You’re throwing away your life for nothing, Christian!

A Sigma Game Substack post this week, entitled It’s Beyond Your Control, featured a comment that came so directly from the pits of Hell that I can smell the sulfur. I don’t have anything to add or subtract regarding Vox’s commentary, as far as the SSH goes. How could I? It’s fairly complete, as far as I can tell, and I am not the person to ask about men. I have five sons, and Vox’s Socio-Sexual Hierarchy explains things so well that I’ve had much better success in understanding and rearing them than I otherwise would have, I’m sure.

But the comment from which he is quoting isn’t, strictly speaking, about the male social hierarchy, or the inborn traits that a young man has that determine his place within it, but with Christianity and rebellion. The commenter said this, and I believe (with far more evidence than he has given to back up his statements) that he’s just making stuff up:

In many spheres of my personal and public life within the last year, the incidents of Trad families with wayward-leaning children has grown to at least a dozen. It is my belief  (emphasis getalonghome’s) that the Traditionalist Christian society in America (not just Catholics) is experiencing a very big epidemic of kids who are disowning the faith of their parents–or even the parents, themselves.

This is such an enormous tragedy. You’ve climbed over mountains of pain and passed through crucibles of fire to find the peace of Jesus Christ. You only want to do the right thing. You end up marrying, and you have a good batch of children. You pour your heart into them. They are the very purpose of your existence–your reason for being. All of your happiness depends upon their success. You sacrifice and give up the things you loved doing. You do with less so that you can give them nourishment. You modify your behavior and become boring and wholesome for them. You probably even homeschool them, teach them, encourage them. They are in your thoughts most of the day. You pray for them, and you teach them to pray. You warn them about the evils of the world, how your little family is surrounded by orcs, goblins, and devils. You take them to church, drive them to church functions, keep a wholesome setting throughout their childhood.

And it all ends in crackhouses and prostitution for a huge number of these kids, apparently.

Look how much he understands us, y’all! “You’ve” climbed over all these mountains, suffered so much, given up your very identity for this! And you’re just going to lose it all and be miserable because your kids have disowned you! I think the psychologists call it “going no-contact”. If this is just a particularly tone-deaf fellow who knows some folks who lost their way, I may come off a bit harsh. But I think I’m dealing with an actual enemy here, and I will treat him as such until he proves otherwise.

That quote just reads like the Serpent, don’t it?

Now, I am a mother of a large number of children, only three of whom can be considered “grown”, and those just barely. I know many more families who have lived just as we have, and guess what? The kids are doing great! I also know some families who did all these things, and some things still went horribly wrong with a child. But mostly? No. Usually it’s one child out of many. As long as there is life, there’s hope, so those stories aren’t done. Our Lord doesn’t give up on people just because they get lost. He goes out to find them.

This comment about how you can’t trust anything you’re doing is useful is not only “a little black-pilled”, as Vox called it. I am choosing to treat it as calculated–whether the writer is aware of his own motivations or not–to be intentionally discouraging to Christians and homeschoolers.

Don’t waste your time, families. They’re just going to lose their minds when they get out from under your thumb anyway!

This is almost verbatim what a man said to me during a Sunday School discussion about raising children recently. So this nonsense doesn’t just come from strangers on the internet. It is widespread and obnoxious as all get-out. I really appreciate the comment at Sigma Game giving me a chance to address my brother at church who spoke with the same shocking ignorance. I needed the intro.

Let me just take some of these idiotic sentences one at a time.

He: You’ve climbed over mountains of pain and passed through crucibles of fire to find the peace of Jesus Christ. 

I: I assure you, I have not. Jesus Christ climbed over all of my mountains of pain and passed through all of my crucibles of fire so that I could live victorious in Him. He gave me my peace, free of charge. Entire books have, of course, been written on Christian suffering. I’ve suffered some, and been joyful right on through it, with the Lord’s occasional chastisement for my attitude. I’ll gladly join in His suffering in any way He wills!

But something tells me that my definition of pain and fire are different than this guy’s. He doesn’t know there’s joy in it.

He: You only want to do the right thing.

I: OK, that’s fair enough. Is there anybody who doesn’t want to do “the right thing”, insofar as they can figure out what that is? Poor, hapless Christians, trying to do the right thing all the time, to no good effect.

He: They are the very purpose of your existence–your reason for being. All of your happiness depends upon their success.

I: Oh, my word, do you even know any Christians? Christ is the purpose of my existence. My children are lovely, but if, Job-like, they all were erased from this earth or my life in the blink of an eye, I would still have my reason for being.

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. –Job 19:25

If I live my faith out in front of my children daily, they will grow to understand that He is the reason for ALL existence!  My happiness, for some definitions of the word, will certainly take a hit if any of them decide to leave the faith of our Fathers, but my joy is indestructible!

I’m not here to become happy. I’m here to become holy.

He: You do with less so that you can give them nourishment. 

I: Absolutely. You get me. I feed them a lot of meat, and it ain’t cheap. (Shameless beg here: I do do without some things for the sake of my children. Not much, and I wouldn’t trade them for any comforts imaginable. My needs are fully covered. But I have to make choices, just like anybody with limited income. Chip in to support my hobbies, if you like! I’ll put my current fundraiser at the end of this post. Enough about money, though. Back to the conversation.)

He: You modify your behavior and become boring and wholesome for them.

I: Not only do you not know many Christians very well, I just found what looks like very good evidence that you are not one yourself, and thus have no credibility at all. I did not modify my behavior for my children. I didn’t modify my behavior at all. I put on a new Man. Christ changed my heart! I know that’s hard to believe. Unbelievers mostly think Christians have always just been what they are, with a few behavior changes to make things look better on the outside. It’s just a decision we make, in your mind. I get that. You have to experience it to really believe it. But if you could talk to people who knew me before, you’d know something really happened there!

I was not just a little bit of a loser who needed some work, ok? I was L. O. S. T.

I couldn’t have changed myself. Neither can you. Repent.

Also, what unwholesome things do you think would be making our lives so much more interesting that we should regret giving our children such a pleasant, safe, loving environment, even if they should come to reject our faith themselves? I’m not going back to any of the stuff Jesus took from me. That is independent of any concern for any other person, including my beloved children. I’d have never been able to do this just for them.

Jesus did this.

It’s a real change of heart that Christians experience. I prayed this evening for you to have that same transformation. I wonder how much of this even came from your own head, Commenter. I have to suspect AI of writing a lot of this at this point, it’s so void of understanding.

No, we are not “boring”. We’re having more fun than anybody I know! My husband and I laugh more and experience more excitement on a daily basis than we ever did before we had children. People around us quite enjoy our family, as well. These people are wonderful.

What is wrong with you? 

 We are wholesome, though. I’ll give you 10% credit for using one correct word, but the rest of the statement is so dumb I can’t give you more.

He: You probably even homeschool them, teach them, encourage them. They are in your thoughts most of the day. You pray for them, and you teach them to pray.

I: Oh, wow, you got through three whole sentences without lying! That had to be strenuous. Better throw down a pint of something strong to quench the thirst you built up before moving on to the next lie.

He: You warn them about the evils of the world, how your little family is surrounded by orcs, goblins, and devils. 

I: Well, you flubbed it, buddy, just as the prophets (I) foretold. Yes, we warn them of sin, and of the Devil’s tricks, many of which you are engaging in here.

We also teach our children, as all Christians do, that Man is fallen and in need of a Savior; that no one is righteous, not one of us. We show our Savior, our Mighty Hope, to our children. We teach them compassion for others who need Him as much as we do. It’s Good News we bear, not fear.

The world certainly has evils. You probably don’t really believe that yourself, considering your language here. Orcs and goblins are imaginary, and I assume you think devils are, too, since you lumped them together. They’re real, but Christ has overcome all of them. We have nothing to fear.

We are storming Hell’s gates, not cowering in fear as Hell surrounds us.  

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. –Ephesians 6:4

Also, our family is not “little”. There are 10 of us in the GAH household, 11 if you count the new kid, but there are also millions, even billions, of believers in our extended family. Not small at all.

You tell me, Reader: Does this guy demonstrate a familiarity with real Christians and especially those who homeschool, their motives and outcomes? Does he offer any evidence that there is an actual epidemic of losing our children, rather than his fevered imagination? Does he offer any kind of solution or point out a reason this might be happening? No, and because Vox was focused on the minor point, which was accurate, he let this fellow off the hook over a nagging, major problem that I can’t ignore: he doesn’t understand the first thing about why Christians do anything.

This comment was not ultimately about any inborn or socialized male traits, or what parents can do about them, which is very little indeed, but about whether our Savior can be trusted to bring our children safely home. 

He says no. You’re all just spitting into the wind, Christians.

I say yes. Our way of raising children is the correct one, regardless of how they “turn out”. But they will stand, because the Lord is able to make them stand.

I will split this response into more than one post for the sake of readability and shareability, but I will return with much more on the topic. It’s one of my favorites, after all. Suffice it for now to say:

Yes! My children’s outcomes are beyond my control. Praise the Lord!

Please share this post any way you like! By social media, by phone, by Pony Express, whatever! I don’t have social media anymore, so I’m counting on subscribing friends to pass the posts around.  Come back and see me soon!