Learn to Compromise

Dr. Mohler of Southern Seminary had an interesting post yesterday entitled, A Cry From the Heart of a Generation — The Pain of Divorce, in which he draws from an article written in a college newspaper. The student begins the article with several raw thoughts:

Those of us on our way out of

Northern Illinois University are getting to the point in our lives when we start looking for spouses and thinking about kids. My advice today is not to have them. At least, not yet.

If there’s one thing I need no citation or research to prove, it’s that our parents have done a pretty horrendous job bringing us up…Since the Baby Boomer generation has gotten so much fun out of naming us hurtful and insensitive things like “Generation Me,” “Generation Why,” “Generation A.D.D.” or the “Entitlement Generation,” we should perhaps return the favor and start calling them “Generation Divorce.”

He then points out what he has seen in the example of his parent’s generation:

Our parents were so repulsed by the idea of the scrubbed-clean “Pleasantville” 1950s nuclear family that they have divorced in record numbers, and the lesson I see they’ve taught us is that compromise and fidelity are no longer in vogue. We’re seeing it with more women marrying older, couples staying in long-term relationships without committing to marriage, crippling divorce rates and the ideal family now becoming a minority in our country.

His conclusion:

Marry late, and marry once, and don’t have kids until you can love them, nurture them, pay for them and teach them there is such a thing in life as two people who cannot be severed.

I see the actions of this baby boomer generation far more outreaching than divorce in the home. We have seen a generation that is unwilling to compromise or submit one to another. Some are left with no example of how to prefer someone else above themselves. We see little commitment to anything. There is no brand loyalty, no denominational loyalty, no geographical loyalty, and no marriage loyalty. It is time for the church to demonstrate true greatness. It is not found in rights and being true to yourself or blazing a trail, but in being the servant of all, a willingness to lay down one’s life for others. We need to learn to compromise, not our morals, but our preferences or our own way.