Integration

This is a *post-in-progress* which probably should have been saved in the draft mode. I recognize that this type of thinking aloud could get me into trouble, but perhaps since there are no pictures, few will read through to the end. My thought process started with the federal holiday and how it related to my blog title.

Here are a few quotes from Edith Schaeffer's book, The Hidden Art of Homemaking. Chapter 13 entitled *Integration* Notice the positive nature of the title.

What has all this talk of integration to do with creative living, as a Christian?

True integration ...is a matter of people having spiritual communication and fellowship together, ...by choice, not law.

The most real something you can do is within the family unit, as you open it up to others, to a cross-section of ages and peoples, or the gathering together of community life on a small scale.

There is no real possibility of an integration that is true and meaningful in the total sense unless it is based on the inner integration which God has made possible through the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ.

At an MLK Day celebration over the weekend, Maya Angelou read her poem *A Pledge to Rescue our Youth* which is an indication of how *the dream* has been modified over the years.

It seems like everyone is looking for a handout. Star Parker understands this and explains the mentality in her book, Uncle Sam's Plantation.

Mr. Alan Keyes in his book, Masters of the Dream, also brings the situation up-to-date when he says:

Yet since the era of the Civil Rights movement's great triumphs over legalized discrimination, though individual blacks have progressed and prospered in significant numbers, the community as a whole has deteriorated. One great pillar of our identity, the family, is crumbling. A growing number of blacks in the so-called *underclass* have, for all practical purposes, abandoned the ethic of self-advancement. Black churches grow in membership even as they decline in moral influence and effect. The violence blacks once suffered at the hands of others many now inflict upon each other, in the schools, in in the streets, in the womb, on such a scale that it amounts to self-administered genocide.

I think that leaves us....without a family unit in which to implement Mrs. Schaeffer's suggestions. This is the way God deals with us...in family units, not as wards of some state.

That should remind us homemakers that we have an enormous amount of responsibility.