Reflections on the Family

Family


The Family is the most
essential human community

FAMILY

1. The Family is a Covenant Relationship:
the family is God’s greatest institution for sanctification.

• We are all born narcissistic, (preoccupied with self). A focus outward must be learned.

• You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.

• The family is forever. Friends come and go.

• The fact that there are more single adults in society today than in recorded history has profound implications for society.

• The family is the first (and often only) place we experience unconditional love, where we know we belong, where we first see that love is not a limited pie, where no one needs be left out.

2. The Family is an Inheritance across the generations:

Our families all pass some positive legacies to us down through the generations, but both blessings and curses can naturally extend down through a family’s generations.  Our society is forgetting the blessings of the extended family.

3. The Family is the primary place where an individual’s calling is expressed, championed and supported.

4. The Family holds the primary God-given responsibility (and authority) for raising and training of children.

Families can delegate some or all of this authority for educating children, but they remain responsible. When families abdicate their primary responsibility for their children in abusive ways, other sphere’s of society, particularly government, may then exercise their secondary responsibility for children.

5. The Family is the most essential human community:

The nuclear family reflects God’s triune nature as the essential model of community (authority without domination). It is the universal model for all other extended communities and organizations.

Allan Robbins
June 2003

Should we vaccinate our kids?

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Should we vaccinate our kids?

In a post-modern world, the spirit of the Berean’s to investigate to see if something were true (Acts 17:11), is easily trumped by emotional antidote.  However, as a YWAMer who has worked in Global Health and Primary Health Care for over 25 years and also as a father of young children, can I ask you to please don’t delay in getting caught up on your children’s and your immunizations…if not for yourselves, then for the protection of your friends and the children around you.

Continue reading “Should we vaccinate our kids?”

I learned about Little Fire Ants yesterday….

Photos: Hawaii Department of Agriculture

I learned about Little Fire Ants yesterday….I’ve been stung by Louisiana fire ants around my ankles, had a 6 inch centipede in my shirt bite me 4 times under the arm. I’ve had a large swarm of ground-dwelling yellow jackets attack my back and neck while mowing our campus firebreak and I’ve had an outbreak of Shingles on my neck and the back of my head. All these were REALLY painful, but they all paled in comparison to little fire ants. Yesterday morning while cutting up a large fallen tree and clearing growth for a friend in a neighboring community I got to experience what before I’d only heard about from friends on the Hilo side of our island. Little Fire Ants are hard-to-see tiny and instead of living on the ground, they are up in the trees and bush leaves where they easily fall and drop on you. So as is typical of LFA, I suddenly had 45 stings across my neck, both arms, hairline and left eye lid. But either fire ants have some secret communication where they all agree to sting you at the same time, or more likely the pain from their venom increases in intensity after the bite, I never saw the ants at all. I first thought my dry skin was especially itchy, then that I’d gotten into some nettles, and then that I had three blow torches turned on my arms and neck…I was on fire.Managed to drive home, hardly able to string two words together, I stripped next to our washing machine while Dee fumigated my truck. Took two Benadryl while taking a cold shower. Then a couple hours alternating ice packs and steroid creme until the antihistamine finally knocked me out until evening.Today I’m better. I can open my left eye. The general redness and swelling on my arms has reduced to just the defined little painful-only-when-touched whelps, and most thankfully, the overall “I’m on fire” pain is completely gone.I’m now a motivated LFA fighter and pray you don’t have to learn about them quite like I did. Since their accidental import to our island in 1999, they’ve taken over East Hawaii and are expanding their range in West Hawaii. There are lots of state and local resources to help fight them. The main thing is to regularly monitor your normal ants by placing four or more peanut-butter-dipped popsicle sticks around your property, placing them in a ziplock bag, freezing them and sending them to BIISC, 23 E Kawili St, Hilo, HI 96720. This Hawaii State Invasive Species group has developed a safe, effective gel-bait that needs to be used every 5 weeks for a year, but seems able to eliminate them from a given area.I generally love learning, but not this lesson.

Perseid Meteor Shower peaks tonight

Credit: Allan Robbins (Creative Commons Lisense)
Credit: Jacopo Werther

Aug. 11, 2020: If your tire of social media grumbles, creation might have an alternative for you the next couple nights.

The Perseid meteor and fireball shower is at its best tonight and tomorrow night and it was pretty fantastic last night. NASA estimates an average of 50 to 120 meteors per hour, but in my experience you can go up to 10 minutes without seeing a thing and then see 4 in two seconds. The Perseids are especially known for their long slow colorful fireballs that streak clear across the sky every so often…slow enough you can blink a couple times and they’re still going. I include a shot of the only fireball I captured last night, and my phone camera couldn’t pick up all the smaller meteors. but I include a shot taken by another photographer. To watch them tonight, find a dark, starry patch of sky after 10PM (even better after 2PM). (It was 4PM last night before the clouds cleared at our house) Lie on your back and look up about halfway between the horizon and overhead. They are going all directions.

What Happens next?

What Happens Next

Playable Covid-19 Epidemiology Simulator
Give it a try!

Try your hand at this! For 25 years every student that came through my Community Health course or Applied Epidemiology seminar got a free app called EpiInfo, to both simulate epidemics and to help tease out the causes and variables. Our field practicums used it in N. Iraq, Yemen, Cambodia and Bolivia. In class, we usually started with simulating food poisoning at church picnics and would end up with a full cholera epidemic, but the linked animations are a pretty good summary and hands-on Epi simulator for what is affecting our current pandemic. For those interested play around with the intermittent lock-downs. Also, if really interested, listen to the “This Week in Virology” podcast discuss a just published simulation of how schools could rotate face-to-face attendance and online learning to maximize protection from spreading the virus between school to home.

Playable Simulation
https://ncase.me/covid-19/?fbclid=IwAR0lsE0ljwRZZ_Z7vXeOwaDtVI33HKLGgkUS0QQ8Ev6lLre6iy0UGJJfpYUGi

1st link is the podcast. 2nd link is the simulatorAudio/Video Podcast https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-653/

Stepping into Silence – Our family’s focus this fall on Japan

Our family has  been reading a profound historical novel
from Japan: Silence, by Shūsaku Endō.

Endo's book: Silence has led to many family discussions this fall.

At the Wheaton College parent orientation Benjamin  and I attended in August  the entire freshman class was reading Silence as part of Wheaton’s new Christ-at-the-Core curriculum and they encouraged parents to read it as well. He and I were also able to attend the “Stepping into Silence” exhibit about the book at their Billy Graham Center. benexhibit

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These are real 400 year old fumi-e from the Wheaton Silence exhibit, worn smooth by the many forced to trample on them

 

 

 

 

fumie1

Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence centers on a young 17th century Jesuit priest who’s sent to Japan to investigate whether or not his mentor has committed apostasy. What Rodrigues, the young Jesuit, learns is the truth of the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) who are undergoing 40 years of intense persecution. To root them out, officials take anyone suspected of being a believer out in front of their village where they are forced to trample on a fumi-e (a bronze image of Christ) as a way of not only renouncing their faith but shaming them so that others will not believe. Those who refuse are imprisoned or killed by anazuri (hanging upside down in a toilet pit and being slowly bled to death).     

For Rodrigues, his illusion of the glory of martyrdom is stripped away as he witnesses this and learns that Ferreira, his mentor, and other priests, were told to either renounce their faith or continue to watch as believers in their congregations were tortured to death before them. The novel wrestles with doubt, shame, betrayal, and traumas’ effects on faith. 

This was one of those great books that makes you ask, “Would I do that? Would I renounce my faith in Christ to end the torture and suffering of others?”  …questions that stay with me and make me look at my own heart…to face the darkness of my own doubts. 

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Passion by Fujimura

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Makoto Fujimura, currently Director of Fuller Seminary’s Brehm Center

The Stepping into Silence exhibit included a number of wonderful paintings inspired by Endo’s book by the renowned artist Makoto Fujimura (Silence & Beauty). So often still, we hear that “to doubt is to sin” yet Fufimua highlights how, Endo’s Silence exposes the flaw in this line of thinking. “It does not express faith in God but instead faith in clarity and our lust for certainty.”  “Faith can be rational, but only after a deeper  journey toward mystery and transcendence.” Most of us do not like to sit with our doubts. When faced with multiple horrible choices, we want clarity.  

Sacrificial grace by Fujimura
Sacrificial grace by Fujimura

In the 16th century Christianity had grown to over 100,000 believers in the Urakami District of Nagasaki Japan when it was banned and believers were hunted and persecuted. The survivors of the persecution secretly maintained their beliefs for 250 years before the ban was lifted in the 19th century. The church then had grown to over 15,000, when on Sunday August 9, 1945 the second atomic bomb at the end of WWII, detonated 550 yards above their church killing 10,000 of the parishioners. Some things are hard to understand.

Last week 11 Syrian missionaries who work in conjunction with ChristianAid Mission, were killed by crucifixion or beheading, in front of their team leader near Alepo. Well over 300,000 Iraqi and Syrian Christians have been killed in the past three years. Andrew White, the last Anglican Vicar in Iraq, told the BBC recently that Christianity is about to disappear in Iraq and Syria. But as the Kakure Kirishitan, the hidden Christians, of Nagasaki have shown, though God may at times seem silent, he is present with us.

Our nation faces choices this fall I fear we will be held accountable for, both individually and as a nation. Are we afraid of wandering in the wilderness? Is my faith in God or is it but faith in certainty. God promises to be with us even in the silence of our doubts, and (spoiler alert) ultimately, He is not silent. 

Unless otherwise noted, all images are by Allan Robbins