The Warning Signs and Symptoms

We should like to consider another side of the power of prevention: Often we become so busy in life that we ignore the first symptoms and the warning signs in many matters. Under the pressures of a complex living pattern, we sometimes become so intent on the next place we have to be, the next thing we have to do, that we often bypass impressions, which, had we heeded them, might have helped something to happen, or to keep something from happening.

Parents, for example, sometimes become so busy with other obligations and interests and activities that they fail to see, or, if they see, fail fully to sense the first signs of changes in their children—change of attitude, change of affection, change of interest and activity, change of the company they keep. These may be for better or for worse, but at least parents should pause and look and sense and see—should watch the signs—the warning signs—should watch the symptoms.

As patiently and prayerfully they live for it, parents are entitled to a kind of wisdom, to a kind of guidance, to a discerning sense concerning their children; and by love, and by wise and patient counsel, and by faith and forbearance, can sometimes save mistakes and hazards and heartaches, and can sometimes keep them from cluttering their lives, from marring their records, from turning down wrong roads. By watching early signs and symptoms, not too obviously, not too intrusively parents can often exercise the power of prevention.

Often, in other ways also, people may have impressions of things they should or shouldn’t do—a kind of still small voice seeming to talk inside—something we might call conscience, or something even other and beyond that which might be called conscience. And when a person approaches decisions or situations which have inherently within them the elements of danger or disgrace, it would seldom seem that anyone could honestly say that he is utterly and entirely unaware of any sense of warning, of any sense that he was doing or considering something he shouldn’t do.

Call them what we will, it seems that we often have occasion to regret ignoring impressions, ignoring the warning signs and symptoms. Intelligently, prayerfully, earnestly, we should heed the warning signs and symptoms, and pay more honest, purposeful attention to the power of prevention.