How to Ruin Your Child in 7 Easy Steps
The Wolf Inside
Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.
It’s easy to caricature the glutton as a big, fat pig—the person who takes too much enjoyment in food and drink. If we have to pick an animal, though, the better image for gluttony is a gaunt, starving wolf. Deep inside our psyche he haunts us—always hungry, never full, always on the hunt. The real mark of gluttony is not that we enjoy the good things in life too much, but that we enjoy them too little. We are driven to find more and more because we have lost the ability to find pleasure in what we already have.
Some forms of gluttony today include the shopping glutton, the experience glutton, and the success glutton.
It’s no wonder, when we parents are slaves to this syndrome, that we transfer this to our children who never feel satisfied with their accomplishments in school, in the arts, or on the ball field.
Into our world of more, more, more, Jesus’s concept of who is truly blessed comes as a bit of a shock: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.”
Consider the apostle Paul. The extraordinary power of God on Paul’s life, his role in spreading the gospel across the Roman world, and the overwhelming joy that came into his life, Paul attributes to an experience of hardship, struggle, and weakness so painful he pleaded with God to remove it (the thorn in the flesh).
In fact, this is not only how God dealt with Paul, but it is His pattern of dealing with people throughout Scriptures: Abraham was barren well into old age, Joseph endures years in slavery and prison, Roth loses her husband and becomes impoverished.
So is Jesus’s answer to the peril of gluttony to seek perpetual suffering? Not at all. What we’re getting at here is that the secret to real enjoyment is respecting the circle of life, the cycles of nature that are built into the world around us by our Creator: “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
*Are you respecting the seasons of life, or are you looking to some future enjoyment, unable to appreciate the current?
"How to Ruin Your Child in 7 Easy Steps" is drawn from How to Ruin Your Child in 7 Easy Steps: Tame Your Vices, Nurture Their Virtues by Patrick Quinn and Ken Roach. Copyright 2015 by David C Cook; all rights reserved.