Modern life is quietly training us to live without families—and most of us don’t notice it happening.
We are a storytelling family.
From the time my oldest kids were just toddlers to the present day, they have loved to sit and hear their dad tell stories. Yes, we read them in books. And now most of them read volumes themselves: I think they got eight new books for Christmas. All of this happens in an intentional environment, where entertainment and storytelling never flow through screens. Books take a much more prominent role.
But when we find ourselves around a campfire, or sometimes just at bedtime around my chair, the kids will often ask me to tell stories. Sometimes it’s simply stories of milking time with my dog, Bear, when I was twelve. Other times, it’s Granddaddy and Grandmama in New York City, starting the church. Or we go back further still.
Stories of my great-grandmother, Stella McClure, who was, hands down, the most influential godly figure in my father’s early life.
At four-foot-eleven, Stella was anything but imposing in presence. And yet her lessons—art lessons, lessons in kindness, perseverance, and grit—shaped my father’s world in ways that only became fully realized once he found faith in Christ. What had been empty forms were filled with meaning and grace.
Most of the stories I know about Stella came to me through him: her challenges raising children through the Great Depression, caring for a one year old and a three year old after losing her husband to tuberculosis in her early twenties, working two jobs, and never remarrying.
But one story that I only learned a couple of years ago came from the other side of the family—children of cousins who reconnected with us and filled in pieces they had been told, even as we shared fragments from our own upbringing.
Stella was raised on a ranch in Quanah, Texas, by a father who was a tanner—at a time when lobo wolves still roamed the prairie. She would bump across those grasslands in her father’s wagon with wolfhounds kenneled in the back until they spotted a wolf, then watch those dogs bound across the fenceless land toward their prey.
Her parents had pioneered that region when Comanche raids were still a constant threat, and her father would lay his ear against the compacted earth of the corral and detect the hoofbeats of Comanche raiders from over a mile away.
When Stella married young—Roy Lester McClure—they moved, as I recall, to the region of Paris, Texas. And the story I heard was from the early homesteading years. A young couple on small acreage, a modest home, and a life where nothing was abstract. Nothing was virtual. And nothing was guaranteed.
Roy was out breaking clods behind a plow pulled by a mule—early twenties, bent forward, reins over his shoulder, both hands on the handle. The sound of turning earth punctuated by the rattle and jingle of harness. Hoofbeats. Real work, real dirt, real weather, real life.
Inside the house, his bride was sewing on a treadle Singer. And Roy could not imagine that sweet Stella was attempting something a bit risky.
Noticing a portion of her hem coming loose, Stella decided to run it through the treadle sewing machine while still wearing the dress.
But as she passed the hem under the needle, the precariously strained garment caught the corner of the machine and jolted it—just enough.
The oil lamp teetered.
Then crashed.
Oil spread quickly.
Flames leapt up around the machine and the area where young Stella was still stitched in.
And far out in the pasture—on the opposite end of the field—something made Roy stop.
He would later say he heard a clear voice that simply said, “Roy, go help your wife.”
No doubt wrestling with his own mind, Roy wavered only seconds. He removed the tangle of reins, laid the plow aside, left the mule in the middle of the field, and hurried toward the home.
As he approached, he saw smoke coming from the window.
Inside, he found the toppled lamp, the toppled machine, flames reaching, and a wife in desperate need of a helping hand.
A few decisive splashes of water, the flames quenched, and all was well—without serious harm.
But somehow—over a hundred years later—that story is still being told.
And it speaks to me. Perhaps more now than it did the first time I heard it.
I love that the bond between husband and wife could stop a man in his tracks and make him run—prompted by the impulse of love alone, and the voice of God in his ear. That is a parable for us all.
But I also think about the world Stella and Roy lived in.
And I ask myself: Isn’t the world we’ve created today louder? More distracting? More diverting? Making it harder—far harder—to hear the voice of God?
Roy heard God’s nudge out in a field, in the turning of earth and the jingle of mule harness.
What competes for our attention now?
A vibration.
A push notification.
A feed.
A demand from a device that never stops talking.
And this tension leads me to a sober conclusion:
So much of the structure, design, and beauty of marriage was built around a life that made it the most reasonable, appropriate arrangement imaginable.
Stella and Roy didn’t have cell phones in their pockets or any phone at all. They didn’t work in cubicles surrounded by strangers. Their connection to one another was their safety, their friendship, their harmony. And that unity was not optional. It was functional. It protected her in a crisis.
The world of a hundred years ago had challenges that forced cooperation—within marriages and within broader communities.
Community wasn’t an abstraction that people idealized and grasped at like elusive straws of make-believe or bygone utopia. It was survival.
You didn’t have the strength to bring in the crops by yourself. But if you helped your neighbor, your neighbor helped you.
You didn’t have the means to put out every fire in every barn. But neighbors would build those barns, protect those barns, and fill those barns together.
And the same was true for marriage.
A pioneer couple couldn’t be bickering all the time. They had to accept their roles. A wife looked at a man who could make decisive decisions because there were real threats—Comanche hoofbeats you might hear a mile away. A wife wanted a man who could protect the family, put meat on the table, and plow through the earth. And a man needed a partner possessing gifts he lacked—to nurture children, preserve food, and turn a shelter into a home.
Disorder and contention within a marriage on the frontier would have been as foolish—and potentially lethal—as disorder on a warship between a captain and a first mate. It was unconscionable. Inconceivable.
Because the mold of life—its givens and hardships, its demand for shelter and clothing and heat and energy and light from oil lamps—that mold invited a certain conformity of design. The kind of design we find celebrated and enumerated in the pages of Scripture.
Real challenges demanded real cooperation. Cooperation demanded design. Mutual submission. And life itself worked in concert with the Scripture.
But today, technology has insinuated itself where hands once clasped in cooperation. Now we grip phones, power tools, steering wheels, gear shifts.
Relationships with living creatures like the mule, with handmade tools like the plow, and with hands of love like a spouse have been replaced.
Now our contact with the real and tangible—with life and survival—is mediated by technologies that subtly replace dependence on one another and shift it to dependence on systems.
And the direction of dependence has inverted.
No longer does the network of aid and strength flow upward—from the couple to the extended family, to the church community, to God in heaven.
Now it flows from the isolated individual to his technological gadget.
From gadget to corporation through subscription.
From corporation to stock market.
From market to regulators.
From regulators to the State.
And in that shift, something happens in the soul.
The roles that once seemed obvious to our ancestors—leadership, submission, cooperation between husband and wife and children—now seem abstract. Arbitrary. Disjointed.
We want to obey Scripture, but the other side of our life no longer complements spiritual instruction with a life that agrees with it.
A father leading his family today can feel like a CEO without a business.
Where is his family economy?
Where is the necessity of his protection?
Where is the dignity of provision—not merely bringing home a paycheck, but ordering the tasks of a household, bringing in the wheat in season, protecting the corn once harvested, tending the animals, guarding against disease?
And where is the pride of the homemaker wife in her art of preservation—her tenderness in caring for children—her cultivation of a culture and ambience where love can flourish?
In the modern story, everyone is told they are interchangeable.
The husband can be the wife, and the wife can be the husband, because technology has erased so much of our distinct service and contribution. It has flattened the world until roles appear to be nothing but preferences and personality.
And then modernity quietly forces a heresy on our brains:
That the ways of Scripture—and the ways of our fathers—are bizarre and antiquated.
So what are we going to do?
Accept a world in which family becomes an accessory?
Or choose—intentionally—a life and rhythm that still remembers the meaning behind God’s design?
Not primitivism for its own sake. Not nostalgia. Not cosplay.
But an intentional return to what makes family real.
To a way of living that restores weight to relationships.
To practices that reintroduce necessity—not because we romanticize hardship, but because we recognize what convenience has stolen.
Should we not live back into this modernscape of individualism, the harder ways?
Raising our own meat.
Growing our own vegetables.
Cooking our own food and preserving it.
Sewing what we can.
Telling our own stories.
Building a household economy that makes husband and wife once again need each other—not as competitors, but as complements.
So that we may escape the oblivion of drifting—ungrounded and rootless—in a world where our only tether is to a screen.
And perhaps, if we can quiet enough of the noise, we might find ourselves again in a field—able to stop, listen, and hear.
Not the buzz of many devices.
But the voice of God.