I want my kids to grow up in a beautiful world.
I want them to smell flowers and view sunrises and dance in fields of wildflowers and be so underwhelmed because it pails in comparison to the beauty they see among friends.
I want them to live in a culture where we protect the weak – animals and people. I want them to learn from the world around them that the world isn’t for them. It’s for us all. Big and small. Strong and weak. Wealthy and poor.
I want them to recoil at selfishness and find it odd and out of place. I want them to continuously face bafflement in the midst of evil. I don’t want them to understand evil. I don’t want them to accept it. And I want them to live in a world that rejects it as well.
I want them to see peace and prayer and love and support as the things this world are made of. I want them to strive to be better because they see better all around them.
But then I turn on the news and I realize that this is not their world.
Their world is a broken one, a fallen one. A world where redemption is harder to find than vice, and where the selfless are the ones who confuse people.
People win through deception and cruelty and trickery. The strongest and wealthiest win it all, and the most vulnerable often go without the table scraps.
And some days this all feels like so much to overcome, an impossible hurdle to climb.
But then I remember that we live in the world as it is. This isn’t Heaven. This isn’t eternal reward. This is a fallen world for fallen people. And while we can’t heal it, we can remain a refuge for what we believe in.
We can fortify the walls of our homes and allow in the pure and the good and the holy. We can leave out the distorted and the vulgar and the deviated.
We can’t keep our homes sin free unless we ourselves stay out of them, but we can use our sin as a means to provoke forgiveness in others. We can use our brokenness to teach mercy and redemption and love.
I never quite understood why people always preached about things like the sanctity of the family. And then I looked around and I realized that it really is the only protection our children have. They look at a television screen and think it normal. They look around and see people acting in whatever manner they choose and they start to believe they can too. They live in a world that teaches moral relativism, and they can no longer decipher right from wrong or even believe that the two exist.
But that’s where our homes come in. That’s where our families come in.
We do not live in a beautiful world. But we can make our homes evermoreso, and in doing so, we can bring a little bit of God’s love into our broken world.
I can’t give my kids the world I want to, but I can give them the home I want to. It’s a big challenge in this culture, but we are up to the task.