WATCHERS OF TIME BY TONYE COLE: WHAT GOES AROUND?

As I read my friends biography, I was intrigued by an intimate desperate prayer he confessed to as he became a father of three boys, pleading that none of them would give him and his wife anything close to the trouble and heartache his rebellious self gave to his parents. It was a prayer I knew all too well and an emotion I connected with immediately as I too, upon becoming a father and watching my children grow into their teens and then young adults, could not help but replay my sojourn in that age group and some of the things my friends and I did which would have stopped my parents hearts in their tracks had they known.

It was therefore no surprise that another conversation with an old school chum of mine would trigger alarm bells, ringing at full blare, all through my head. Unknown to many, the years have crept silently upon us and we suddenly have children that are of marital age. As is oft the case mothers have a bond with their sons that runs very deep just as fathers seem to have with their daughters, so when she told me she hasn’t been able to bring herself to meet her son’s girlfriend and whoever he will marry must know she is a part of that marriage, I immediately knew this story wasn’t new nor will it be the last.

The Creator of All Flesh in setting out how man was to fill the earth instituted marriage as the sanctioned methodology. In doing so, He created from man an equal but opposite helpmate that man named woman. In the sighting of this beauty of creation, the man in evident awe and appreciation declared “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. But intuitively knowing that children must one day leave to start their families, to the heartache of their parents, he declared to the hearing of both he and his wife “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”. Are we ready to let our children go? May the Lord be merciful so our children do better than us.