Personal Update

This entry serves as a personal time-stamp to document current difficulties*, and hopefully it will provide me with a possibility of facing my problems in a constructive way (perhaps another vain hope).

Psalm 128
1) Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways!
2) You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
3) Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.
4) Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.
5) The Lord bless you from Zion! May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life!
6) May you see your children’s children! Peace be upon Israel!

I was reading from psalm 128 quoted above. It talks about fearing the Lord and the conditional promise (vs 4) of the results of fearing Him. And, especially since I have been thinking about the Covenant Theology aspect of Christian Theology, I really believed this promise. I thought fearing the Lord meant belief and faith in God and His promises and attempting to obey the commandments out of gratitude for the salvation and other good gifts He gives. I actually got excited about serving the Kingdom by establishing institutions and raising believing offspring, but reality has demonstrated to me the vanity of such false hopes of improvement. When it turns out that you are a lousy parent and your child goes down the path of failure and wrongness, it requires some justification or explanation. The only thing that makes sense is that by definition I have not properly “feared the Lord”. Nowhere in the quoted passage does it mention the consequences of sin and how those consequences can snuff out the promise. I still believe in God and respect Him, but for me, those promises in the Bible are getting harder to believe since they don’t seem to be happening in my life. I got lucky these past few years and got a good job in this horrid economy, so I was able to rise above mere survival; I am grateful for this blessing. Now I have some stability in my social status (upper working class), but my family is falling apart. This is all probably my fault on every level, but I knew I couldn’t live a true, honest, and Christian life without spiritual help from God. I have needed help all along, but I just didn’t know how to access the help I needed. It breaks my heart to actually see from scripture what should have been my life and compare it to how my life actually turned out.

Now the standard Evangelical way of explaining away promises like the one in the Psalm above is to point out that since the advent of Christ, everything is to be spiritualized and that to believe in an actual physical promise is wrong. I don’t buy it, but when everything falls down such views take on a more “truthiness” type of flavor.

It is a terrible and awful (in the original sense of these words) thing to realize that you are cut off from the future (as far as your own lineage goes) and that judgment day cometh and you have failed.

There were two ways I could have ended the curse of sin in my dysfunctional family. One is to not have children at all and end the genetic mistakes (the easier way and preferred by planned parenthood), the other is to try to raise them in the faith and make every sacrifice for their betterment with (hopefully) the help of God. The second option is the harder and more noble of the two, and with enough hope, it even seems possible (after all haven’t many other families in the church accomplished this?). This second option is also dangerous, because if you fail, you have made things worse and the curse continues and now the dysfunction continues. I should not have hoped. I should have taken the easier first option. May God have mercy on my soul.


*Several days ago, my son, Samuel, was hospitalized for attempted suicide.