16
October 2015 SR
I have walked alongside some friends who struggle with this,
whose parents are making this really difficult, if not impossible.
How do you honor your father and mother…if you’re parents
aren’t worthy of honor?
This whole ideal of Mom and Dad teaching children what it
looks like to love and honor…it is all horribly wounded and
crippled by sin, and Mom and Dad are both sinners. Now the
weightiness of parents, the authority and position they have, is
being used to hurt.
You want me to give them more?
Let me make it worse.
The Promise
This commandment is the first commandment with a specific
promise:
“that you may live long in the land the LORD, your
God, is giving you.”
Or, as repeated in Deuteronomy, and then later in Ephesians 6, it
is expanded:
“That it may be well with you, and that you may
live long on the earth.”
This is not a guarantee that the length of your life is directly
proportional to the extent that you honor your father and
mother. Nor that if you honor your father and mother, every-
thing else is guaranteed to go perfectly.
Well, then, what is it?
Here I was surprised. What I expected to find was that the
“you” was plural. It is a kind of generic social good — it is good
for you as a people, you will dwell long in the land as a people
if you are the kind of people who honor father and mother.
There is a generational legacy there, a continuity, as well as the
Social Security kind of care of the elderly by their children.
However, the promise is apparently to
you
. In the same way
that it is
you
who are commanded to honor your father and
mother, it is
you
who gets some kind of temporal benefit. “It is
well with
you, you
will dwell long in the land…”
Isn’t the value you get related to the honorableness, the wisdom
and honesty, the virtue of the parent you are honoring? That
makes logical sense…but it doesn’t show up here.
The apparent claim is that something happens in you, or to you,
in this ongoing process of “honoring your mother and father”
that corresponds to some form of blessing. There is a “possibility”
in there, a “might,” not a guarantee. But what is going on here?
Could it be that honoring your father and mother is good for
you? Regardless of their worthiness? This is easy if your par-
ents are honorable. All of our parents are sinful and broken
human beings. All of our parents have made mistakes...when
they have hurt you, wounded you, maybe in ways or at moments
when you were most vulnerable…
But could it be that God desires healing and redemption in
your earliest, most basic relationship? Could “honor” include
things like forgiveness, reconciliation and hope?
Does honoring still have room for being careful and setting
appropriate relational boundaries...all of that? Absolutely.
But for you, for your sake, that it might be well with you, and
honoring God’s commandment to you, teaching you to honor
and love Him…take a step in honoring your mother and father.
Tip the scales toward your father. Honor him.
Tip the scales toward your mother. Honor her.
Applica on
How do we do this? How do we “add weight” to our parents?
I want whatever blessing is associated with that. God clearly
believes this is fundamentally important, and that this is a neces-
sary component of loving Him and loving others.
One small step towards giving “more weight” to your mother
and father. What does that look like?
Perhaps your mom or dad have already passed. You can still
honor them. Take some time today to remember something
they taught you, a lesson you learned from them, a story you
shared. Better yet, share that story. One of my great memories
is painting Logan’s nursery with my dad, and he’s just telling me
stories about his dad. Generational honor.
Perhaps your parents are alive and kickin’…Make a special
effort, today, to lean in to that relationship. Call them, have
dinner with them, thank them, tell them you love them or
honor them. You know what your relationship looks like — give
it a boost, give it an extra step, give it weight, give it honor. For
me, if my parents weren’t here, I’d Skype them tonight. I don’t
do enough of that, but I can honor them that way.
Perhaps your parents are alive…and you kind of wish they
weren’t. Or you are pretending they aren’t. That is because
there is real pain there. There is history and hurt and garbage.
They are not honorable…but that isn’t the point. You are called
to honor them.
Maybe it looks like a phone call...or a letter...a little crack in the
door of reconciliation...or it is a prayer of forgiveness…or just
“God, help me to want to think about trying to start forgiving.”
Give it some weight. The truth of your human experience is
you can’t make your parents weightless. Lean into forgiveness,
lean into the relationship.
Find a way, today, to honor your father and mother.
Not only for their sakes, though it is for their good.
Not only for your sake, though it is for your good, that “it may
be well with you.” You strengthen your foundation for relation-
ship, your capacity to love others, and your capacity to love
and honor God.
Ultimately, honor your father and mother to honor God. He
commands “this is the course of righteousness” and we follow,
we trust, and we discover love.
SR
Top Ten Words
continued from previous page...
How to contact General Council:
Email address to all of the General Council members:
Regular mail can be sent to:
Susie Fox, General Council Chair
1722 Taylor Station Road, Blacklick, OH 43004.
