In the Days of Your Youth

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come.” Qoheleth aims those words squarely at the young — and that makes them a word for every family, because the family is where the young first learn, or fail to learn, to remember their Creator. The whole burden of raising children in faith is folded into that one line. Not “remember your Creator someday, once life has knocked you around and you finally get serious,” but now, in the days of youth, while the heart is fresh and the memory is still being formed.

And Qoheleth gives the reason with unsparing honesty: because the evil days come. He unrolls the long poem of aging — the trembling hands, the dimming eyes, the songs gone quiet — and the point of it is urgency: teach them now, before the body runs down and the years arrive of which they will say, “I have no pleasure in them.” A faith planted in youth has roots by the time the hard years come. A faith endlessly deferred is a faith that may, in the end, never be planted at all. The family that waits for a convenient season to hand on God often finds the season never comes.

This is why grandparents matter so much in a family, and why the generations belong together under one roof and around one table. The old, further down Qoheleth's road — the guardians of the house who tremble, the strong men bent — are living witnesses to the young of two things at once: that the body truly does fail, and that the God remembered in youth remains when everything else is failing away. A grandmother's steady faith at the end of the poem preaches to a grandchild at the beginning of it more powerfully than any lesson could.

So the task of a family is a handing-down against the clock. Give the children their Creator now. Pray with them while they are small; let them see faith lived in the ordinary weekday and not just heard about on Sunday; plant the memory of God deep while the ground is still soft. Of everything you are teaching the young ones in your care — manners, skills, ambitions — is the memory of their Creator the thing you are teaching first, or the thing you keep meaning to get to? What could you do, in the days of their youth, to help them remember him before the days come when remembering is harder?