All Present or Accounted For…

It is a wonderful, comforting, reassuring feeling when parents, mentally, can call the roll, and find all the family in⎯safe and secure. When families are young in years it is comparatively easy to feel assured that they are somewhat safe, or at least to be assured that they are all in. But when they grow older, and their interests and activities widen, and they become more independent the waiting hours of night are often long, as they come home, one by one.

Sometimes children, young and old, wonder why parents worry so much and are so concerned about their unaccounted absences. But both caution and concern come with experience and responsibility⎯and not without reason. There are so many hazards, so many things that could and have happened, and parents cannot, or should not, escape an acute sense of concern for all who are not present or accounted for.

Children should and must expect to keep parents informed of their absences and activities. It isn’t good for anyone of any age to be unaccounted for. Otherwise an unexplained accident or illness could go unknown and undetected for far too long a time. Apart from love, apart from parental responsibility, it is simply a matter of good sense and safety for someone who has an interest in us to know always and at all hours, where we are, with whom we are, where we can be reached, and when we are expected to arrive. Less accountability than this, less responsibility, is much too loose. And in these matters, youth should not and must not think that parents are prying. It’s just that they need to know, for theirs is an inescapable obligation, which they cannot set aside if they would and should not if they could.

This sure sense of responsibility is suggested in the Saviour’s parable of the shepherd and the sheep: “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine . . . and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.”

It is a blessed thing, in the hours of the night, and at all other hours also, to have the sweet assurance that all are “present or accounted for,” and we owe it, all of us, to all of us, to see that it is so.