Monday, September 6, 2010

Please Pray and Participate

While we wait to honor the departing of one spouse through death, we're sadly faced with the dissolution of another family through impending divorce. This affects all of us, not just the two adults and their two children. Our family and our society suffer from any ceasing of family stability.

I know this because of the choices I made in my marriage almost thirty-five years ago, and the ripples they started that have now grown into tsunami-sized waves. From day to day and crisis to crisis, I never know when the waves break on the shore of our lives whether I will have ridden safely on the surf or been sucked into a riptide that lands me miles from where I had been standing. This is the nature of unresolved family issues.

Grace has, thus far, saved my children and their children from destruction, but this does not mean that they haven't been battered by the brokenness of their parents. Only succeeding generations will tell the tale of whether we succeeded in making amends for our sins, the sins of their parents.

Young families celebrate their marriages and the births of their children with many of their network in attendance, but how many of the people attending these celebrations commit to walking the walk with these families? Prayer is not the same as participation.

When a baby refuses to sleep and there's a toddler needing attention; when a husband is so sleep deprived that he can barely stand and still has to put in the hours to bring home a paycheck; when a young bride has spent her first pregnancy helping her mother die; and her second in a town of strangers, who is there to hold the parents, rock the babies, change the diapers?

Who will go to hell with them and raise them up out of the flames? We all need prayer, but we also need participation.