Let's take time to exercise our imaginations for just a moment. Picture yourself as a brick layer tasked with the job of building a small balcony wall on top of a roof of 2 story building. Here's the kicker though; the building has no elevator and there's no room for other large equipment to move the bricks to the roof. With the owner willing to pay you any amount of money for the job, you decide to haul the bricks to the top of the roof with rope and pulley. You find a ladder tall enough, lean it against the wall and start climbing. You make trip after trip hauling the tools up to the roof needed to build the build the brick wall. You're starting to sweat after the second trip, and you haven't even started working on bringing up the bricks! After a few more trips up and down the ladder, preparing for this no-good-lousy-wack-of-a-brick-laying job (you try to limit your swearing) you look across to the building next door and realize you hauled all of your equipment to the wrong roof! You spent so much time and effort preparing for this job only to find out your ladder was leaning against the wrong wall! Now, this example might seem a bit extreme, but I promise, there is a message to your cuss-word-free imaginative story.
How much time do we spend on climbing up the wrong wall? In other words, how much effort are we putting into things that don't really matter or that don't help us progress as much as we could be? While we are still climbing up, we aren't as efficient as we could be if we were climbing up the right wall. What does this have to do with families? The definition of family seems to be changing. Family traditions are changing. People wonder if they should get married, have kids and enjoy the blessings associated with having a family, no matter how big or small.
An article by BGSU in 2019 states that the average age for a man to have a child is 27.5, nearly 2.5 years older than men in 1980. Even females in 2019 are waiting 2 plus years longer to have kids than women did 40 years previously. Why are people having kids later in life? There may be a plethora of answers, but I want to suggest one that I hope will inspire some to think a bit more about starting a family and recognizing the importance of such if they are capable of doing so. I wonder if these men and women who are waiting longer and longer to have kids are climbing up the ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall. Are they too focused on earning money to have a family? Are they too busy having fun in Hawaii or Italy to welcome a child into their life? Now let me get something straight. There is nothing wrong with having fun with your significant other, in fact that needs to be encouraged, but we also need to be sure that we are eventually progressing to having kids if that is within our capabilities.
I believe the Bible contains truth and wonderful words of guidance from God. I would like to share Psalm 127:3 which states, "Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of his womb is his reward." All families are far from perfect, but each child, including you, is a loved individual from God. He knows families are important and will bless you in your efforts to raise a family. A study done by Edith Cowan University found that parents with at least 4 kids had the most life satisfaction out of the other types of families. This also implies that when a couple starts having kids, they want to have more! Why is that? Children can bring so much joy into our lives! Kids are what await us at the top of a ladder that is leaning against the right wall. If we want to get the fancy brick wall complete on top of the correct roof and receive the hefty paycheck from doing so, we better lean that ladder the right way.
Let's not climb the ladder throughout our lives only to find it was leaning on the wrong wall by the time we reach the top.
https://www.elfac.org/parents-with-four-or-more-kids-are-happier/#:~:text=Want%20to%20be%20a%20happier,Dr.
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-years-change-mens-entry-fatherhood-fp-19-28.html#:~:text=Among%20the%20more%20recent%20cohort,the%20late%201980s%20and%20today.
