Home is the best place to teach what is important

On Friday night, I took a journey through the past. After my uncle and aunt died last year, my cousins took responsibility for selling his home and disposing of and distributing my uncle’s and aunt’s possessions. My sister Martha traveled to Massachusetts recently to get the family records and remembrances. Uncle Sonny was the last remaining Rockey in Massachusetts, so there were memories from parts of three centuries!

That night, while on vacation, I started going through the pictures and documents and treasures from the past. I examined my grandfather’s baptismal certificate, and for the first time I can remember I saw pictures from his wedding to my grandmother. I saw a $175 bill for my great-grandfather’s funeral in 1918 from the same funeral home where my uncle was buried in 2012. I also examined many receipts from the mortgage payments on the family home by my great-grandmother. (Interest was $3.37! I spent many hours in that home.) I saw pictures of my uncle and my dad as children, and examined my uncle’s discharge papers from the Army after World War II. And, contained in the boxes of memories, there were certificates — lots of certificates — mainly baptismal certificates for many in my family.

I’m not sure what one does with all these aging memories. Do you keep them and then pass them on to your children? Already I don’t know many of the people in the pictures I saw. My children may know only two or three family members in the pictures. But it would feel funny, even disrespectful, to throw away these memories from my family.

As I look at the boxes of material, a very small portion of the mountains of possessions left by my uncle and aunt, one thing I see is that the values of my ancestors have been handed down to me and my family. It is pretty easy to see from the family records that faith, family and country were valued and lived in the Rockey family of the past four generations. I hope those same values have been taught to my children, and now to my children’s children.

The practical application of this lesson is that the home is the best place to teach what is important. It is God’s plan in the Old and New Testaments that the home is the chief place where faith and values are taught. In Deuteronomy 11:18-21 God tells the people of Israel: “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.”

In Ephesians 6:4, God speaks through Paul to the Christians in Ephesus, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

It seems to me that in today’s culture we often pass off responsibility for teaching values. We expect schools to teach values, or the government, or even the church. Perhaps that is because values are not always taught in the home. God established all of these institutions, but God’s plan is that faith and values are first taught in the home.

So, what do you do with all these records and memories? If nothing else, they remind me that my job is not done. I need to continue teaching my children, and now my grandchildren, about the love of God, the bonds of family and our responsibility to our county.

Jonathan Rockey is pastor of St. John Lutheran Church in Palmer. Contact him at jonrock53@mtaonline.net.

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