Just one of the ten commandments has the promise `So that you may live long in the land`, and it’s this one: Honour your father and your mother. Why?
Perhaps for three reasons. First, if we have (even for no fault of our own) bad relationships with our parents, it can have damaging emotional consequences we’ll need to recognize and work on. Both externally, in our attitudes to other authority-figures or potential father- and mother-figures (and everybody needs these); but also internally, because a real part of who we are comes from them; and so as Dallas Willard says, to reject and stay angry with them is to reject and stay angry with a part of ourselves.
And secondly, how we react to the idea of `father` can poison how we relate to our Father in heaven. (`If He’s anything like my father I sure will hate Him.`) Indeed there may well be a correlation between experience of an absent father and an atheistic disbelief in the presence of any heavenly Father. At any rate, one disconcerting part of fatherhood is that we define what `father` means for our children. I taught my own children that they had two fathers: one is very good at what He does; the other, well, he does his best. (Which got quoted back at me when we fell out.) But some of us who had problems with our earthly fathers have to choose to work hard (I did) at understanding and rejoicing in God being our `Abba`, our `Daddy` (Rom 8:15).
Other cultures grasp these issues better than western ones do. (I’ve owed a lot to east Asian friends in this specific area.) So thirdly: is it surprising that in our culture which doesn’t take this command seriously, doesn’t respect the elderly, we’ve also lost the sense of what it means ourselves to mature, grow up, become an adult?- and have no sense of value (only fear) in what ageing will mean for us too?
What is maturity? In our culture, there is no Lord now to be the Shepherd of our journey; and without God, and with no clear sense of what either `wisdom` or `personal growth` mean, there can be little meaningful direction in our lives to give real value to the `experience’ we accumulate. `Perpetual adolescence – informally attired, developmentally-arrested, and blithely irresponsible – seems to be the ideal state for young to middling adults’, wrote one UK journalist. And adulthood may simply mean the moment when we give up trying to keep in touch with the cutting-edge. Then there are the later decades: whereas God in Proverbs 16 presents advancing years as a cause for deep thankfulness (`Grey hair is a crown of splendour’; believe it?), valuable because of the progress they embody in His sculpturing us for eternity… we westerners tend to see them as mostly a time of loss; `old’ merely means `obsolete’, and old age becomes the final defeat rather than the final harvest. Doesn’t all this mirror our ceasing to respect the next generation up, as per the fifth commandment?
So `Children, obey your parents` (Eph 6); adults, `honour` them. What does that mean? Sometimes it will mean forgive (like in the disastrous families the old testament records); choosing to forgive – whether or not we can forget – unkindness, or the abandonment of divorce. (As long as we hold on to bitterness, says Rob Warner, we hurt ourselves; he quotes someone’s determination to `keep my side of the relationship clean. Whatever wrong my parents have done, I will choose to show them respect.’) God always comes first, Matthew 10:37; nevertheless respect – whatever else we feel inside – is central to honouring; and so is helping them as for many years they helped us.
How helping specifically? Maybe technically, in these days of endlessly changing, often confusing, gadgets. Maybe financially if there is need (balancing 1 Tim 5:8 and 2 Cor 12:14; and think of what Jesus exerts Himself to do even on the cross, John 19:26). More probably, as time goes on, emotionally. I remember Lindsay Brown saying that three key components here (as with most relationships) were: ensuring time together; real and regular communication (including expressing gratitude, praise, and encouragement); and demonstrating affection. This is where Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages is so very helpful (or try 5LoveLanguages.com): we want to show affection in a way our parents (like our spouses, or our children) actually feel. When my mother was old I came across a book called 52 Ways to Show Aging Parents You Care: I surely wish I’d had it earlier. Letters, creative presents, and the one that struck me particularly, asking, and recording, their memories. It matters a lot to parents whether we care about what they’ve experienced, what’s happened in their lives. And one day we will probably want to have those stories too…
`Love is patient, love is kind… It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love… always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres…`
For more practical suggestions please see this post:
