Are they Ready?

An automobile, out of control, hurtles over a curb, roars across a lawn, and two young children are flung fifteen feet. Innocent children playing in their yard, healthy and laughing one moment, are dead the next, and the hopes and dreams of two young parents come crashing around them.

This senseless, needless waste of human life stuns us and there is impressed upon our con­sciousness the awful suddenness with which our lives may be snatched away.

Piercing the thick fabric of our complacency there emerges the solemn questions, Am I aware that what I am doing now, at this moment, will affect my child's future? Will he be pre­pared to handle life's problems or be defeated by them? Am I striving with every fiber of my being to develop in him a character that God will approve? The days and weeks pass swiftly. "It is impossible for us to overestimate the ad­vantages of youthful piety. . . . The instruction of children has been greatly neglected, the righteousness of Christ has not been presented to them as it should have been."—Selected Messages, book 1, p. 318.

The counsel given stands out bright and clear. Maybe our energies have been too de­voted to the physical needs of our brood. In the oasis of plenty have we been living in a desert of poverty? Can we realize that we too may not have a moment to spare?

There is drama behind the scenes. While "Sa­tan seeks to bind the children to himself as with bands of steel" Christ pleads that "all the tal­ents and gifts . . . belong to God, and should be wholly consecrated to His service." The chal­lenge to motherhood is the age-old challenge of bringing children to a knowledge of God. Most women know how to be socially correct. The grim fact we must accept is that many mothers cannot pass on an experience in Christ because the simple truth is they have nothing to give. The world needs mothers who know how to establish Christian homes.

Being a parent costs all that we have. We must give and give of ourselves and then give some more. It is a job that has to be worked at continuously. Even animals can be trained to right habits. The family cat presents a problem by sharpening her claws on the upholstery. By persistently taking the animal to a reed basket and putting its paws on it the cat soon learns the lesson—the reed basket is the one place to sharpen claws.

Charles T. Bushnell, Ph.D., a sociologist, ob­serves that when a child is three years old par­ents have done half they will ever do for his character. No air of mystery surrounds this molding of a life. Through determined per­sonal effort we may see unfold the miracle of human character.

With uncertainty all pervasive, with the low­ering clouds of Armageddon hanging over their heads, what youth need today are parents who have found certainties. Samuel Grof ton in "The Tense Generation" says, "In a world as compli­cated as ours, and as filled with stresses, what children need most of all, obviously, is the clos­est possible kind of continuous communication with their parents. It is here that we are scoring our greatest failures."—Look, August 27, 1963.

Mrs. L. B. Johnson has achieved a warm and gentle relationship with her daughters. She has the habit of ending her telephone talks with "I have faith in you." Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them. Disci­pline, she says, is something children want. They feel cherished because of it and would feel lonely and abandoned if they were not disciplined. She teaches more by example than exhortation and compares her technique to floating messages out to sea and hoping they will come back eventually. "It has been my greatest satisfaction to see the lessons I had tried to implant—and that had fallen, I thought, on arid fields—later blossom forth in one of my children."