Page 48 of Cowboy Falling Hard
Trust, Honesty, and communication. - Caitlin Loggins, Hookdale, Illinois
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“YEAH. THAT, AND MYmom was a single mom. I don’t even know who my dad is. If she knows, she doesn’t talk about it. But yeah, when she got remarried, I didn’t really fit in with my stepdad. To be fair, I have to admit I didn’t try. I got into a lot more trouble than I would have if I would have had a solid family behind me. Baseball kind of saved me. Maybe that’s when I stopped being alone and started being with the group again.”
Orchid hated that Dwight’s childhood had been lonely and sad. That he’d longed for love. “Society is kind of breaking down all of those barriers where you have your family, your group that you’re part of. Like that’s a bad thing. It’s really not. Not if the group you’re involved in is a community of like-minded individuals.”
“Like-minded is important for families. Businesses function well if there’s a lot of diversity, although there still has to be something that strongly unifies it. But churches, families, communities function much better and are much stronger the more cohesive, the more similar they are.”
“It makes you wonder how you fall for the lies.”
“There are a lot of lies.”
“You just have to hold things up to the light of the Bible. Scripture will guide you, but so often we want to throw it out, call it old-fashioned, and say it doesn’t apply in our modern world. That God somehow didn’t know.”
“The Israelites would accept people into their community, but those people had to conform to what the Israelites believed and did. Look at how God commanded for them to handle people.”
They were quiet for a bit, neither one of them seeming to want to continue that line of thought, because it was a hard teaching and not a fun one to think about. Which didn’t make it any less important. Maybe more.
“In Genesis, God tells the man to leave his parents and cleave to his wife. If a man has already left his parents, he can’t leave them. I suspect that that right there is a sign that children should be with their parents until they leave to get married. There is no command, but it does seem to make an assumption. And that goes back to what we were talking about before.”
“About someone alone being more susceptible to attacks from the devil?”
“Exactly. If you have a young man or a young woman, say, in their late teens or early twenties, going off by themselves, with absolutely no adult supervision, they’re much more likely to leave what they’ve been taught in their childhood and fall into sin. They are easy prey for the devil.”
“It’s scary, that is so true. But if they’re still with their parents, they at least have that accountability. That knowledge that there is someone watching them.”
“And then when they get married, they go from having the accountability to their parents to being accountable to their spouse. It completely leaves out that vulnerability of being alone. Where you don’t have anyone you have to answer to, no one who sees the wickedness you’re considering, and then trying, and then engaging in.”
“‘That digression,’ Psalm one.”
“Sure is.”
“No wonder the devil pushes that age group so hard to want to be independent, get out from under their parents’ care, and go off by themselves.”
“The potential for falling into sin is huge, and the devil knows it.”
She shifted against the fence, wishing she had an answer but knowing there was nothing she could do. “I hardly think we’re going to change culture, although it makes me wish we could.”
“God can.”
She agreed with that, to a point. “He can, but it almost always takes something catastrophic. A flood.”
Dwight snorted.
“Persecution of an entire people group,” he said in much more serious tones.
She thought of the fact that Christianity had spread because Christians had been persecuted. And shuddered. “I started readingFoxe’s Book of Martyrsonce. I couldn’t finish it.”
“I know. It’s hard reading. But that’s how the early church spread.”
“Yeah, that’s a little scary. God has mercy, but a lot of times, there’s a huge payment that’s required.”
Their conversation had turned extremely serious. The idea that persecution and hardship was the only way to bring Christians back to the Lord. When things were easy, people tended to have an easy, surface-only Christianity. It wasn’t until things got difficult that they got serious about God. God had to manipulate situations, bring suffering and hardship into their lives, to drive them back to Him.
Orchid didn’t want to be the kind of Christian who had to be driven to God. She wanted to be the kind who clung to Him voluntarily.
Unfortunately, far too often, she didn’t think about the Lord until she needed Him.