Rules for Reformers

by Douglas Wilson

Acorns are cute, but sprawling oaks weathering a storm are glorious.

If that happens, the end result is the same as what happens when you mollycoddle anything. Bringing up children as though they will be perpetually endangered is to create a circumstance where they likely will be.

When you look at children, do you see potential victims or potential heroes? The eye of faith sees both.

Do you drop the kids off at your district’s city gate and hope that your enemies (and God’s) aren’t hired to do too much of the training? Or do you react the other direction and hunt for a private school that will wrap them up in cotton batting for as long as possible? Or do you want to provide them with a Jesus-centered education that will train them for the battle, the way boot camp is supposed to?

Many conservative Christians know that the culture war we are fighting is a desperate battle for our children.

Once we realize that we are in a long war, a war in which the first blood shed was that of Abel, and the last blood shed will be that of the final martyr, an honored someone who will no doubt not be born for many centuries yet, we will finally recognize the importance of the time we are called to invest in our children. Because it is a long war, it crosses generations. In a very short space of time, your children will join you in the line, and a short time after that, their children will join them. This means that we begin by fighting for our children, but we must end by fighting by means of them. We must do two things simultaneously—we must fight today’s battles, and we must recruit and train tomorrow’s warriors.

My contribution will be that of making penetrating geezer comments from the corner of the living room after Sabbath dinner. I will see myself as still fighting through them.