Youth by Parental Rules

If today’s youth think life is a challenge, all I can say is you should have been a Southern Baptist youth in the 1950s, and if that was not challenging enough, go ahead and have a Pastor for a father and a mother who felt called to be a missionary and you became her personal “mission field.”  We had two rules that I remember – (1) Never date a girl you wouldn’t consider marrying and (2) Good Baptists kids don’t dance. So, when 90% or more of the girls at my church and my school danced, the dating field was severely limited. In fact, in my more mature years, I’ve found verses in the Bible that I’m fairly sure were not there in the 50s, like, “Let them praise His name with the dance”(Psalm 149:3).  My solution was to attend a small, conservative, Baptist college, where the dating field was much more qualified to meet my parents’ rules. I found one, dated her, and married her. Fifty-eight years later, it appears to have worked. So, follow parental rules, just in case they work.