Yesterday after juice, tablet time, and thirty-minutes of red light, green light in a field I came back to the house for a computer tutoring session with a lady in the community. The kids stayed around my house but weren’t causing a commotion, they were happy to watch from the road outside my gate as I showed her how to send an email with a photo attachment.
Things took a turn for the worse when the ladies younger sister showed up. It was time for her seven-year old niece (one of the children on the street) to go home. But her niece was having too much fun watching me teach with the computer and refused.
Now the adult response to this would be to either approach the child and tell them to go home, or take the child home. Unfortunately the sister was interested in my computer too so she started shouting at her cousin from the porch instead. As you can imagine this turned into a huge shouting match between her and a group of children
Eventually I put an end to the yelling and walked the children down the road myself. One of the boys was particularly angry about the things she had said, and had done a lot of shouting so I got down on one knee and looked him in the eyes. “Now what do we do when somebody lashes us (yells at us) I asked him? We lash them back!” He said in anger.
His response was incredibly sad but to be honest it didn’t surprise me. As with most cultures there is a lack of fathers who can teach little boys what it’s like to be a man, and Godly mothers who can teach teenage girls how to Glorify God. Though I felt woefully inadequate in the moment I took a few minutes to teach him real men don’t lash back because it doesn’t fix anything.
After dealing with an eight-year old acting his age I walked up onto the porch and faced a woman in her twenties who acted like she was seven. I kindly asked them to leave and explained she had allowed herself to be dragged down to her cousins level. In the worst case she should have allowed me to send them away (which I would have gladly done) instead of shouting obscenities from my porch.
Walking down to a local store an hour later I encountered two grown-women standing in the middle of the road yelling at each other as a crowd gathered. Unfortunately this is something we see far too often here, the mothers and fathers acting like they are seven. This of course is the core problem since the twenty year old daughter sees her mom acting this way so in her mind it’s fine.
Never before has there been a greater need for Godly men and women to mentor (teach) both children and adults what it means to be a real man and woman. For most Christian parents that’s incredibly difficult because almost all time and energy is focused on their children (which is where it should be) so the call is for Godly single men and women who will look for those teaching moments…and instead of lashing back point eyes to God.
svgmissionary.com 