Raising Our Kids in a Broken World
Children are God’s gifts and inheritance to their parents and the community at large. Like the arrows in the quiver of a great warrior that are sent into the camp of the enemy to do damage and win wars, so are children the gifts that are sent into the future to both establish the blessings of a lineage and also continue the line of ancient wisdom. So how we raise them, where we raise them, who are involved in the their formative years, and the health of the mental and spiritual environment that we help them develop even as they grow, will determine how much of the family blessing they will establish in the future. And because the future is just the very next unknown second, minute, day or year, every minute counts when it comes to doing the right thing with regard to raising our children.
No one needs a diviner to see and also understand that we now have societies, communities, nations and countries that are dealing with a very disillusioned generation of young people who are so disconnected from wisdom and truth. It’s like a very heavy veil of sorcery is covering our world and our young people are mostly the ones bearing the weight of this darkness. This, I believe is largely because they were born into a social media generation that is steeped in unreal things, falsehood, and mind bending manipulative narratives, so they really do not have antecedent from the pre-internet age that will help them find safe spaces outside of the generation that they are born into. They are not able to think back and pull strength from pre-internet experiences. They just don’t have it to pull from. Meaning that for them to live above the dictates of this new generation of social media that they find themselves in, there must be the open arms of parents and older ones who are rich enough in wisdom to help them navigate through.
Somehow, based on whatever parameters, we have somehow built our societies as a reactionary system of living, churning out people who are not stable in their minds about what life really is about. So we have more young people who are knowledgeable in many things that the society is throwing at them, but dull of spirit and the mental ability to really apply wisdom to life. So they live life from a very selfish and self-centered point of view. They go through life with a warped mindset that life is a battle or competition with others and that they must be the winner. But the truth is, in as much as many motivational speakers tend to say these half-baked statements, life is not a battle with anyone and it’s not a competition with some seen or unseen rivals. Life is a battlefield and a competition against self. Meaning that a true winner is not the one that beats everyone, but the one who has conquered himself. The true winner is the one who has put to death his selfish tendencies and self-centered mindset. A true winner is the one who, by experience, has learnt to understand that life is beyond this world and the acquisition of things. Such person has learnt that he is a better person when he makes room for others to be the better versions of themselves. He has learnt to take responsibility for his actions and won’t pass the blame on to someone else. He has learnt to understand that falling on his face is not the end of the story, but that picking himself up and building a castle with the stone that made him fall is a better way to end the story. But sincerely speaking, none of these beautiful things will materialize if we are not deliberate about how we raise our kids.
I look at the societies that call themselves developed and I see the madness of their negligence and self-centered lifestyles. And because Afrikans have decided to follow suit in the wayward attitudes of these so-called developed nations, we now have more correctional facilities supposedly built to correct the outcomes of our failed societies than we have instructional facilities, where human characters are built before they find themselves in a society that is already steeped in madness. You will please forgive my language and expression, but things are really bad out there and someone just needs to point it out.
We must stop putting all our efforts in pulling people out of the river downstream and start making real moves to find out why they are falling in the first place into the river upstream. Reactional standpoints towards life, as we have seen, are not paying well, and we have to change those approaches.
I do a lot of meditation and mind adjustments using the simple things I see or understand about nature. A little while ago, something that I had never thought about suddenly made sense in my mind.
I was having a light chat with my wife on new year’s day and we got talking about where and how our kids will be raised. I think the chat began with us commenting on a TV series we were watching about modem medicine and how it’s mostly about surgery, reactions and nothing much about preventive approach based on clean and healthy lifestyle.
As we had our conversation, it suddenly made sense that when children are raised in rural or semi-rural communities and play with nature or natural things like trees, animals, plants, with each other, they actually interact with life-giving organisms, as against the ones raised in the urban setting who play with lifeless toys, play-stations and stuff that is mostly created to alter the state of their minds and thinking. So, instead of them interacting with living things that give life, they interact with dead and lifeless things that confine their minds to technology like robots.
Mind you, I am not saying that living in rural areas is the only way to raise healthy kids, neither am I saying that living in an urban area is detrimental to children, but that we have given too much room to strangers and have left our kids at the mercy of those who do not mean well for their spiritual and mental well-being. So, we are shocked when the cases of suicide, rape, drug abuse, depression among young people is on the increase, but we forget that the play-station we bought for them and the movies we allow them to watch unsupervised are mostly violent. So we have to go back to the basics and really look at what we are doing to our children in the name of exposing them to technology and development.
God did not make a mistake when the first home He gave to man was not a tower, skyscraper or even a three bedroom flat, but a garden that is completely surrounded with nature and natural things. And neither is it a coincidence that the first time man decided to come together and build a city with a tower in it, the result was a global confusion, which is still here with us even till now.
The truth is that, every living thing carries a blessing from God, the Creator, and that is simply what the truth is. For God blessed all He made and called them good. So when we relate with creation and teach our kids to relate with nature, we are actually relating with blessed and living things. So, let us raise our children in blessed and life-giving environments that will help them understand that they too are life-giving spirits having a human experience.
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