Sons

Job 1:18-20 ESV

“…your sons and daughters…were in their oldest brother’s house…a great wind came…and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead…Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.”

Raising children is hard. Even as everyone has an opinion and has experience with the rearing of children no one has a monopoly on how it should be done. Just as no two snowflakes are the same no two children are the same, no two circumstances are the same, how then do I do this thing? I look at my two sons, one far smarter than I ever remember being, easily able to sit and contemplate for hours, and struggles with quitting when things get hard, and another who seems to be bent on loosing all feeling in his posterior. Unable to sit lest he fall asleep. Only willing to quit on those things I ask him to do. Have no fear the toy is never to high; the candy is never too far removed for him to find a way. I have determined that one more rightly resembles myself. While the other more rightly resembles his mother. (My best friend and I were not allowed to repeat 1^st grade together, separate schools were needed to help us focus!)

What means must be used to help a boy grow into manhood. Many of you have already experienced the epic trial, that bears resemblance to the pole vaulter or high jumper, after exerting all your energy, thinking you have finally cleared, you hit the pad and quickly look to the bar to see if you were imagining it fearful that you might have somehow touched the it, or aware that you did touch it praying beyond all hope that it would magically stay up! This is the struggle of parenting. The challenge of raising Christian men and women, not good boys and girls. How is this accomplished? Even as I strain and struggle with my son who acts more like me than I want to admit, I know it is the constant beat of the drum. Dori singing “just keep swimming”, the riddle “How do you swallow and elephant?”, or the proverb that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, all of these pointing to the reality that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

Yet, in time Rome is built, and you start to rest easier thinking the trials and strains are behind you. You have finally reached that point in the movie when it fades and “happily ever after” comes across the screen, then the news hits, their dead. No one knows how bad new shoes pinch except the person wearing them. For all the words given in comfort only God really knows how bad it feels. I pray that I might only imagine how Job felt that day. As the children he held to his bosom, watching grow into fine upstanding adults. Feeling the pride that swelled in his breast as he watched them and heard of their exemplary conduct, and then hearing the news that GOD had taken them from him.

In David we see a little of this, as he endures the death of three of his son’s, with two of them being truly despicable people, and yet he cries and mourns for them. How are we to respond when the young precede the old in greeting their maker face to face? In sorrow. In mourning. Celebrating those we know to merely be preceding us in paradise, and mourning with the family what should not be but what sin has wrought in our world, death. Sin and death are the great enemies of the Christian, the enemies that have been conquered. Conquered on the cross, as one father watched, his son die for those who did not deserve such a sacrifice. And we are loved for it.

CRUCE, DUM SPIRO, FIDO