Be Thankful for Good Parents

Are good parents a gift? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I usually write these a few days in advance. This blog is a break from Ecclesiastes. Tonight, I was playing through Persona 5 Strikers where the heroes go into the cognitive world of the villains and find out a major influence on the evil that these villains do is unresolved trauma in their past. In this case, it was a villain whose past had him being an abused child by an awful father who murdered the boy’s mother over money.

It was truly evil.

You don’t actually see the child being abused. You see everything happening and the child is invisible throughout. As I think about it, that could be even more symbolism right there.

I have good parents. My parents raised me right. I was in church every Sunday and my folks were kind to me. We had our differences and they made mistakes at times. All parents do.

Yet seeing something like this makes me think of what a blessing I have.

It also leaves me thinking not every child out there has that blessing. For some children, this wasn’t just a scene in a game. This was reality. For me, if a game helps open my eyes to something like that, that’s a powerful enough influence. People who say games can’t help us don’t know what they’re talking about. Stories are gripping. This scene gripped me with thinking about a poor innocent child being so horribly abused by his own father, the one who should have loved him and shown him how to be a man.

Scripture tells parents to raise their children in a way that doesn’t exasperate them. Children are to be seen as a gift. Israel was forbidden from child sacrifice entirely. It would not show your devotion to YHWH to sacrifice your children like it supposedly did to pagan gods. It would rather show how little you cared for the gift of child life he had given you.

That’s another reason abortion is so unthinkable. It treats children like they’re disposable. Children become an inconvenience. An abuser does that to his children that have been born. An abortion does it to the children who haven’t.

I can’t help but think of how Jesus said it would be better to have a millstone tied to you and to be thrown into the sea than to abuse a little one. In the game world, what happened to the child reverberated throughout time to the two decades later when the game takes place. The child is inflicting evil on others as an adult that is akin to what his father did to him, all the while thinking he is being a hero to those who are being abused. It’s hard to explain without playing the game. I don’t think I can. Just trust me on it.

If you had good parents, be thankful for them. You didn’t have to have them. You could have been born to parents who didn’t care for you. If you didn’t have them and you were like the abused child I saw, your parents don’t define you. You are valuable and capable of loving and being loved. Turn to Christ and rise above what happened to you. The more the abuse controls you, the more they win. It’s your life. Don’t let them dictate it. Jesus tells you who you are. No one else does.

To those who have abused children, repent. You have done a great evil and there is no excusing you, but there can be forgiving you. Turn to Jesus and seek to make things right. Seek to end abuse out there. No child ever deserves to be abused. Ever.

Think about these things.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

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