Created For Covering

FORWARD

Our ability to achieve our full potential as God has intended requires relationship and connectivity. At the most elementary level, the Kingdom of God, which is in the Holy Spirit, is all about relationship. As a matter of fact, everything in the Kingdom is related. Failure to understand that leads to missed opportunities, missed moments, and even missed destinies. The Psalmist tells us that “God places the solitary in families”, and that He is a Father to the “fatherless”. So from heaven’s perspective right relationship involves being connected to a family. No one needs to read too many news headlines or watch too many “reality” television shows to realize that families are in trouble, men and women are in crisis in regards to their masculinity and femininity, and confusion about roles and functions in our social containers is prevalent. As a matter of fact we live in an hour when all of our social containers are in chaos, from the family, to the church or synagogue, the community, and sadly even our elected officials who are assigned to govern the affairs of life on our behalf, upholding the will of the people. We live in an hour where the masses are feeling out of sync, out of sorts, and even out of touch. We are far more vulnerable in this hour than we are visionary. There is hope however to reclaim, recover, and recommit to principles that actually restore balance and equilibrium to our lives. My dear friend, Dr. Robert Shaw has decided to “take on” the sometimes perplexing and controversial concept of “covering” in terms of its purpose in relationships in the Kingdom of God. There is no question that for some, a great deal of damage was done when those in authority who themselves had by sheer determination, performance orientation, and the will to succeed, achieved levels of leadership in the Body of Christ, without the character to match the position they held. Their promotion was based on their ability to move a crowd, preach a good sermon, convince others that they had what it takes to lead, only to discover that once they arrived at the position they sought to attain, there was a painfully evident “gap” between their position and their “person”. The end result, was and always is that instead of offering security, safety, and protection (i.e. “covering”) for those under their care, they operated and still operate in a spirit of “control”, so that “covering” has become a lid to oppress and hold people under instead of an umbrella to provide shelter from the storms of life. Covering is God’s idea, and sadly there has been so much dysfunction prevalent in the lives of the masses both churched and un-churched in recent decades, that covering has lost its significance, its essence, and its essential necessity in the lives of far too many who out of their own dysfunction have opted for independence as opposed to interdependence in every social container from the family all the way to the highest levels of government in the land. If ever families, churches, communities, governments, and nations needed to recover a genuine, healthy, God-centered, wholesome awareness and experience of “covering”, the time is now. My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Shaw for taking the time to instruct us both theologically and psychologically and from a wealth of his own personal history and experience in the people-helping business, regarding this important truth and its appropriate application to our lives. Take your time as you read this “learning manual” and once you read it, do what it says to do. Your life and the lives of those you are related to will all benefit from it, because once you become the change you desire to see, others begin to experience that same transformation.

Dr. Mark J. Chironna
Church on The Living Edge
Mark Chironna Ministries
Orlando, Florida