Blog: Entry #3

Train up a child in the way he should go
[teaching him to seek God’s wisdom and will
for his abilities and talents],
and when he is old he will not depart from it.

— Proverbs 22:6, Amplified Bible

As I often point out to people, the verse—train child…when old– does not say anything about the teens and twenties. In the biblical culture, one did not become an adult until the age of thirty. This is why Jesus could not begin his earthly ministry until his thirtieth birthday. Before the age of thirty, the man/woman was considered a youth. When you get to the chapters about my teens and twenties, it will become glaringly apparent that I was not yet a practicing adult. I believe that our omniscient, loving, heavenly Father, used the word “old” in Proverbs 22:6 precisely because He is cognizant of the human condition. God understands that it takes some of us time to grow up and see that our empty places can only be filled by an experiential knowledge of our creator, even if we were trained up as children in His way.

I put in the quote from Proverbs because mom really did do her best with what she knew, and because all three boys grew up to be good people. It is only in my sixties that I am beginning to understand how much the trauma of her life, and especially her childhood, affected her ability to be all that she could be as a daughter of God, and how that impacted her raising us boys. Mom’s heart was always in the right place. She taught us courtesy and respect for others. Mom was selfless. She always put her boys’ needs before her own.

Margaret Ann Swanson Hodge, mom, was not perfect, but she was a good person.