God, Your Family and Nature -- Kackley Family History

 

Between babies nine and ten, I had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream: I hiked the length of Isle Royale National Park. Isle Royale is one of the few National Parks in the Midwest, so it is our favorite, although, because of its inaccessibility, it has fewer visitors than Denali in Alaska, where you can only enter by bus on a gravel road! It is an archipelago in Lake Superior – the eye of the wolf if you look at a map. At the ranger station, I purchased a book entitled Last Child in the Woods by Robert Louv. While it was secular and was mostly concerned with the limits placed on children due to a litigious society, it was very exciting to me. You see, I hiked the island with my father, who was 68, my 18-year-old son, Mick and my 12-year-old daughter, Abri. I had trained for the hike carrying my 1-year-old son, Noah, on my back on our country roads and at the many state parks in our vicinity. I came to see the tremendous gift that God gives us in the earth and the difference a connection with it makes in a child's life.

What is nature? Very simply – all of Creation!

Louv's main concern is all the children growing up in controlled environments. While in Genesis 1:26 God gives us dominion over all the earth, the earth has massive forces and is not really controllable. Knowing this, for a child, means he understands God's greatness – that He can make such a gift for us – and God's love – that He would.

Do you have to live in wilds of Wyoming to show your children the amazing gift of nature? Absolutely not. But the remarkable thing is that, while adults try to control a child's environment, there are very few children who do not prefer a wild encounter. Granted, a child may need to go through a media detox to enjoy the wild. But, when children have their screen time limited and are nudged outdoors enough, they eventually delight in the wilderness. I grew up in an apartment building with a park on the third floor; you can't get much more controlled than that. And yet, our favorite activities were climbing behind the manmade waterfall and around the wall behind the artificial forest, and watching the duck family that, of its own accord, decided to nest next to the concrete pond. That is what a child gravitates to: the wild spaces. However, it is still up to you, the parent, to expose your child to nature. What you value is what he will value.

I have had the unique experience of having grown up in the city and having raised kids in the suburbs and the country. My family history with nature begins with my grandfather, Jerry Kackley. He was extremely overweight, but he loved nature. His flower and vegetable garden in his little backyard in a steel mill town were famous. He loved driving back roads through the country, vacations in cabins in the woods, and nature photography. When he and my grandmother moved to Hammond, Indiana (the historical location of Jean Shephard's A Christmas Story,) they started going to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan. We have pictures of my dad, Jim, there at age 1, in 1943. I hiked there regularly from the age of three (1968) through college. My kids went to a Fathers' Day reunion picnic there as preschoolers (1997) and we camped there on a family vacation out east (2010). My grandfather's ashes were scattered by his children at the end of trail 10. By the way, that's illegal without a permit, so please don't tell anybody. Returning to those woods has been a family tradition that has bonded generations together, all because my grandfather loved wildness.

The Birth of a Creation Momma

 When I was a young mother, expecting my third child, I heard Josh MacDowell from Campus Crusade Ministries on the radio. He said that everything we teach our children should be based on the character of God because one day, "Mom says so," will not be a good enough reason for them to do something. From that day on, I sought to look at everything in terms of God's view of it, so I could teach my children the truth.

On one of our first dates, my husband asked me if I believed in evolution, and I didn't even understand the question because, even though I had been brought up in church, the idea that there might be an alternative to evolution had never been suggested. He got me thinking about the truth of the Bible and, after he shared a Henry Morris article with me, I was sold. From then on, it was just about getting as much understanding and as many of the details that I could find that explained Creation as the Bible informs us. 

Since then, I have collected a library of creationist literature and DVDs, and have attended hours worth of lectures on the creation/evolution debate. And, while I have spoken and written on many different subjects while raising my children and mentoring other mothers, I have come to the conclusion that teaching the truth of the Bible and specifically as it applies to Creation is the most important thing I can teach. It is the foundation for everything we believe as Christians and if that is compromised, then everything we base our lives on in this world and the next may crumble.

In the process of getting a certificate in Creation Apologetics, I have realized some very important things. First, the Bible is the Christian's foundation, not men's ideas of how the world is organized. Even for the unbeliever, everything that he is basing his ideas on -- laws of logic, morality and uniformity of nature -- is something that only comes about from an intelligent Orderer, not by chance. And, for the many devout Christians out there who believe everything about the Bible is true -- except Creation! -- they need to know the science, the real science, that supports the Bible.

For many years I have been seeking God's direction as to what I should focus my writing and speaking ministry on. While I have been studying the creation/evolution debate for almost thirty years, I have understandably been more involved as a Christian homeschool mom and wife on a daily basis more intensively. However, as the children moved out, my understanding of how important the Cr/Evo issue is has increased. So, at a conference where we were asked to think of a dream that we hoped to realize by the end of our lives, I knew that being a Creation speaker was really where my heart was.

The reason that focusing on the Creation/Evolution debate was so important to me was that I have seen that many people, both Christians and unbelievers, have noticed that, if you don't read Genesis 1-11 as history, you have no cause for human sin, death and suffering and, thus, no need for a Savior. There is also no hope for a better life beyond this one. We are nothing but walking protoplasm. 

Is a belief in a literal 6-day week of Creation necessary for salvation? No. And, for those of us who have grown up with a Christian worldview, we can play fast and loose with the interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis and go tooling along just fine as believers. But, if we teach young believers or unbelievers that a literal Genesis is not necessary, then where does it stop? What is true and what is not? Do we get to throw out the parts we don't like? What happened to "Thy Word is truth?" (John 17:17)

Many Christian parents do not teach their children about Creation because they were not taught about it and don't know how science as presented in museums, documentaries, public schools and nature centers works with the Bible. They are often intimidated by the evolutionary scientific consensus and prefer to leave the subject alone. But, that is very likely to result in the accusation of hypocrisy by their children as they grow up, which would be very accurate. To say we believe the Bible is God's Word -- except for what the scientific community tells us is wrong -- is hypocritical. It is one of the great reasons that young people give for leaving the church.

So, my ministry verse popped out at me as I was reading through the Bible. It's harsh, just what you would expect from a prophet who was commanded to marry a prostitute, but important.  -- Hosea 4:6  

                "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children."  

So, that has become my purpose in life: to introduce families to the truth of God's Word and to show them that science -- real science -- supports what God knew all along.