World Wide Family

by Rosalyn Goodall

As women in ministry and as pastor’s wives, we are accustomed to being servants and people pleasers. We try to be obliging and we want people to like us. But we may sometimes feel out of control, victimized by the velocity and direction of life. Eagerness to please can make us vulnerable. Satan would love to rob us of our purpose, energy and joy. He looks for the right tactic to neutralize our effectiveness. Depending on the nature of our personality and our areas of weakness, he can often be effective using one of the 7 common strategies.

… the most vulnerable victims of family instability are the children who are too young to understand what has happened to their parents." James Dobson, Love Must Be Tough

Dr. Dobson graphically illustrated the tragic impact on the next generation in a recent conversation with a sixth-grade teacher in an upper middle-class California city. She was shocked to see the results of a creative writing task assigned to her students. They were asked to complete a sentence that began with the words "I wish." The teacher expected the boys and girls to express wishes for bicycles, dogs, television sets, and trips to Hawaii. Instead, twenty of the thirty children made reference in their responses to their own disintegrating families. A few of their actual sentences follow:
"I wish my parents wouldn't fight and I wish my father would come back."
"I wish my mother didn't have a boyfriend."