Doing Things Wrong is Never Right

Still trying to create an outline for the pastor’s book.

Today I watched DVDs instead of using audio CDs. It was somewhat depressing. The theme of the book is family planning. I don’t mean the Planned Parenthood type of family planning, which means planning to have your unborn children sucked out and put in dumpsters. I mean approaching marriage and family with forethought, goals, and rules. This is not how my family worked, and the results are about what we should have expected.

Pastor Rich is the grandson of a pastor. Evidently his grandfather did something right, because his father became a minister and ran a church in Nassau, and Rich is a pastor, and he has four sons, none of whom appear to be drug addicts or repeat felony offenders. According to my mother, my grandfather considered becoming a minister, but he became a prosecutor, a tort attorney, and a judge. And he grew cigarette tobacco. He had four daughters. Two are dead because they were cigarette addicts. My sister now has lung cancer. Three of the four sisters had bad marriages. Most of the grandchildren have had problems, as have the great-grandchildren.

Over the last eight years or so, I’ve been learning things fortunate people learn by their tenth birthdays. When I watch these DVDs, I realize these things are obvious. You can be very smart and get pretty old without learning obvious things.

When we insist on doing things our own way, we are like socialists. Socialism never works, but the people who keep trying it don’t believe that. They keep saying they just need to make some adjustments. They need to find the right people to put in charge. Whenever there’s an improvement, they claim it means they’re on a trend that leads to perfect bliss. That’s what sunk the Soviets. They looked at 1900, and they looked at 1950, and they saw a big difference, and they figured things would keep improving. But that’s not what happened.

If you do things your own way, you may have success in some areas of your life, and you may have periods where things improve, but you’re never going to have the kind of family you would have if you did it God’s way. It’s a con game, and you’re a con artist as well as the victim.

Maybe a few people who read the book or get the disks will learn and manage to avoid the kind of needless, wasteful problems my family has faced.