Every year in America, thousands of churches fail because they had nothing to say to the children—the grown children, that is, like Abram and his wife Sarai when Papa Terah made Haran home. Consider. When we won’t cross the rivers always known to us for lands never yet shown to us, money is always the matter.
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it as “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends . . .”
When something breaks, we see what at once, or search for it. But when something works, like the stairs of a stone path or the good will of a teen, who can say where the working is? Anything that works comprises an infinite quantity of good links, from the big stuff we’ve just described right down to the mysteriously bonding molecules and atoms . . .
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