Adulting

ByHal Hammons

It is trendy these days to admonish millennials into better practice of what is being termed “adulting.”  Basic skills such as cooking, shopping, laundry, auto maintenance, and the like are being neglected.  As a result, a generation is going off to college unable to boil an egg or sew a button.

The cry goes out from far and wide to bring back home economics classes, shop classes, and financial literacy classes.  Get our schools to empower our children so they will have a chance of coping in a world that will soon try to eat them alive.

It’s a fine idea.  I have a better one.  I call it “parenting.”

My dad taught me to change a tire.  My mom taught me how to balance a checkbook.  I didn’t pay as close attention as I could have and was forced at some pains to finish my education on my own.  But still, I had the tools.  Now I’m instructing my girls on their usage.  My spiritual training worked in much the same way.  The church helped, certainly.  But my parents were responsible for turning me into a full-grown Christian, and they took that responsibility seriously (Ephesians 6:4).

Woe unto the parents who completely palm off their responsibilities onto institutions!  If I were to trust the elders to complete my girls’ spiritual education, or assume any relevant secular education was being provided in school, or (worst of all, perhaps) think training for everyday life was done adequately through television, I should have my parenting privileges revoked.  No biggie, since I wasn’t using them anyway.

It is my job to find straight paths for my children (Proverbs 3:5-6), teach them how to walk in them (Proverbs 22:6), and beat them with the proverbial “rod of discipline” (Proverbs 22:15) until they get it right.  Me.  Not the church.  Not the village.

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Isaiah 1:20 provides a warning in the context of the more familiar phrase in verse 18 — “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow.”  If the nation would refuse to repent, God says, “you will be devoured by the sword.”  But one passage in the Midrash, a collection of rabbinic writings, translates it quite differently — “if you refuse and resist, carob pods you shall eat.”  James Moffatt apparently was quite impressed with this view of the text and rendered the verse accordingly in his translation, although every other Bible translation I could find reads essentially as the New American Standard Bible does.