The New Unempolyable

The Attorney General's Child Support Division has a responsibility to assist parents in obtaining the financial support necessary for children to grow up and succeed in life. To encourage parental responsibility, the Attorney General establishes paternity of children, establishes court orders for financial and medical support and vigorously enforces support orders. The Attorney General promotes the emotional involvement of both parents in the life of the child by working with community groups, schools and hospitals. Attorney General employees will perform their duties in an efficient manner to minimize taxpayer expense and in a friendly fashion to maximize customer satisfaction. https://www.oag.state.tx.us/cs/about/index.shtml#mission Divorce is rampant in our country.  And in our community the truth is that often people don’t get married in the first place.  In the United States today we seem to have replaced the Christians version of marriage: Marriage is God’s gift to us so that we can learn to love one other person unconditionally the way that God loves each of us with the Disney version of marriage:  Marriage is when two “soul mates” find each other, fall deeply in love and then make a commitment.  In the Disney version,  when things go wrong or if it gets hard then you haven’t found your “real” soul mate and you should divorce them and try again.  (And whether or not children are involved have no bearing on YOUR decision.) In the Christian version, marriage is a life long job assignment. The church recognizes that there are some marriages that need not continue because there is real physical damage being done to one of the partners.  That dehumanizes both people -- it’s like an infection of gangrene -- sometimes you need to cut off the limb to save the life. But cutting off the limb is never the first choice.  The breakdown of partnerships is killing our children.  What God desires is a model where two people are working hard learning to love one another unconditionally and modeling that for children.  That’s far from the current model in the US. That’s true in our neighborhood and in other neighborhoods across the country regardless of the economic status of the neighborhood.  However in our neighborhood something else is happening.  When two people have a child together and choose to separate the often end up in court. The court in the state of Texas almost always awards the mother $1000 a month.  Which means, if the father is working full time at a minimum wage job they are then living on about $200 a month.  What invariably happens is that he finds another woman and has a child with her thinking it will work out -- and thank God it sometimes does.  And then you have a situation where the second woman must work full time in order to support the second family because the man is working to support the first woman.  And God have mercy on your soul if you are the third woman.  Because then you must be the sole income earner. Men, of course, have been the soul income earners for years.  It’s not that hard. But imagine the relationship dynamics if you are both working full time but you are only bringing into the house the income from one person?  And then acknowledge that there are many cases where a strong, well educated, middle class or upper class person couldn’t stand that dynamic and would just dump the man. There are so many things wrong with this picture.  And it can’t be fixed by the courts or more laws.  There are justice issues for the children involved (of course) and the children often end up on the short end of the stick in all these situations.  As Jesus people we have a strong call to help our culture rethink what marriage means. We need to teach our children and ourselves that marriage is not a cultural event where you can spend thousands of dollars on a party.  Marriage is what it means when God has given you a job assignment.  Too many times in our churches we allow the culture to dictate what we are  to believe about marriage.  We, all too often, swoon at the idea of “soul mates” and find ourselves not using God-based language to describe our responsibilities to one another in a committed relationship or as co-parents.   What do we do when we discover that many of the men in our congregation are actually doing their current families harm if they are employed because then there’s no one to watch the current children?  It’s such a mess that most of us (as people who don’t want to get “too involved”) just turn a blind eye.  And yet that’s not what we are called to as Christians. We are called to get involved even when the situation is messy.  We are called to get involved even when we are tired and there is so much to do.  We are called to continue to pray and live as if God is making a difference in the lives of God’s people (because God is).  If you’d like to find out more about what messy, real and difficult relational church looks like you can check us out at www.parkerlane.org.