Even though it’s been several years ago, I’ll never forget the sadness in her eyes when she said, “I’ve had a lot of daddies and I just got a new one.” This little girl didn’t know what a father was.
Her mother’s string of boyfriends was all she knew and the fact that some had abused her and left their mark emotionally on this sweet little girl broke my heart.
Recently, a friend remarked that her view of God wasn’t what it should be because her own father had neglected and physically abused her. Because of her past, her image of father God was skewed.
You’ve seen the statistics. You know the outrageous amount of broken families and single parent homes. In a world where fathers are either absent or uninvolved and mothers have the legal right to murder their unborn children how can we teach the love of our Heavenly Father to those who don’t know what a family really is?
There is only one way to do it and it begins and ends with your local Bible.
From the first dysfunctional family in Genesis all the way to the churches in Revelation, families in the Bible had problems and thankfully God didn’t spare us many details.
However, throughout a Bible full of flawed relationships, God the father and Jesus the son stand out to show us what a family is supposed to be. Their relationship is built on love, trust, and sacrifice and ours should be as well.
In the church, God takes strangers, puts them together through the blood of his son and tells us to be a family. Time and time again, he tells us to love each other (Matthew 22:39, Johns 13:34, I Thessalonians 4:9, I Peter 4:8, I John 4:7).
He instructs us to put up with one another (Ephesians 4:2, Romans 15:1 ), to be honest with one another (Colossians 3:9), to look out for each other (Philippians 2:4), and to forgive one another (Matthew 6:14, Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13).
He stresses that we must be kind and compassionate (Ephesians 4:32, I Peter 3:8-9, 2 Peter 1:7).
Taking people into the Bible and showing them the love God has for his imperfect children is how to overcome this world’s distorted view of family. It’s also the perfect way to gain a new brother or sister in Christ.
When there is a bad or no role model, what is a child to do? The mothers seem only to be interested in the boyfriends and the boys are only interested in her companionship unless they have more sinister interests in the little children who are trapped in such a situation.
I find it the same way with deity role models. If God, Jesus and the holy men of Scripture are not the role models for our children, what is left for a child to imitate but the superheroes? Today so many parenting blogs and websites even counsel parents to use the fictitious heroes as role models for their children. What a sad world we live in today! Somebody will pay.