Scripture told us that would happen

The nonprofit Council for Contemporary Families reported that ‘AT the end of the 1950’s if you chose 100 children under age 15 to represent all children, 65 would have been living in a family with married parents, with the father employed and the mother out of the labor force. Only 18 would have had married parents who were both employed. As for other types of family arrangements, you would find only one child in every 350 living with a never-married mother!”

Reading those statistics is nearly mind boggling in light of our American culture and the statistics we have today. I don’t know exactly what those statistics are but I know that roughly one out of every two marriages end in divorce and we have ever growing numbers of babies being born to never-married and unmarried women.

The same report also stated that, “Today among 100 representative children, just 22 live in a married male-breadwinner family, compared to 23 living with a single mother (only half of whom have ever been married). Seven out of every 100 live with a parent who cohabits with an unmarried partner (a category too rare for the Census Bureau to consider counting in 1960) and six with either a single father or with grandparents but no parents.”

Those numbers are very nearly staggering and yet I wonder…what family situations aren’t even taken into consideration? How many children live with someone other than a parent or grandparent? How many claim to live with parents but live elsewhere? And where are the statistics of the 15 year olds raising children? Are they, the 15 year olds, numbered among the children or the parents?

A number of months ago I had someone tell me how vital the nuclear family is. This person pointed to the Bible and the ‘importance’ God places on the dad, mom, kids family to support their point. I am not now, nor did I then, discount the importance of parents in a child’s life. I’m not discounting the importance of a dad and a mom in a child’s life. But..just as I pointed out to the person telling me that, I must point out now…Scripture gives us many examples of families that never mention both parents. We are shown children of widows, prostitutes, even children whose dad’s made them leave home (Ishmael).

The nuclear family is important, there’s no doubt about that, but Scripture doesn’t show us that it is the vital state of raising children.

My husband can offer things to our children that I just can’t. I can’t teach our son to be a man because I don’t know what it’s like to be a man. I can’t give him the kind of male attention that he seems to need because I’m not a man. I can’t give our daughters what my husband can. There’s a reason for the term, ‘daddy’s little girl’. Girls experience something with a dad that they don’t get from a mom. But I can offer our children something that my husband can’t. It’s a balance. We both bring things to our children that the other can’t give them. And together we give our children something that they would not have without having the two of us as parents.

Grandparents give children something that parents can’t give them. A perfect example of this is the way a child wants to eat when at their grandparent’s house. Even if that child isn’t hungry, let them go to grandma and grandpa’s and they will be starving. There is something special about the food at grandparent’s homes that food in their own homes just doesn’t have. One of my sisters used to look forward to going to our grandparents house because she loved to eat ‘mayonnaise sandwiches’ while she was there. Those sandwiches were exactly what they sound like…mayonnaise on bread. Nothing special to it and nothing we didn’t have on hand all the time at home. But, oh, the joy she got in eating something most would consider nasty while at grandma and grandpa’s.

There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child and no matter the child’s home situation, all children are raised, in a sense, by the community around them and the extended family that play a role in their lives.

How many children model their lives after their favorite aunt or the great grandpa they barely remember but whose stories make him sound like hero material? How many children look down on their parents because they inforce rules that the child doesn’t want to live with but hold the neighbor in high regard?

I have heard many people speak of the downfall of America, have heard just as many talk of how the disintegration of the family has contributed, or outright caused, that downfall. The person that told me how important the nuclear family is also told me that it doesn’t make any difference if the dad is good or bad just so long as a child has one. And if the dad is going to be out of the home for any length of time then the family is destroyed because there is no dad physically present.

I would be the first person to admit that a dad plays an important part in a child’s life. But I’d also be one of the first standing up for the fact that children can, and do, thrive in any family situation. There are many children living in foster care that are better off with the single foster mother than they were with their biological mom and dad. There are children that live with both their biological parents that must watch their parents harm each other and even the children, and some of that harm comes only in the form of words.

I must ask…how much does the child gain when they say…’Daddy hits mommy and mommy cries’…I heard that come straight from the mouth of a toddler.

I’m not aiming to support anything with this. My goal isn’t to write in favor of any family dynamic, although there are some that I would write against. My intent in writing this is to think of how the Lord has allowed and made the dynamics of family change throughout time.

My sister and I have spoken often in the past of how much more important marriage was in the 1800’s and before. Of how men and women in those days literally needed one another to survive. Often the men didn’t know how to care for the house and the children, and if they did know how they were too busy working outside the home, even if that work was in their own fields within sight of home, and providing for the needs of their family, to be able to take care of the house and the children. During the same time women had very limited options for earning money to be able to provide for the needs of their families if they didn’t have a husband or other male relative to provide for them.

Life often required the partnership of two different people to be able to care for a house and the members of the family that resided there. Men had one job, women another. They had roles within the family and those roles were important.

Not all that far from somewhere I used to live was a historic village. In that village was a log cabin that had survived from the 1800’s. I have been inside that cabin. It is small and sparsely furnished, with only one room and a loft area. There is a very interesting story behind that cabin…rather, there is an interesting story behind the family that lived in that cabin. The cabin belonged to a man that was a widower with six children. I don’t know how long he was widowed or how he came to be widowed. All I know of their story starts with the fact that the man was widowed and had six children. Finding himself alone to care for six children he went…somewhere…and came home with a wife, a woman that was widowed and had six children of her own.

He moved her and her children into his cabin, that one room cabin with a loft, and they not only raised their 12 children there, together, but they had six more children together. And they all lived in that one room cabin.

I loved that story the moment I heard it. There was just something special about the life that family lived. Today, I can’t remember the name of the family but I sure remember their story.

And I think of the hand that worked behind the scenes to bring it all about. I don’t know the condition of the wife’s first marriage. Did she love that first husband? Or did she marry him out of need? Was he good to her or did he abuse her? Did she grieve when he died? Or was she grateful to be free of him? I don’t know any of that but I know that she had to marry that first husband to have those six children. Children the Lord obviously wanted to be born.

I could ask the same questions about the husband and his first wife. Did he love her? Was he devastated at her death? Those are questions I have no way of knowing, there may well be no one that knows those answers left to answer them. But I do know that just as with his second wife, the events that happened did so because the Lord wanted them to happen.

And the Lord wanted the six children born to that couple after their first spouses died to be born. There was a purpose far beyond what that family probably ever saw to the life that they lived. And there was a hand that controlled it all.

The person that told me of the importance of a dad in the family unit, an importance I’m not disputing, spoke of the dad as if the children cannot thrive and grow into what they should be without the dad there, even if he is a bad dad. But in families where there is no dad…the Lord placed those children there.

The statistics that I gave above…in the 1950’s the families were the way they were because the Lord made them be that way. And the statistics of today…the families are the way they are because the Lord has made them that way.

Sin has grown and multiplied among the human population so that things have grown worse and worse on earth. Scripture told us that would happen. Things have become evil. Scripture told us that would happen. Children are hurt and left to live in less than ideal situations…because of the evil sinfulness that permeats the human hearts…a sinfulness that is growing rampant like an epidemic.

Scripture told us that would happen.

I have even been told that there is a war against the family.

Scripture told us that there would be wars. Whether one of those wars is an undeclared, but no less real, war on the family or not…

Scripture told us it would happen.

The Lord had a plan for mankind before he created the world and that plan is being worked out day by day, person by person, in the lives of each and every person ever created because the Lord’s hand is controlling it all so that His plan can be fulfilled to the very end.

Scripture told us that would happen.