer home, or even in the church—or,
possibly, even years beyond the teen and college years.
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Jack
Hayford Ministries
14800 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, CA 91405-2233