Getting Back To God’s Order

Getting Back to God’s Order, and Back to Each Other

I’ve come to believe that healing starts when we shift to a God-first mentality.

When God is first, the home has an anchor. The man can lead with humility and protection — not dominance, but covering. The woman can teach, nurture, and pour wisdom into the next generation from a place of peace, not exhaustion. Neither is greater. Both are needed. That’s how families were designed to function: together.

On my journey, I’ve seen what happens when that order breaks. I’ve watched men walk away from their first marriage, abandon responsibility, and start new families while leaving children behind. Even men who once said, “I’ll raise them as my own,” disappear. And the family structure fractures.

Then the weight falls on one set of shoulders. A single mother becomes provider, protector, teacher, counselor — all while the world keeps demanding more. Society was never set up for a mother to raise children alone and carry every burden. And our kids feel it.

We saw it in the 80s and 90s with the rise of crack cocaine and the criminalization of men — fathers taken from homes, or fleeing them. We saw the latchkey kid born: children coming home to empty houses, raising themselves, learning life from the TV instead of a parent’s lap.

Is it any wonder the mental health system is overflowing? Trauma piles on trauma. And when we’re hurting, we reach for what’s easy — social media. But scrolling doesn’t heal. It doesn’t teach us to look within. It doesn’t replace real conversation, real community, real education.

We’ve lost the art of communication. We’ve lost classrooms where teachers once taught us how to think, not what to think. I remember those teachers. The ones who taught critical thinking — to evaluate, to question, to solve. That’s what we need again.

So here’s my prayer: that we return to God first. That men rise to lead with integrity, not absence. That women are honored as teachers of the home, not left to do it all alone. That children grow up in homes with two parents present, loving, and engaged.

Because families aren’t perfect. But when God is at the center, broken things get rebuilt. Cycles get broken. And the next generation doesn’t have to start from ashes — they can start from legacy.

We can’t change the past. But we can choose, today, to rebuild what was lost. One home. One prayer. One healed heart at a time.

www.cathrynmharris.com