All Present or Accounted For…

It is a wonderful, comforting feeling when parents, mentally, can call the roll and find all the family in—safe and secure. When families are young, 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, 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 absences. But 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 and acute sense of concern for all who are not present of accounted for.

Children should keep parents informed of their absences and activities. It isn’t good for anyone of any age to be unaccounted for. Otherwise and accident of illness could go unknown and undetected for far to 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 communication than this is much to loose. And youth should not and must not think that parents are prying. It’s just that they need to know, for they have an inescapable obligation which they cannot set aside if they would and should not it they could.

This responsibility is suggested in the 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?”

It is a blessed thing, in the hours of the night, and all other hours, to have the comforting 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.