Hearken, Ye Parents

Be certain of this: At the point when you attempt to make the child see the corrections they need to make, there will be, via the avenue of the highway of excuses, an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Your instruction that is too late will fall on deaf ears. It becomes even more difficult when you look back on your own life and realize there were some companions you had who were only just commencing on the road to apostasy, and you never realized it until it was too late. You look back on the first thing that individual or group did that causes you to wish you had never been involved with them at all, and now your child is following their lead, doing that very same thing. That too is a heavy burden to bear.

There are occasions, and they are not rare, when parents bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but they gallop away from the faith on their own. That is bad enough, but when the child ventures away because you know you failed at some point, that is even worse.

Hearken, ye parents of young children, do all you can, and when they are grown, pray that you did all you could to get them started the right way and to stay on the right path. [Editor’s note: The same would hold true of moral departures as well. Copied with minor edits from the July 13th Beacon, Pensacola, Florida.]