Take responsibility, create a vision

Editorial Comment
Many families have no direction and depend on fate. I have heard many people hide behind a common deception, “it is the will of God”.

Many families have no direction and depend on fate. I have heard many people hide behind a common deception, “it is the will of God”. Many people who fail to plan will ascribe their failures and shortcomings to the will of God. To me, this is the biggest deception and unwillingness to take responsibility. You fail to do family planning and end up in a mess and you say it is the will of God.

Kilton Moyo

Your spouse is violent and tortures you and you ascribe that to the will of God. Did you actually know that according to our culture we blame everything on either, some people, God, the devil, bad luck or something besides ourselves? We fail and refuse to take responsibility as people. This affects even the way we do family. We fail to take responsibility and blame everyone else. These days we blame the economy, the dollar, politics, desperation, unemployment, globalisation, internet and many others except ourselves. When you cannot realise your own contribution to your situation, you cannot correct anything. Correction begins from inside out. Transformation starts or happens when we renew our own mind and not others. This is what Romans 12:2 is teaching. “Be you transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The world would have order if we stopped blaming others and considered our own contributions to the problem at hand. You transform and bring order to yourself when you chose not to conform to what is happening in the world and begin to do things according to what you want. Conforming to the chaos defeats your own purpose in life and takes away your dignity, your stability and tosses you to and from and you lose all shape. What am I saying?

Stop copying others To put order in your life, stop aping others and be yourself. To put order in your family, stop aping the world, but get to what God says about building the family. To put order in your marriage, find out what God says about marriage. If you base on what the world says, you will not enjoy your marriage. You will divorce 100 times and mess yourself up. To put order into your life, also find out what God says about your life or human life. To put order into your relationships, find out what God says about relationships. The same applies to all things where there must be order. Order is a God thing.

Our challenge is that we have listened to everything about everything except God. It is sad in that even Christians are conducting themselves according to what the world says, what human rights say, what culture says and what economics say. Very few take time to get into the word to discover what God says about their situations. There is as much chaos in Christian marriages and families as there is in the world. There is as much violence, divorce, pain, shame, dysfunction in Christian families as there is in the world. I thought that we were to set the pace. Do not miss understand me, tribulations will come to all, storms will hit all of us but when we have the order of God, we remain standing after a storm. We cannot fall like everyone else. There has got to be a difference.

Plan and have vision Many families are dysfunctional including Christian families. There is no order at all. One reason there is no order is that there is no planning. As a family, where are you going? Ask yourself this question. No one sets out for a journey and they do not know where they are going. Many dysfunctional families lack vision and purpose. They are driven by circumstances rather than vision. They allow everything to shape them and they have lost shape and value and that is why they are so confused. When you have a vision and everyone focuses on the vision, it does not matter what happens to you, you will stay afloat because you know who you are and where you are going as a family.

To put order in your house, kindly have a vision. Rally your family behind a vision. Give your family purpose to live and to be family. You cannot just drift like that. It is not wise. I know that you know that many of our families in Africa have no vision. Everyone does what they want and that is why there is no unity in many families. When you work towards a common goal as a family you will foster unity and team work. You will eliminate unnecessary rivalry, jealousy, and unacceptable hatred in most families. Vision eliminates competition in the family and helps members uplift each other and help each other. Vision helps members to value family and each other and protect each other. It is sad when family members bewitch and kill each other, rob and betray each other like that.

Beloved, family unity and purpose is not automatic. We need to teach and train for these. Order is not automatic; we must plan it and do it. It will not come by a miracle or by the prophet’s oil or water. You work it out. Invest in it. My prayer is that we will, in this generation, prioritise our families more than ourselves and the world. There is too much selfishness in the family today.

Kilton Moyo is the creator of Fruitful Marriages, a renewal and enrichment programme, and is pastor, counsellor and author of The Sex Trap. Call or WhatsApp on +263 775 337 207, +263 772 610 103 or +263 712 384 841. [email protected]