Moving On

We had our last Bible study tonight with my son, Sean, there. Although it was a good time of prayer and teaching, it was also sad because I thought about the years that have passed and how much I'm going to miss him. He graduates from high school on the 15th and then will be moving to Georgia to live with his dad.

As hard as it is to let him go, I feel like it's time. He has such a sweet spirit and a good head on his shoulders, so I'm not all that worried about him. I know that God will be with him wherever he goes, and He can take care of him better than I ever could. He's had some great Christian friends in his life for the last three or four years who have mentored him and prayed for him through those tough early teen years and even now as he prepares to leave. I'm so blessed to have him in my life. In so many ways, he's a special person. And I love him.

I've been feeling all sorts of things lately because of this upcoming change in our lives. I know he is excited because he's missed his dad terribly over the years. And his dad has missed out on most of his growing up, so I know they are both looking forward to being together for a while. The selfish part of me wants to keep him here with me forever. As my daughter learned from an old episode of Dick VanDyke recently, that's what you call "selfish love."

I think Dick was teaching his son about a duck...but the same principle applies...

Bittersweet. Saying goodbye to his boyhood, but looking forward to his adulthood. He is covered in prayer, so I know he'll be fine.

I, on the other hand, am another story all together.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

In the years following my divorce and remarriage, I’ve developed a soft spot in my heart for the family unit and a strongly-held conviction that the family needs to be restored to what God intended it to be. So, while I'm on a roll with my deep thinkin', here's what I've been  pondering today regarding family.

I have three teenagers. Each of them has, at one time or another, had a girl friend or boy friend (someone with whom they are “going out,” even though none of them can officially date yet). With our kids pairing off at such young ages, I find myself deeply concerned, and up until now, I’ve not really known what to do about it.

On the one hand, I feel like these “puppy love” relationships are harmless. They are never left alone and unsupervised. On the other, I fear that this kind of relationship sets them up for hardened hearts later on (from break-ups and heartaches experienced before marriage) and a likelihood that they’ll one day look at marriage from the perspective “this probably won’t last either.” Not to mention the fact that teenage relationships like this might very well complicate hormonal issues that are hard enough to deal with when the opposite sex isn’t yet a factor.

A little radical, you think?  Maybe. But when you consider the ever prevalent moral decline of our society...maybe not.

Will a relationship that begins at 13, 14, or 15 really last a lifetime in our day and age? 

We’ve allowed something that God intended to be beautiful and loving to become perverted to the point that the ideology of a “first and only” love relationship is practically foreign to this generation. With American culture being what it is, our kids don’t really have a chance to experience “true love” the way our parents and grandparents did. They may catch a glimmer of it, but with the sex-saturated nature of our culture, by the time a kid is marrying age, they already know everything there is to know about the opposite sex.  They've had plenty of practice with plenty of partners. We need to change that. We need to start teaching our kids, in no uncertain terms and on a daily basis, that love, sex, and marriage are God-given, beautiful blessings to be enjoyed and treasured, and that what the world teaches them about it is fundamentally wrong.

Without some radical changes taking place at home, traditional marriage will surely become obsolete. To a great degree, it already has. I believe the turn-around starts with us, as parents, setting standards for our children that are higher than those of the world. We have to get radical in our child-rearing. We have to stop worrying about whether our kids like us or not and start doing what is necessary to change their future. We have to stop compromising.

We need to take our families back!

Blessings,
Christa

Road Trip

The Labor Day weekend is approaching and you know what that means...three-day weekend! Yes, for the working girl, a three-day weekend is big. Especially when there's no more vacation time left to take.

So, we're loading up and heading to the beach. This time, my 13-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter will be the only ones going with us. For some reason, the kids have quite a bad taste in their mouth for the beach. So much so that the older two chose to pick up trash in our community (youth project at church) rather than be subject to the 72 hour misery that is a family trip to the beach. I suppose that if we were staying in a condo, they'd change their tune a bit, but we will be staying in the travel trailer we bought a couple of years ago. We thought it might bring us closer as a family. Apparently, it's a little too close for comfort for the sophisticated tastes of our 15-year-olds. It must cramp their style somewhat to be seen in such close proximity to their parents.

Do people still say that something cramps their style? That probably went out with Fonzie.

Or maybe we're just boring.

We took the boys and our younger daughter down in June (our other daughter was with her mother...yours, mine, and ours) and it appeared to me that they were trying to have a bad time. We thought they'd love going to the water park, so we dropped a pretty penny and spent a whole day there. All the boys wanted to do was sit around in lounge chairs and complain that it was too hot. One of them did enjoy the wave pool once, and I forced them both to grab an innertube and float down the lazy river. Who doesn't like the lazy river, for crying out loud? When I was a kid, I'd have been thrilled to pieces to go to the water park.

I don't think we're all that boring. I think kids are just different now. Too many video games. Too much television. It really isn't their fault. It's ours.

In any event, we're going to the beach, leaving two behind. It makes me sad. They're staying behind for a good cause, though. I'm proud of them. I think they're wonderful.

Blessings,
Christa