Drinking--the piano, not me...

Read a fun blog the other day about a mother of young children who was giving up her daily 5:00 pm glass of wine during this season of Lent. Apparently, she regularly has this glass of vino during the day to give her something to do "for herself,"or to "make her feel like an adult." She wonders as her children get older if she will cease to have this need to "take a break" from her daily routine?

Aside from the obvious alcoholic issues (more about that in a bit), I wanted to comment to her something like: As your children grow older you do not want to drink wine any more...you don't want to drink it any less either!

I do remember when the kids were young, and I stayed at home with them a few days a week. (My wife and I did tag-team parenting.) When she would come home on the days I was with the kids I would practically run out into the driveway to meet her--often with a beer or some Jack Daniels for both of us (as you know, working is no picnic either.) Time passed, and my children grew older, and my liver survived.

But alcoholism as a disease is a huge issue, and especially for young adults in that 17-21 year old time frame which is extemely difficult to manage without alcohol. I believe it should be legal for people to drink at age 12, and I see so many benefits to that it would take 100 blogs to list them all. Wine is never the problem...the problems are always covered up by wine. Even a person who gets drunk on one glass of wine or beer or whatever, should take that seriously, and drink only when the community can provide support to keep you healthy and whole. (in other words, don't drink alone, and never drive!) Our society has lost all sense of reality on this question. Kids don't drink because they like the taste of beer, they drink because adults haven't given them anything else to do! Kids don't drink because they want to die and get into car accidents, they drink because we refuse to let them grow up and be adults! And don't get me started on the drugs, which as my daughter once told me, if you're going to break the law, why not smoke it?

Lower the drinking age, show children how to drink responsibly, and we would probably have safer roads. And healthier children.

But back to the young mother...she was giving up wine, not because of her alcoholic tendencies, but rather, to use that "adult time" in her day to focus on God. Now that, is a good idea. The challenge will be if she can use her 5 pm wine to focus on God. And, since the Christian God is not opposed to wine, she has a shot...but she got the point. It's never the relationship with wine that is the problem, it's the other relationships of our lives that wine can make problematic. Just as God isn't only for adults, neither should wine, from the making and cultivating of one of God's greatest treasures to the drinking, be only for adults. If not drinking wine can bring us closer to God, imagine how much closer we could get if we did something God actually likes us to do?

May your table be full, and your conversations be true.