often take public transportation to college or office. Recently, while I was waiting for train at the Park Street station in Boston, I noticed a new sign board that says "Parents ask your children to keep safety rules". I thought about it for a while. Then the train came and I was gone. But the same evening I realized the importance of it when I heard the tragic death of a girl child hit by local train, and another teenager shot by his close friends. So I decided lo share some of my thoughts on the relevance of spiritual safety rules to our readers.
We are living in one of the most civilized countries in the world. Yet our children do not have a safe environment here. Increasingly, teenagers are becoming victims of accidents, substance abuse, discrimination, gang violence, AIDS, pregnancy, and suicide. Christian values have been removed from school system, family life, and mainstream of life. Children are being persuaded, intimated and coerced to accept new philosophy and culture that have never worked and never will. As a result, children grow up with little idea of right and wrong. They live in a society that grown coarse and desensitized to the value of human life and basic civility. How does it come to this? It starts with an ideology that question the biblical truth of obedience to God, parents and authorities. Emphasis to personal discipline, fear of God, respects to parents and authorities are considered too extreme for developing kids. It is reasoned that behavioral and culturally, children are incapable of self-control.
Though Indian children are not afflicted on a large number as the general population, there are exceptions. During my discussion with few Indian teens in New York and Boston I observed some negative consequences of the peer pressure experienced by our children. Although early adolescence has long been characterized as a time of uncertainty, changing social mores, values and liberal education add to the confusion Activities that once found among worldly people - drinking, premarital sex, drugs, suicide - now tempt our children. If our kids don't get proper guidance, leadership, and spiritual support, they will not become whole, balanced adults. Instead, they will become victims new world disorder.
Parents should understand that school or university education may teach children arts and science and help them to get some kind of a job. But it cannot make them spiritual and moral. What is needed to our growing younger generation is the biblical orientation to the meaning of life. This may be achieved only through a disciplined life, which comes only from obedience. It shall be practiced through cultivating meaningful family devotions with your children, discussing spiritual problems with them, creating a home atmosphere conducive to greater parent-child relationship connecting to God. Moreover, encourage your children to study Bible through Sunday schools, and other younger groups. Ask them to read the Bible regularly and help them in finding how to enjoy studying it and benefiting from it. Guide your children in finding the way to a more consistent Christian life, to an outworking of the moral standards that they profess. The most significant safety rule that God prescribed to parents is: "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it "(Proverbs. 22:6)