Thinking of all the typical trappings of Mother’s Day as I turn in tonight, and honestly I want to gag a little. I’m not really a sentimental person and probably not your average stay-at-home mom either. However, I think I speak for many others on this Mother’s Day 2020, amidst the coronavirus pandemic and all that it entails.
What used to suffice on this Hallmark holiday: cute little handprint crafts, Mom acronym poems, so many chocolate covered strawberries, plethoras of dyed carnations, matchy-matchy posed family photos – is more than a little tiresome in the age in which we live.
I could care less about the appreciation factor at this point. Knowing that some other humans approve of the job I’ve done (and am doing) will not keep me going, especially on the incredibly hard days that can accompany parenting in this day.
Rather, we want to know that we are doing matters, that what we are imparting to our children will last far beyond us, into eternity in fact. As a parent, I’ve always believed that focusing on developing our children’s spiritual compass would be the most important part of this journey.
However, I’ve only recently come to see that raising them with a prophetic sense of the time in which we live is a close second. This situational awareness is inseparable from the geopolitical events of our day. What’s the point of them intimately knowing Jesus if they spend their time here on earth gazing up at the sky, anxiously hoping for heaven as a reprieve? What’s the aim of them getting high grades in history, if this knowledge is used to control them into becoming just another cog in the machine?
The smokescreen and veneer of America past that comforted us in our stereotypical lives has been removed, and violently so. Even for those not fully awake yet, what’s clear is that this is a time like no other in American history, and it requires a parenting paradigm to match.
So pardon me as I pay our children to read a slew of political books this summer, or as I regularly show them news clips of the happenings of the day, or as I take them with me to campaign for local candidates, or as I drive them downtown to a MAGA rally.
I am not focusing on politics for politics sake. I am raising citizens of the greatest nation on planet earth, which just nearly missed annihilation and is even now fighting its way back from the brink. The pivotal importance of the hour cannot be overstated, and I will not omit our children from these discussions. Learning history is great, but living it is amazing!
So for my Mother’s Day wish: 1) I want more parents across this land to take time to be invested politically, to dialogue with their children about the issues, and to fight to save this nation that has been appointed as a light to the world. 2) I want our children to know, as they look back at this time, that their parents chose to do the hard thing and looked down the road for the dangers ahead. 3) I want believers across generations to come together in unity and return to the principles that made this land of ours great. 4) I want the resulting freedom to spread around the world, that Jesus would get His full reward!
I’ll be one happy mom if we can work towards these. No need to send the flowers and the chocolate. Okay wait, you can still send the chocolate!
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done. -Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing, 1964
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/ronald-wilson-reagan/the-1964-speech.php
Just spot on. Amen!
Thank you!