Teach The Children

In the pages of Scripture we read of God's requirement that His chosen people, the Israelites, teach their children the Faith that He had given to them. This precept was of vital importance to keeping the family of God together.
When they began to slip, when they ignored the family rules of the Lord, and began to assimilate with  people that were not living under God's Law, they also stopped teaching the children about Him.
This always ended badly. Through intermarriage and pagan lifestyles, the people would lose the connection with God and go "off road". They would get lost in the desert, and God would have to do something to bring them back, and remind them that leaving Him would leave them empty and miserable.

Until He sent His Son, Jesus, this was a pattern that would repeat over and over, about every fourth generation. When Jesus came, He gave His life for all people, and gave us the Church, which provided a constant infusion of Grace into the world and is a direct connection to the Kingdom of Heaven through the Sacraments. The pattern was broken, but sin is still in the world, and people still go "off road", trying to be satisfied with what it offers.

What we do with our lives matters. Our lives, and the lives of our children, are gifts from God, and the only way that we will be truly whole and find meaning, is if we give our lives back to Him, and teach our children about Him so that they have an opportunity to choose to give their lives to Him as well.

Since the beginning, the world has been a place of beauty, and possibility, but it has also had a darkness, that crept in to tempt our first parents, and has been working against our relationship with God. The Devil is real. He is a person that desires our ruination and ultimately the loss of our souls. He waits in patient envy, to whisper ugly lies, trying to tease us out of our relationship with God. He is a con-artist and a master of deceit. He can make what we have been made for look like drudgery, and make the path to death look like a party. If we aren't on our game, if we don't stay in the family of God, we will lose the ability to recognize the devil, and then the way of the "world" will look like the only way to live. We find ourselves without a compass and without a way back to the one that we were made by and for. We find ourselves hungry, wanting, lonely and seeking something to love.
Lesser loves are all that we can recognize, because over the course of generations the family bond with our Creator has been weakened by sin and ignorance.

God wants us to know Him. He has built a GPS system into our hearts. These hearts are always seeking God, their true Love, and are never satisfied with cheap imitations. This is why so many people are never satisfied with their lives.
Our hearts truly are restless until they rest in Him.

Our children need to know this. They need to be taught that there are no substitutes for God. They have to be exposed to His love, and be taught how to listen for His voice.
The voice of the Devil is loud and insistent.
Families are being decimated by the culture. Children are being lost. Children are being sacrificed to gods that gobble up their innocence and leave them with broken hearts.
Some children are being sacrificed before they even have a chance to draw breath.

This is real. It is as serious as God's Love is true.
The voice of the Father is loving and persisent, but He won't force us. He wants us to love Him with an authentic love.
Bring the Children to the Father. Teach the Children His loving plan.
It's the only way to get back on the road to the Promised Land.