By Donna Astern

Note: This is a very sensitive topic for many people. In no way is this article meant to cause you further pain, but instead to point to healing and faith in the One who can truly change a heart.

Have you noticed the epidemic of estranged parents, children, and grandchildren these days?  It’s both sad and startling to realize how many families (at least in the USA) are hurting due to broken relationships, especially among Christians.

Many adult children have been turning against their parents, their families, and/or their faith. The spirit of division and the influence of secular media & culture have taken many children captive. When also fueled by American individualism, this deception, in its extreme, dishonors and disrespects parents, displays rebellion and blasphemy, and causes hurtful family situations to become intractable.

Alternatively, at times, it is the parents who have turned against their children. The hurt of rejection works on both sides of the relationship.

Even though the Word teaches that in the last days, there will be disobedient, unloving, irreconcilable and rebellious people (2Tim 3:2-3), Christian parents and children are often stunned and confused to observe those behaviors in their own family.

For parents, it can seem as though the promise of Prov. 22:6 has failed.  “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Additionally, a sense of foreboding can hover over a parent’s broken heart due to the adult child’s violation of Ex. 20:12. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”

However, long before these current difficulties, our loving Father provided two promises I am highlighting for us to lay claim to in faith.