The family is rock solid. Don’t miss out! The traditional family is one of the most awesome, breathtaking, and vitally important of all of God’s magnificent creations! Here’s why:
- God’s plan stabilizes and provides coherence to the family.
- The stabilized family builds stability and coherence into the national culture.
- A stable culture assures continuity of values across future generations.
- God’s plan facilitates the growth of the God-ordained marriage partnership and family.
- Married people are happier.
- Married people are healthier.
- Family is life’s boot camp for children, instilling virtues and guiding growth.
- True family-centered families—as opposed to career-centered family arrangements reduce crime.
- True family-centered families—as opposed to career-centered family arrangements reduce drug abuse.
- A loving family experience facilitates interpersonal relationships outside the family, enhancing the richness of career, hobby, volunteer, and recreational experiences.
- God’s plan enables family members to practice humility, forgiveness, mercy, longsuffering, and a servant’s spirit in a loving, nonthreatening environment.
- The positive character embedded in family members—parents and children—is carried to the outside community throughout life.
- Family members learn to overcome pride by serving other family members
- The family is an incubator for building God-ordained intellectual, emotional, and spiritual views and values (character development).
- The family aligned with God’s plan ultimately leaves the greatest of all possible legacies.
- The family aligned with God’s plan is the married couple’s gift back to God.
- The family aligned with God’s plan inspires frequent, comfortable, and nonthreatening opportunities for faith sharing.
The driving passion for the family visualized in God’s plan is the aggregate of:
- Gratitude for the Lord’s personally expressed infinite love.
- Desire to express that gratitude by serving Him and others as a way of life.
- Desire to be a conduit of His love to succeeding generations by embedding His love and character in the next generation’s children.
Anything that erodes family culture absolutely and irretrievably undermines national culture, at first weakening it and ultimately annihilating it. No culture has ever survived the breakdown of the family. Ours won’t either. It’s up to YOU to save America and the family. What do you think?
Dr. Lloyd Stebbins 
AMEN to all that you said. Many people don’t think deeply about family. Heart Hugs
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That’s right Sylvia. The family is the most powerful institution ever created and is also the most easily neglected or abused. What do you think?
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Coming from a divorced home, I can attest that broken family units lead to broken people. Only by the grace of God have myself and some family members been redeemed from the ashes.
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Thank you, Caitlyn for sharing the gracious and candid comments.
Divorce is one of the several most selfish decisions a person can make; the other selfish decisions involve abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and placing a loved one in a nursing home prematurely.
People contemplating divorce are typically focused on their perceived personal pain. Try an experiment. Share a cup of coffee with an older couple that has been married 50, 60, or 70 years. It you ask, you’ll likely find that the couple flirted with the idea of divorce one or more times during their marriage. Almost before the words come out of their mouth, they will quickly add that they are glad they didn’t go through with the divorce. There is always light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel may be days, weeks, months, or even years-long, but the light (God’s light and their own emotional light) will be there.
Consider too, a holistic perspective. A calculation in my book demonstrates that a person with no particular visibility will directly or indirectly influence nearly 2,000,000 people in just four generations. Within that realm, a couple choosing divorce will virtually guarantee that at least one of their children will experience a divorce some time in the future, which will be multiplied through the generations. The divorcing couple will significantly increase the probability that their siblings and close friends will also experience the pain of divorce.
After all the divorcing couple (and all the rest of us too) are very good at putting on a pretty face. If you’re a bit skeptical, look around church on Sunday morning at the people who’ve been fighting WWIII in the car on the way to church and break into an Academy Award-winning smile as soon as they walk through the door. That smile will easily mask the pain of the underlying divorce.
Altogether, the divorcing couple will ultimately be responsible for or substantially contribute to 40-50 other divorces and all the associated pain. So far, we haven’t even discussed the lasting pain of divorce that ripples through a number of affected family members. When the couple contemplating divorce is able to transfer the focus from self to the holistic view of long-term effects on a large number of people, it becomes much more difficult the justify the divorce, and therefore easier to stick it out and forgo the divorce. Of course, God simplifies the whole process, saying in Malachi 2:16, “I hate divorce.” What do you think?
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I can’t help wonder how different my life would be if I came from a home like that. I too came from a broken family and then suffered abuse (not sexual) from the new step-dad from the age of 8 til 17( my real father passed away when I was 7). I was allowed to move out at age 17 due to the harshness of my home life. I graduated high school while living on my own and working 2 jobs to pay for my place so I could feel safe. I am so envious when I see family’s like you described above in this blog. I just always say to myself those kids don’t know how lucky they really are.
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Thanks for sharing such a personal story. So sorry to hear about your suffering, but glad that you have survived so well.
Scripture commands that:
“…at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore WHAT GOD HAS JOINED TOGETHER, LET MAN NOT SEPARATE.” [Mark 10:6-8 NIV]
At the time of marriage, the man and woman make a vow with each other and a covenant with God. Neither are breakable. But at the same time, the marriage license issued by the state represents a contract with the government. A contract is breakable. Consequently, most couples go to a church or synagogue to get married, but they go to the government to get divorced. By dissolving the contract, the government assumes the power of God. The couple obtaining the divorce finds false comfort in knowing that the divorce is legal. After all, it has been granted by the government through the judicial system. Even though the government has the power to dissolve the contract, that dissolution does not relieve the couple of their vow before God and their covenant with Him, a fact so often conveniently overlooked. Why would any thinking couple ever want to give the government the power of God? “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Marriage belongs to God, not to Caesar.
The success of marriage relies, in large part, on its irrevocable permanence. There was a wildly popular old song that proclaimed, “I want to be happy, but I can’t be happy, ’til I make you happy too!” When the married man and woman both recognize and accept without qualification that their marriage is a commitment that is irrevocable and permanent, neither can be routinely happy unless they are willing to exert whatever time and effort is necessary to make the other one happy. Since the marriage is closed, there is no Plan B. By overlooking this vital concept, massive pain and suffering have spread throughout our modern culture like a metastasized cancer.
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Another thing to consider is the material of the shed. A gambrel shed
resembles a barn, it has a roof with two sloped
pitches on each side. After a solid amount of online
searching, I was full of grand ideas of versatility of
sheds and would like to share some of my research with
you.
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