You have to cling to the promise in Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Another poster pointed out that we all have free will, and sadly, many children make the choice to drop their faith practices when they grow up.
What’s even more heartbreaking is that many of these children come from homes where the parents did absolutely everything right.
And once in a while, parents do absolutely everything wrong, and the children, amazingly, make the choice to follow Christ and serve Him and His Church.
And sometimes, parents do everything right, and then someone else in the Church really messes up bad, and the children bear the brunt of that person’s sin, and understandably, walk away from a church and a faith that they no longer can trust.
That’s what happened in our family. We were doing great, and to this day, our daughters praise us for the way we raised them. But when our girls were in their teens (one was away at college), we were thrown out of our Protestant church. Our older daughter dropped totally out of church for several years, but after we became Catholic, she converted, too, and practices faithfully.
Our younger daughter was still home during the ousting, and she experienced the brutality and the hatred of it all first-hand rather than through emails and phone-calls. She has never been a regular church attender since, although she will attend Mass with us when she is home. She doesn’t trust “Christians” or churches because of the horrible way they treated her parents and her.
We just have to trust that promise in Proverbs. She’s not “anti-God” or even anti-church. She’s just never seen a church that actually works the way it’s supposed to work. It’s kind of like eating fish–if every time you eat fish, you choke on a bone, you stop eating fish, and no one can convince you to try even the best-prepped fish.
Thanks Ed, God bless.