Pondering: message to the youth (5)

This will close my series of posts for tonight! I hope you have found them helpful and even if you have some barriers to agreeing with what I've presented that you at least share my concerns and have a more discerning view of what is really going on.

Another way that I need to explain how the past several "generations" have been ripped off and cheated has to do with God.

Suppose that you were raised as a child in an orphanage, one where all your material needs were met but you were told your parents had died and that you were alone in the world. And then suppose one day you grow up and go to college, and then discover that your mother is alive and had been kept separated from you, through no fault of her own. You are reunited and you love your mom, and perhaps instead of living in a dorm you live with her while you go to college. You talk and do things together, and maybe the local newspaper even does an article about you both as their "feel good" story.

However, while this is a "happy ending story," you did not step into a time machine and remake your years of being alone. You find your mother and you are happy, but you did not have her when you were a baby, an infant, pre-school, Kindergarten, 1st-6th grade, 7th-12th grade, and she was not there when you graduated, got your first part time job, applied to college, got accepted, and had your first dates. You totally missed the experience of having a mom, and finding her at say the age of 21 does not change the past. It only makes the present and the future much better.

It is the same for children who are raised by their families without knowledge of and love for God. While you can always be raised "in the faith" and then decide to "fall or drift away from the faith" as an adult, you can't go back in time and rewrite history so that God was in your life for all the years you were raised without knowledge and love for God. You can find God, of course, even if God was denied to you by your parents as a child, but you cannot relive those years as a child the way you would have if you had known and loved God from the start. Time machines exist just in fantasy movies.

This is what I call "the lost opportunity" cost. Children are meant to know and love God from the first moments they can comprehend. It is not for God's ego trip; it is for the benefit of fullness and completeness of the human being. Just like having a mom and a dad are essential to a fullness of the human experience and a child's development, so is the knowledge of God. You would not have had to explain this to any generation of people before these past several generations. Knowing and loving God is an essential component to a child's mental, emotional, and spiritual health. In this blog posting I'm not speaking of a specific religion except that it be one that believes in the one true monotheistic God. It is inexcusable to raise a child without him or her knowing that God exists and has a relationship with the child that will last through their life.

Regular readers know that I was married to an agnostic Jew, and how because I was stalked by cults, I had privately resolved never to have a child who could be abused by them as I was. I never shared my reason for not having a child and took extensive precautions to not become physically pregnant. So this meant that it was a topic of general conversation with my husband and with other people in the normal "what if" way that anyone talks about having a child. One of the things that my husband and I totally agreed on was that "if" I had ever had a child, the child would be raised to be a full and devout Christian. My agnostic Jewish husband was the first to say, "You must raise a child to have the faith. He or she can always make their own decisions when they are grown up, but if you never give them the faith you are robbing them of it completely."

Throughout the 1960's and 1970's that was the predominant opinion until the "social revolutionaries" became parents. They then decided to rip off their own children by estranging them from God. They did this to cover up their own bad decisions, because who can teach about God when you deny him in your every action? Further, the temptations of occult beliefs (with again, their "free pass" on behavior and wink toward even horrors like abortion) took over families, and rather than being born into a family that taught love of God, children were raised either "God-less" (though God never abandoned them, even if the children did not know) or worse, directly as fodder for cults. I despise $cientologists and others like them for that reason. Cultists who raise their children without God are instead stuffing pollution into what should have been the clear springs of faith and reason in their children's minds. It is very hard to bring people "back" to God if that "USB port" had garbage flowing into them from the start. There is a "missing piece" in young adults who have been raised in cults and who, while they know the truth and have run from the abuse, feel estranged from God.

I have such pity, sadness and love for people who were robbed of God in their childhood and filled with the trash of cults. Some of them are brash, but many of them cover up skittishness that is like the pony that has been only beaten and spurred by human owners. They feel they cannot then let themselves believe the hand of human kindness when they do encounter it. That is what happens when children are robbed of their knowledge and love of God.

God is patient and if anything good can come from the horrors of these chaotic times, perhaps it is that even the most scarred can find their way back to believing that God wants to know them, and wants to love and guide them. But I appeal to you new parents, even if you think you are suave and cynical, please do not rob your children of love for and knowledge of God, even if you personally cannot provide it, have a godly person mentor them, or send them to Bible or Qur'an schooling. You cannot pop God back into them like a pill later in their life as if your neglect of them regarding God never happened, or is 'all fixed.' Follow the example that those of us who had to suffer through those times since the 1960's and raise the child in the true faith of God, and let them live their lives with both options in front of them, not lobotomizing them of God when they are in the cradle. It is one of the greatest tragedies of our time and many ills will still result from this before it gets better.

I hope this helps, and I hope that I can "help the unbelief" closer to belief for those of you who have been scarred by occults or estrangement from knowledge of God's love and his will and greater plan for all humanity.