CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• PRESCRIPTION FOR A HEALTHY MARRIAGE # 13
  Preventive Maintenance
  (part three - "Thought Control")
  
• How Do you Celebrate Thanksgiving?
  
• WHEN CHARACTER NO LONGER COUNTS,
  ANY THREAT FROM IRAQ (OR ANYBODY ELSE) PALES IN COMPARISON
  by Mikal Frazier, LMFT, LPC
  

Last week I mentioned that I was undergoing surgery. I went through a laser procedure in an attempt to reduce profuse nosebleeds as the result of a hereditary condition. So far the surgery appears to be successful and I am back at work. Thank you for your prayers and inquiries about my condition.

Tomorrow is "Thanksgiving Day" in the United States. We are looking forward to a joyful gathering with family members, but I'm a little troubled by way we have come to see it as an occasion of self-indulgence. In today's newsletter I will share some of the thoughts that concern me.

We are also glad to welcome Mikal back with her perspectives on the current moral climate in our society.

Norman

Prescription for a Healthy Marriage # 13

Preventive Maintenance

By Norman and Ann Bales

To prevent marriage breakdown, we need to learn how to maintain control of ourselves in three crucial areas, thought, touch and words. Violations of the marriage covenant always start in the mind. Jesus said in Mark 7:20-23 that "those things which cause us to be unclean come from within us." He listed everything from evil thoughts, to sexual immorality to murder and he says, "All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean."

In the Sermon on the Mount, he said in Matthew 5:28 "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." On the positive side, Paul wrote in Romans 12:2 "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is -- his good, pleasing and perfect will."

NORMAN'S COMMENTS:

About the time, Ann and I were going through our marital crisis, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the church where I was working. We weren't talking about marriage. We are talking about our spiritual growth and one of my friends on the staff asked this question. "What do you think about when you are alone?" He asked everybody in the room to share the kinds of subjects they concentrated on when they were on their own time. I didn't like the question, but neither did I like the answers I gave. However, that little exercise revealed an important truth about myself. I was spending too much of my energy thinking about things that really had no relevance to the way I would live my life over the long haul.

In Norman's book, He Died to Make Men Holy, he makes the point that if you want to be a holy person, you've got to think holy thoughts. Christians are particularly vulnerable at this point. We think that our love for the Lord, our respect of the Bible, our commitment to Christ will build a hedge around us and we'll be protected in those situations that would cause us to compromise our faith and violate our marriage vows. Just recently, a person said to us. "There is no danger that either my wife or I will ever have an affair because we are honest with each other and we completely love the Lord and each other." That was a scary claim. In the early years of our marriage, if you had asked, "Do you think either you are Ann will ever be involved in extramarital behavior?" we would have said, "No." We would have questioned your sanity for even asking such a question." But it happened and we learned what Paul meant when he said in 1 Corinthians 10:12, "So if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall."

Years ago, we went on a blackberry-picking excursion. Prior to that time, Norman had never experienced a skin rash as the result of contact with poison ivy. He found some bushes that were just loaded with berries. Ann said, "Honey, be careful there's poison ivy all through those berries." In typical macho fashion, Norman said, "Oh, don't worry about me. I'm immune to poison ivy." The next day he could have used an "ocean of calamine lotion. The minute you think you've got a hedge built around you is the very minute you need to be on your guard. That's just what Satan looks for.

How do you protect your thoughts? Let us offer a few suggestions:

1. Watch your what your mind feeds on

   . The entertainment media has saturated us with messages that attack the virtue of fidelity. What we see on the screen, what's written in popular novels, the soap operas and other T. V. programs, send the message that sex outside of marriage is exciting, normal and inevitable and that virtue is prudish, narrow minded and outmoded. You're not going to be able to avoid all the negative messages, but you certainly don't have to make them welcome.

2. Watch what you look at

   . When God was challenged by Satan, God said, "Have you considered my servant, Job," He made this comment about Job in 1:8 "There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." As Job later reviewed his life of service to God, he said in Job 31: " "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl." The book of Job is a very old document, but it speaks to the nineties. We offer lame excuses such as "I couldn't help myself." Job didn't do that. He said, "I made a covenant with my eyes."

3. Keep yourself productively occupied.

   There's an old saying that "an idle mind is the devil's workshop." So often when I hear people tell the story of their unfaithfulness, it comes at a period in their lives when they had time on their hands and were not productively involved in things that were wholesome. That was David's downfall. The story of David's sordid affair with Bathsheba begins this way in 2 Samuel 11:1

   "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem."

   David's place should have been by the side of Joab, fighting with his men against the Ammonites. Instead he was restlessly roaming around the rooftop of his palace in Jerusalem. He had time on his hand and not being inclined to restrain his thoughts, he sinned.

Recently in a telephone conversation with Mikal Frazier (our resident therapist), she talked about how to affair-proof a marriage. She expressed the opinion that it isn't done merely through doing nice, caring things for one another. Keeping the romance alive in a marriage is important, but romance alone will not guarantee the faithfulness of both partners. Mikal deals with shattered marriages on a regular basis and she sees only one sure-fire way to prevent an affair and that is to maintain a mutual commitment to Christ. We agree with Mikal. We would simply add that to keep that commitment alive, you have to protect your thoughts.

Next Week: Thought Control

On Thursday, those of us who live in the United States celebrate thanksgiving, a tradition that started with the Pilgrims and has gradually emerged as one of our national holidays. For many of us, Thanksgiving means a family gathering, consuming the largest or second largest meal of the year and watching the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys play their traditional Thanksgiving Day football game. When you think about it, that's a somewhat strange way of telling God how grateful we are for his blessings.

It seems that the more materially blessed we are, the less grateful we become. In our society, we spend approximately 25 percent of our income for food while in some third world cultures a family will spend 80 per cent of its income for food, but we are the ones who tend to complain the most. When I visited Argentina several years ago, I was handed a piece of literature with this statement on it. "Argentines are poor but act like they're rich; Americans are rich, but act like they are poor." That's the way some other people in the world see us. How much truth is in that perception?

There also seems to be a direct correlation between the path that our nation is taking in the direction of secularism and haughty, insensitive and ungrateful attitudes. A teenage boy in a high school class asked a Sunday school teacher. "Where did we get the holiday of thanksgiving?" The teacher was amazed. He thought everybody learned that in American History at school. But he went home and looked at his own children's textbooks, which said. "Thanksgiving was started by the Pilgrims who enjoyed a feast of ham and turkey with the Indians." - No mention was made of the fact that the Pilgrims started Thanksgiving as a religious people who were profoundly grateful to God for their survival in the New World. In Romans 1:21 Paul talked about those people, who were darkened in their understanding, caught up in all kinds of violence and moral rebellion and among other things he said, "they did not give thanks to Him." That increasingly describes the mentality in our society that gains momentum with every passing day.

We just returned from the Dominican Republic. Although we didn't change our lifestyle, while we were there, we witnessed extreme poverty, which has been exacerbated by a devastating hurricane. Surely the season calls for a greater response on our part than eating until you're miserable and gluing your eyes to the Cowboys' game on television.

WHEN CHARACTER NO LONGER COUNTS,
ANY THREAT FROM IRAQ (OR ANYBODY ELSE) PALES IN COMPARISON

by Mikal Frazier, LMFT, LPC

When character no longer matters, we as a nation are sealing our own fate. Anthropologists tell us that all societies are established with a strong commitment to an ethical code and when this commitment is broken, the society fails. The ubiquitous breakdown in character, which is the cornerstone of the work ethic on which our nation was founded, has reached alarming proportions.

As I examined several of my texts in order to write this article, two principles of character surfaced over and over. The first is that character is produced from a vertical flow. We must be taught character. We learn it from our elders. Then we teach it to those younger than ourselves, and thus the vertical dimension. The second principle of character is that it is crucial for the health of the horizontal - the here and now, the place and the relationships - in which we live. Without character, societies self-destruct.

The Josephson Institute of Ethics has identified six core ethical values. These ethical values are called The Six Pillars of Character. From these core ethical values are produced moral duties and virtues. The Six Pillars of Character are:

The depravity of our children when it comes to character is so pervasive and the risk of such depravity has been determined to be so great, that several state legislatures have mandated these values be taught in their public schools.

William Bennett quotes from Plato's Republic in his anthology, The Book of Virtues:

You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed... Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything... There can be no nobler training than that.

Even Plato, 400 years before Christ, recognized the value of that vertical flow to insure the wealth and health of the horizontal station. The breakdown of the family is behind our character deficit. God designed the family to carry out the essential flow of information from parent to child. As the family in America breaks down, God's plan for sharing this knowledge is destroyed, and character becomes non-existent.

Dr. Armand Nicholi, professor at the Harvard Medical school and a staff physician at Massachusetts General Hospital told an audience of young adults:

The breakdown of the family contributes significantly to the major problems confronting our society today. Research data make unmistakably clear a strong relationship between broken families and the drug epidemic, the increase in out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the rise in violent crime, and the unprecedented epidemic of suicide among children and adolescents... (a lack of character).

Dr. Nicholi went on to say, "We need a radical change in our thinking about family. We need a society where people have the freedom to be whatever they choose -- but if they choose to have children, then those children must be given the highest priority."

Notice again the necessity of the vertical dimension for the health of the horizontal station.

Robert Bly, in his book, The Sibling Society is also lamenting the loss of this crucial vertal flow which instills character. He likens our current society to a colonialized culture. Bly points out that when colonies were formed and tribal cultures were destroyed, it came back on them. Grave consequences were to be paid. He states,

Our society has been damaged... by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions, and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone.

Bly goes on to say, "If colonialist administrators begin by attacking the vertical thought of the tribe they have conquered, and dismantling the elder system, they end by dismantling everything in sight. That's where we are. We are the first culture in history that has 'colonized' itself."

To heal our nation, the position of the elders must be restored. Barbara Whitehead in her book The Divorce Culture discusses the urgency of restoring this healthy vertical flow delivered in the family. As she recognizes the inability of a broken flow to produce character she states, "More alarmingly, we will lose the capacity to foster strong and lasting bonds between fathers and children, between older and younger generations, and between children and the larger society." The breakdown of the vertical prevents the development of character, and the lack of character prevents the continued vertical flow.

Benjamin Franklin said, "Nothing is more important for the public wealth than to form and train youth in wisdom and virtue. Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom."

(Mikal Frazier is a licensed family therapist with a private practice in Minden and Bossier City, Louisiana. She and her husband, Jim have three adult children and two grandchildren, whom they will gladly tell you about if you ask. Actually you don't even have to ask.)

If you have questions about marriage and family relationships, you can "ASK THE COUNSELOR." Address your questions to Mikal Frazier. Her address is mikalfraz@aol.com

Norman's e-mail address: nlbales@allaboutfamilies.org