Intended for Good

In a recent radio show our local Christian host asked his callers the question, "Should the government take care of people in need?" He had one caller who worked in a local program that fed children at school who wouldn't get a good breakfast at home. The host asked (but didn't get an answer) an interesting question. "If there were no programs available, how many of the kids currently being fed would still get fed?"

I'm not asking that question. I am interested in the concept. When I was in the Air Force, the government was considering charging for medical visits. The problem? Well, it seemed that, since the medical care was completely free to the whole family, it was being abused. Military doctors, intended to care primarily for military members, would be treating sniffles and scrapes. It was overkill. So I begin to wonder about the concept.

I would guess that there are quite a few programs and ideas that were started to serve the needs of people and end up in abuse. There is the whole proverbial problem of welfare where the perception is that women intentionally get pregnant to get more money from the system. They wouldn't have been getting pregnant if they had to support their kids on their own, but the "help" has created a problem of abusing the system. A school meals program is introduced to give meals to the needy and parents who are not too poor to feed their kids, just too lazy, sign their children up.

In considering these kinds of things, one came to mind that could likely get me in trouble. I'm thinking of what used to be called "Sunday School" -- a place where kids get taught Christianity. They originally started in the late 18th century primarily to teach street children and control their Sunday activities. By the early 19th century they had shifted to teaching religious values to the unchurched poor. Now, is anyone noticing something about all this? Nowhere in any of this start is there a place where churched children were being taught on Sundays. So ... where did that take place? That was the job of the family, especially the parents, along with mid-week classes on catechism. Well, by the 20th century Sunday Schools were primarily church-based institutions taught almost entirely by volunteer women to church children. What's my point? Well, I wonder about that concept of a good program that ends up as an abuse.

I think that Sunday School, good at one point, has created its own set of problems in our time. Parents, offered the chance to have someone else teach their children, took the opportunity to fail to take responsibility for training up their children in the way they should go. They assumed "good programs" and "good teachers" and let the church do the job that God commanded them to do. They figured, "My kids have gone to Sunday School ... they're getting taught all they need to know" when God's idea was to teach your kids "when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise" (Deut 6:7). Funny. An hour on Sunday morning suddenly doesn't seem to measure up, does it?

In Genesis 50, Joseph tells his brothers that while they intended evil, God intended good. God is really excellent at taking something bad and making it good. Humans, on the other hand, are pretty skilled at taking something that was originally intended as good and turning it bad. The trick, of course, is to recognize it ... and fix it.