It was black on Highway 96, our road home from a little project at our church, Spring Meadow Baptist Church. Without warning, a clump of grass just off the shoulder gathered itself and began running alongside the shoulder, as if to race us home. Then the “clump of grass” transformed into a raccoon!
He was quick enough to give no warning and slow enough to give no way around him. By now, the glare of my fog lamps off his coat replaced the momentary clarity of his shape. I’m sure it was a blur for both of us. He stepped away, but it was in the wrong direction! He stepped away from the night and right into my Mercury. Wham! It was like we were riding atop a giant club; we could feel it. I am sure he did not.
“Dumb raccoon!” I heard myself exclaim. I felt kind of sorry for the little guy, but I must confess that there was an impatience inside of me that said he got what was coming to him. It wasn’t smart to step toward a moving vehicle, especially one eager to avoid him!
The next morning we loaded back into the Mountaineer for an early Sunday morning drive to a church a couple hours away where I would be preaching. As we headed away from our house and toward the entrance to Highway 96 we spotted nearly a dozen white tail deer. We see them nearly every day here on the Ranch.
“Look.”, I said. “Deer.” From the back seat, often an observation post for my kids, my eight year old son, Weston, piped up. “Don’t hit ’em, Dad!”
It didn’t matter that I drive thousands of miles across the country every month. It didn’t matter that I rarely hit critters in the road. It didn’t matter that I was on my way to preach! No matter who you are, what you have done or what success you may have enjoyed, there will always be someone who knows that you have rolled a raccoon!
I have learned from experience that there is no perfect family. There are no perfect people! Yet, while I may not be perfect, I can be “real”. My kids know when I am real and when I am not. “Keeping it real at home” does not mean conceding defeat; it means an honesty that produces a genuine faith in God’s help for my shortcoming.
The “real world” is no match for genuine faith at home! The Apostle Paul called Timothy his “dearly beloved son”, a great blessing to Timothy in the absence of a strong “father figure”. Timothy was not raised in a perfect home! But he was prepared to face the hostile world Paul spoke of in II Timothy chapter one because he was brought up in the home mentioned in verse five. “…I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.”
Too many of us have bought a fable about what it means to live in “the real world”. Somehow we think that we protect ourselves from the “real world”, code for the evil available out there, by exposing ourselves to it! I suppose we think that it is something like gaining immunity to disease by controlled exposure to it! There must be a better way, and there is.
The truth is that both you and your family are likely already far more exposed to the world’s system than you realize. You are bombarded daily, perhaps hourly, by the world’s ways despite any walls you may have erected. We do not need more exposure to the world, real or otherwise. What our children need is more exposure to the truth found in God’s Word and illustrated by our lives.
A genuine life in the present is preferable to “perfection” in the past. A genuine life of honesty before your family and a life of dependence upon the Lord is a path to success for your children in the future! We’ve all hit a raccoon or two, but any one of us can and should steer our kids a steady course for the right destination.