The God Model

So HDFS majors are crazy about models. There's a developmental model (yay Piaget!) and a model analyzing grief and a model for analyzing unequitable marriages and a model for analyzing... ok, hopefully you get the idea even if you are not an HDFS major.

For the past four years, I have analyzed my childhood and family structure through various different models and theories. I know no one can fit or come up to scratch with one model perfectly. No matter what model I analyze through, I see deficits and I see those deficits having ramifications later on. But then one of my professors said that even with some deficits I described, I had recieved that need or fulfilled that task in some way.

I then realized that there was one overarching model. The God model. I was always struck by the part of the song in Father Let Me Dedicate that said, "Can a child presume to choose / where or how to live//Can a Father's love refuse / all the best to give/" because I know that not all children including myself lived in a completely healthy family, and some children lived in really terrible conditions. So, of course, it goes back to the "How can a loving God allow..." type questions.

Today I saw the answer: When a child comes out of a family - healthy or otherwise - and enters into God's family, he or she starts to see things from and analyze his or her life using the God model where their weaknesses were overcome by God's stregnth, and they see that God was there giving them blessings and holding them through their pain. God was also the one to give them new life or keep their hearts softened through it all so that His spirit would minimize any negative effects of unhealthy patterns of development and parenting. God and the members of His body take in that person and renew the person through His spirit and by fellowship.

One can only analyze things through the God model because God opens people's eyes. One can only be freed through the God model because only God can give them that new life.

Can a child presume to choose
Where or how to live?
Can a Father's love refuse
all the best to give

let my glad heart while it sings
Thee in all proclaim

This alone shall be my prayer
Glorify Thy name

Be glorifed in me
Be glorified
Be glorified in me
Be glorified