Your Soft and Pliable Children
I continue to receive prayer requests from our friend who serves as a chaplain in a correctional facility for teenagers. Many of these kids are worried about sick family members and ask for prayers for them. Some of these teens are unmarried parents who ask for prayers for their children. Many want God to help them be able to go home. Some ask for God to help their parents trust them again. However imperfectly, these kids who are in serious trouble still want family connections. They long for family love.
When I was a child, we made several trips to the Smoky Mountains. We’d make the long winding drive up to Clingman’s Dome in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. What a thrill it was to drive through tunnels and see majestic views. We almost always saw black bears alongside the road and would come home with a count of how many we saw on a particular trip. Sometimes we’d travel down the North Carolina side of the park to visit the town of Cherokee, North Carolina.
We usually stayed in a motel in Gatlinburg. We spent hours sauntering along the busy Parkway that goes through town. We might play a game of mini golf and we always visited souvenir shops filled with salt and pepper shakers in a myriad of shapes, little boxes made of cedar, little black bears stuffed with straw, and other souvenirs. This was before the T-shirt revolution.
I was mesmerized by the taffy pulling machine in the window of the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen. Founded in 1952, the shop was still pretty new when my family and I watched the machine stretch great globs of taffy over and over again.
Those kids at the correctional facility share some characteristics with the taffy on taffy pulling machines. At one time, they too were soft and pliable—and pulled in different directions over and over and over again. Some of those pulls led them into the situation they are in today.
Homeschooling gives you the opportunity to limit some of the pulls on your soft and pliable children and to lead them in the way they should go.
Teach me to do Your will,
For You are my God;
Let Your good Spirit lead me on level ground.
Psalm 143:10
