Against the Drift: How Parents Can Reclaim Their Children
Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 10:53
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Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 10:54
We cannot control every influence that touches our children.
But we can shape the fire they sit beside.
Against the Drift: How Parents Can Reclaim Their Children
In my January 11 post of this year, I spoke of something simple, almost old-fashioned: families reading or listening together. I mentioned Rob Parsons’ book A Knock at the Door as something worth gathering around—whether read aloud or listened to in the quiet companionship of an audiobook. I suggested, too, the creation of that gentle, Danish sense of hygge—warmth, nearness, shared stillness.
But what I had in mind was deeper than atmosphere.
There is, if we are honest, a slow drift taking place. Not dramatic, not always visible, but steady. Children absorb more than we realise—through media, through conversation, through the subtle shaping of what is normal. Spend a little time listening—not instructing, just observing—and you begin to notice it. The tone of speech has sharpened. There is more impatience, more edge, more casual harshness than there once was. Fifty years ago, the language of the home, though far from perfect, often carried more restraint, more gentleness. Something has shifted.
And children, almost without knowing it, are carried along by that current.
This is why what we place before them matters so deeply. Stories are not neutral. Words shape the inner world. Books that cultivate empathy, fellow feeling, quiet courage, and spiritual awareness act almost like a counterweight. They steady the heart. They soften what the world hardens. That is why I occasionally draw attention to recommendations—not as a pastime, but as a quiet form of resistance.
There is something almost unbearable in the opening lines of George Müller’s life story. Not because it is outwardly dramatic, but because it is so quietly destructive. A boy, entrusted with opportunity—with education, with provision beyond his years—turns inward instead of upward. And in doing so, he wounds the very heart that sought his good.
He himself later wrote, with disarming honesty, that he had been “a thief, a liar, and a deceiver.” Not once, but repeatedly. That word matters. This was not a single lapse, but a forming of habit. Small acts, perhaps, but together they shaped a direction. One can picture the moment his father discovered the hidden money—counting coins, testing suspicions, finding what had been concealed. It is a simple domestic scene, yet heavy with sorrow. A trust broken quietly, but deeply.
And the deeper sadness lay not only in the boy, but in the atmosphere around him. Religion, in that household, became a means of advancement rather than transformation and bared lightly on what Godly devotion was. So, Müller would later reflect that he was being prepared for the ministry “for the sake of a good living,” not for the sake of God. And so, the outward structure was there, but the inward life was not.
Without that inward turning, everything else sharpened the wrong edge. He studied, yes, but he also drifted. He read what dulled his conscience, formed habits that deepened his carelessness, and moved further into a kind of moral numbness.
Perhaps the most piercing moment comes with the death of his mother. While she lay dying, he was unaware—absorbed in cards late into the night. And even after her passing, there was no awakening, no immediate grief, only further wandering. It is difficult to read without a kind of quiet ache. Not simply because he sinned, but because he did not feel.
And that, in many ways, is the greater danger for our own time.
Not always open rebellion—but numbness. A dulling of the inner life. A loss of tenderness.
And yet—this is not where his story ends.
What makes Müller’s life so compelling is not the darkness of its beginning, but the depth of its change. The boy who stole and deceived became a man marked by integrity, compassion, and an extraordinary dependence on God. In his later work with orphans, he refused to ask for financial support, choosing instead to trust entirely in prayer. The life that once took became a life that gave.
He would later say that the great turning point came when his heart was truly affected—when he began to read Scripture not as a duty, but as a living word. “I saw that the most important thing I had to do,” he wrote, “was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.” Something softened. Something awakened.
He did not simply improve. He was changed.
And this is where the quiet encouragement lies for us, especially within the life of the family.
If a child can drift, he can also be drawn back. If a heart can grow dull, it can also be made tender again. But this does not happen by accident. It happens through what we place before them, what we model, what we make space for.
To gather a family around a book, or an audiobook, may seem like a small act. But it is not small. It is formative. It is, in its own way, a gentle reclaiming of ground that would otherwise be lost. It creates not only warmth, but attention. Not only closeness, but shared reflection.
And perhaps more than anything, it reintroduces a different tone—a language of patience, of compassion, of inwardness—that slowly reshapes the atmosphere of the home.
We cannot control every influence that touches our children. But we can shape the fire they sit beside.
And sometimes, in that quiet circle—listening together, thinking together, feeling together—the drift begins, almost imperceptibly, to reverse.
Against the Drift: How Parents Can Reclaim Their Children
We cannot control every influence that touches our children.
But we can shape the fire they sit beside.
Against the Drift: How Parents Can Reclaim Their Children
In my January 11 post of this year, I spoke of something simple, almost old-fashioned: families reading or listening together. I mentioned Rob Parsons’ book A Knock at the Door as something worth gathering around—whether read aloud or listened to in the quiet companionship of an audiobook. I suggested, too, the creation of that gentle, Danish sense of hygge—warmth, nearness, shared stillness.
But what I had in mind was deeper than atmosphere.
There is, if we are honest, a slow drift taking place. Not dramatic, not always visible, but steady. Children absorb more than we realise—through media, through conversation, through the subtle shaping of what is normal. Spend a little time listening—not instructing, just observing—and you begin to notice it. The tone of speech has sharpened. There is more impatience, more edge, more casual harshness than there once was. Fifty years ago, the language of the home, though far from perfect, often carried more restraint, more gentleness. Something has shifted.
And children, almost without knowing it, are carried along by that current.
This is why what we place before them matters so deeply. Stories are not neutral. Words shape the inner world. Books that cultivate empathy, fellow feeling, quiet courage, and spiritual awareness act almost like a counterweight. They steady the heart. They soften what the world hardens. That is why I occasionally draw attention to recommendations—not as a pastime, but as a quiet form of resistance.
There is something almost unbearable in the opening lines of George Müller’s life story. Not because it is outwardly dramatic, but because it is so quietly destructive. A boy, entrusted with opportunity—with education, with provision beyond his years—turns inward instead of upward. And in doing so, he wounds the very heart that sought his good.
He himself later wrote, with disarming honesty, that he had been “a thief, a liar, and a deceiver.” Not once, but repeatedly. That word matters. This was not a single lapse, but a forming of habit. Small acts, perhaps, but together they shaped a direction. One can picture the moment his father discovered the hidden money—counting coins, testing suspicions, finding what had been concealed. It is a simple domestic scene, yet heavy with sorrow. A trust broken quietly, but deeply.
And the deeper sadness lay not only in the boy, but in the atmosphere around him. Religion, in that household, became a means of advancement rather than transformation and bared lightly on what Godly devotion was. So, Müller would later reflect that he was being prepared for the ministry “for the sake of a good living,” not for the sake of God. And so, the outward structure was there, but the inward life was not.
Without that inward turning, everything else sharpened the wrong edge. He studied, yes, but he also drifted. He read what dulled his conscience, formed habits that deepened his carelessness, and moved further into a kind of moral numbness.
Perhaps the most piercing moment comes with the death of his mother. While she lay dying, he was unaware—absorbed in cards late into the night. And even after her passing, there was no awakening, no immediate grief, only further wandering. It is difficult to read without a kind of quiet ache. Not simply because he sinned, but because he did not feel.
And that, in many ways, is the greater danger for our own time.
Not always open rebellion—but numbness. A dulling of the inner life. A loss of tenderness.
And yet—this is not where his story ends.
What makes Müller’s life so compelling is not the darkness of its beginning, but the depth of its change. The boy who stole and deceived became a man marked by integrity, compassion, and an extraordinary dependence on God. In his later work with orphans, he refused to ask for financial support, choosing instead to trust entirely in prayer. The life that once took became a life that gave.
He would later say that the great turning point came when his heart was truly affected—when he began to read Scripture not as a duty, but as a living word. “I saw that the most important thing I had to do,” he wrote, “was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.” Something softened. Something awakened.
He did not simply improve. He was changed.
And this is where the quiet encouragement lies for us, especially within the life of the family.
If a child can drift, he can also be drawn back. If a heart can grow dull, it can also be made tender again. But this does not happen by accident. It happens through what we place before them, what we model, what we make space for.
To gather a family around a book, or an audiobook, may seem like a small act. But it is not small. It is formative. It is, in its own way, a gentle reclaiming of ground that would otherwise be lost. It creates not only warmth, but attention. Not only closeness, but shared reflection.
And perhaps more than anything, it reintroduces a different tone—a language of patience, of compassion, of inwardness—that slowly reshapes the atmosphere of the home.
We cannot control every influence that touches our children. But we can shape the fire they sit beside.
And sometimes, in that quiet circle—listening together, thinking together, feeling together—the drift begins, almost imperceptibly, to reverse.
The Autobiography of George Muller
Autobiography of George Muller by George Müller | Goodreads