PROVERBS 31: 28 "Family Tragedy"

Proverbs 31: 28     Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.

Proverbs 31: 28.   The summer before my freshman year in high school, our house burned down.  In less than an hour, our little shotgun house was nothing but ashes and a chimney. 

We survived and moved into a trailer----- which was way nicer than the old house.  People called my parents heroes for saving their children.  

Good came out of that fire,  but my parents never said that I should burn my house down when I grew up. 

In fact, my parents made a point of teaching me to keep working smoke alarms in my house.  They taught me not to play with matches.  They told me to keep the pilot light on the water heater lit and covered.  They trained me to do everything possible to avoid taking my family through the disaster of a house fire------ even though good came out of our house fire.

Follow me closely. 

Though good came out of the situation, and though my parents’ response was considered “heroic,” we still recognized that the situation itself was tragic and not to be repeated.

Proverbs 31: 28 describes a daily scene in the life of the woman worthy of a king.  She is Mama and she is there, a present and active blessing in her children’s lives. Daddy is also there, a present and active blessing in THEIR children’s lives.  Mama is there.  Daddy is there.  And Daddy is Mama’s husband.

Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.

That is the format God established when He invented the family back in Genesis chapter 2.   That is the format that the ideal woman wants for herself and for her children.  And a king-to-be should want a woman who wants the family structure that God established.

But that can’t always be.  Divorce, death, deployment, desertion, or discord can disrupt the flow into a Biblically ordered family.  Our single-minded lust for sexual satisfaction leads us into ill-conceived conceptions.   

But whatever the reason, when mama isn’t there for her children, when daddy isn’t there for his children, when daddy and mama aren’t together with their children: it means that something went wrong---- disastrously, tragically wrong.

In those situations, I’ve personally watched single mothers and single fathers--- especially in my own family---- step up and do an amazing solo job raising wonderful children.  I’ve personally watched families and communities close ranks around children who got dropped off for the weekend by a parent who never came back.

Children are a great good.  Single parents who do a 2-person job alone are heroic.  Good things comes out of those homes.

But we shouldn’t pretend that the absence of mama, or daddy, or both isn’t a tragedy.  

Yet, more and more that’s exactly what we do.

Listen to the lines in our movies, and sitcoms, and theater.  Listen to the music.  Listen to conversations around you. 

We teach our little girls, “You don’t need a man to raise your kids.” 

Across our culture we spend more time preparing boys to deal with a baby’s mama than we do teaching them to love a wife.

We talk to our daughters about WHEN they become a mother and IF they become a wife.

We drop our children off for Grandma, Ma Dear, Big Mama, Auntee, or the Child Services lady to raise. And when they should be grown and independent, we bring them back home with us to live out a whole other childhood.

But we mean no harm.  We love our children.  We’re just like people who grew up in a war zone.  We have become so conditioned to constant tragedy that we don’t even see it as trauma anymore.  It’s just the new normal.

So, we are accidentally training yet another generation to be single parents.  

Hear me.  We are not simply preparing them to deal with single parenthood if it somehow happens.  Listen well.  Look at what we do.  We’re socializing our children to assume and even to PREFER something other than what God called family to be.

And that is like teaching our children to set their own houses on fire and call themselves heroes for doing so.

We’re supposed to want better for our children. Not want the same. 

Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her

We’re supposed to want our children to have the corny, boring old daddy-as-husband-mama-as-wife-raising-their-children-together family that God (Who knows what the crap He’s doing) ordained.

No.  Our kids raising their kids in a “traditional” home isn’t quite as heroic as the struggle most parents live through today.

But we only need heroes when we have disasters.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church in Montgomery, Alabama, executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO) and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

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