A couple of years ago, the television set was left on and I came into the kitchen to start working. I left the program on, although I didn't have time to sit down and watch it. It was a program where wives were being swapped.
I wouldn't normally watch a program like that, but since it was on, I listened to it and learned a few things. The two families involved in this show were about as opposite as you could find. One family was (from what I could tell) 'Christian', and the other family was very worldly. The wives got swapped and tried their best to fit into each other's mold.
The Christian family was one that was trying to live as if they were survivors. They had no electricity, and none of the luxuries that modern day families have. While I appreciate their point of view, I think it is a little extreme to have to live as barebones as that. They had some good points though, that we would appreciate.
The other family was typical modern day American. The couple only had one child, and they did not know how to control him. They had a lot of 'toys' and lived with a lot of nice things. Everyone in this family was selfish and there was not a lot of sacrifice for better things.
The thing I noticed though, as much as there were valuable things going on in the Christian home, they lacked humility. They did a lot of things right, and were impressive in some areas, but, in the end, they were not kind to the other family.
At the very end, the lady who was the wife in the secular family, was very impressed by the Christian family. She actually seemed to want to know more, but, sadly, the Christian lady treated her harshly for the things she wasn't doing right. For example, she openly rebuked the woman for wearing provocative clothing. The whole thing just wasn't done right. At the end, the worldly lady was frustrated with the Christian lady and openly admitted that she had learned a lot about family life by being in that home for that period of time, yet the Christian lady wasn't very accommodating. After the program was over, it was said that the Christian lady apologized for being harsh.
Some of the things that the Christian lady did, that were right, were to teach her children how to do hard work. There was no option for her kids to watch television or play video games. But they learned how to do life together as a family. They learned how to prepare food from scratch. They made everything they needed, instead of running to a store when they needed to get something.
Although I think going without electricity is a stretch, there is a point there, that we could learn from. What if the day ever came, when electricity isn't available to us? How would we respond to that? Would our children know how to be resourceful in coming up with an alternative to electricity? What if grocery stores weren't available to us? Would we know how to grow our own food, just in case? Or would that be so foreign to us, that we would just starve?
Our society is so dependent upon other things to survive. What steps could we take to prepare for survival, if we needed to take those steps?
I am not old enough to know what it was like to live during the Great Depression, but those who went before us can tell us what it was like. Everyone on the block would get together and bring an item and put it into a pot. Then it was heated and soup was made! That was how some lived during the Depression. All they had was soup that was made by everyone chipping something in to make a big soup bowl with, in order to feed the people on that block.
In Early American days, people used to barter. That means, one person would bring her eggs to a place called a 'Mercantile' and she would trade her eggs for another item like milk. That was how people lived back then, along with many people having their own little farms.
Today, farming is scoffed at and looked at as 'primitive'. Now we have the big, agricultural farms, which produce tons of meat and milk, but at a cost to us. Not in money, but in health. Food that is produced on these farms is unsanitary, full of antibiotics and growth hormones, and the animals are not even fed the right kind of food for them to digest. These big, agricultural farms are replacing local farms and we are losing a lot of our nourishment as a result.
In 1946, the first grocery store came into being. People became less dependent on their farms and more dependent on the grocery store. Today, the thought of living off the land is almost unheard of in America.
All it takes to get back to what we had, is to be willing to do the hard work. People in our society avoid hard work like the Plague. But, God intended us to work hard, and in doing so, we would be blessed in the results.
We don't do hard things, just for the sake of doing hard things. We do them, because we know the trade-off for our convenience is our well being. Our society has been duped into thinking that we should do whatever is easiest and most convenient, not what is best for us, whatever the cost.
We have to do the hard work in front of us, but we also need to go back and recover what we have lost as a people. We are not animals that go from one pleasure to another. We are human beings created in God's image, designed to carry out His will. If we live for convenience, we will never be able to do that. May God help us to do the hard work He has called us to do.
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