My New Year’s Resolution

I like older people. Much of the time, they are content with where they are and they have an ease about them that makes one drop their defenses quickly. They don’t smirk either…they give you big, wide smiles, savoring them while they share a moment of laughter. They also have incredible B.S. detectors that can be set off at a moment’s notice. Don’t mess with them – they will call your bluff. Older people often have a simple wisdom that can be applied to most any complex situation in life. But most are not begging to give advice to others – they are simply content to live with what life has already taught them and we are presently learning.

I love watching parents turn into grandparents and the slow but steady shift in perspective this creates. Much of the responsibility (and headache) of parenting is gone and all that remains is a simple joy in providing unconditional love to a young child. And, with it, an unending supply of sentimentality and nostalgia. For grandparents, it’s amazing how quickly their nostalgia “filter’ can find and resting place over the most difficult of family situations. Sometimes I wonder if they see life through the warm and glowing lens of Hallmark Channel camera.

We have not had the easiest year. Life threw the kitchen sink at us. And in the past year I have not savored the love and liveliness of a beautiful wife and four children. I haven’t been a “bad” father or husband. I simply realize that there have been times when I was distracted by less important things. And that has caused me to live life somewhere other than in the immediate present.

I don’t normally do the New Year’s resolution thing. But I’m making an important one this year. My resolution this coming year is to live life with the sentimentality and nostalgia of someone double my age. It’s to imagine the fondness with which I will remember these very moments much later in life and transport that same fondness into the present. To revisit memories that, though they seemed bleak at the time, turned out to be powerful moments of grace in my life. And I’m not waiting until the New Year to make the change. There are many chances for “old” Sam to influence “young” Sam’s worldview in the next two weeks. Hopefully, my New Year’s “exercise” will turn into a lifelong habit. Feel free to try it with me.

“I Like Best to Think of Him that Way.”

The last few weeks at our house have been insanely busy. Major decisions and life choices have taken a back seat to children’s play practice, the air conditioning going out in mid-July, and babies with ear infections. Beth and I became aware of just how little margin we had for “error” in our daily routines. Sometimes it’s tough to keep your cool in those times. I sure didn’t. By the end of it all, I was raising my voice at my kids and barreling past every insight and principle of parenting I had gleaned in the past few years.

I read a book about…well…bad parenting a few weeks ago. The book spends most of his time talking about the psychological impact of  corporal punishment. And I think the book probably ends up unbalanced in its final conclusions. But the more interesting aspect of the book involves where Christianity and parenting intersect. And that was really fascinating to me. It tells a marvelous story about nineteenth century evangelist Dwight L. Moody:

In [Moody's] home, grace was the ruling principle and not the law, and the sorest punishment of a child was the sense that the father’s loving heart had been grieved by waywardness and folly.

Moody’s son, Paul, relayed an incident where he had been caught directly disobeying his father by inviting a friend over to play after his normal bedtime hour. Moody lost his cool and raised his voice:

…I immediately retreated and in tears, for it was an almost unheard-of-thing that [Moody] should speak with such directness or give an order unaccompanied by a smile. But I had barely gotten into my bed before he was kneeling beside it in tears and seeking my forgiveness for having spoken so harshly…Half a century must have passed…and I can still see that room in the twilight and that large bearded figure with great shoulders bowed above me and hear his broken voice. I like best to think of him that way. I had seen him hold the attention of thousands of people, but asking the forgiveness of a disobedient little boy for having spoken harshly seems to me now a finer and greater thing, and to it I owe more than I owe to any of  his sermons. For to this I am indebted for an understanding of the meaning of the Fatherhood of God and a belief in the love of God had its beginnings that night in my childish mind (emphasis mine).

Horace Bushnell is one of my theological “heroes.” In his book Christian Nurture (1861), he writes some of the most piercing words ever regarding parents reflecting the character of God:

[Harsh treatment by a parent] is a great discouragement of piety in children…Anything that puts the child aloof from the parent…will be a wall to shut him away from God. If his Christian father is felt only as a tyrant, he will seem to have a tyrant in God’s name to bear…But there is a kind of virtue which is not in the rod – the virtue of a truly good and sanctified life. So much easier it is to be violent than to be holy, that [parents often] substitute force for goodness and grace and are wholly unconscious of the posture (emphasis mine).

 These quotes cut me to the core. I passionately desire to be this father but often times find that I am not. Yet quotes like the ones above don’t condemn me – they give me a glimpse of what the Holy Spirit can do in my heart as I continue to seek him. They are not hollow or shallow objectives to meet; that won’t change my behavior or impact my children. But they are examples of what “Spirit-led” parenting can look like. Each scenario is always different, but the love of God can be found in everyday interactions with children. Hopefully, my children will look back fondly on a particular memory and be able to say, “I like best to think of him that way.”

Dilettante Dads

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. We live in a world of specialization. The more of an “expert” you are in a particular field of interest, the more chance you have to secure your position as a person of importance and relevance. People spend their lives grasping for that level of expertise and our culture rewards those that give their heart and soul to a discipline, field, or technique. That’s easier for us. We then have a label. “Oh, he’s the medical/business/intellectual expert.” “She’s the manager/attorney/fashion expert.” We feel secure believing that we know everything we need to know about a person with one specialized label. I watch students struggle with this in college. When they ask, “What should be my major?” what they are really asking is “They are asking me to pick a label. What should my label be?”  

Fatherhood flies in the face of that notion. Fatherhood requires us to be well-rounded. A jack of all trades and a master of none. Furthermore, good fathering requires you to be present with your family rather than honing your skills of expertise. You hear this from dads all the time. They often talk about when they used to do something in particular, but the time they spent doing it was only for a few short years. Their areas of growth and knowledge center upon whether their children are into fishing or ballet or baseball or long division. And when their children move on, they do, too. So, for fathers (and many mothers), life becomes a race to cram everything they can into a work day and then shift gears by focusing on their family oriented ”expertise.” So in the end, fully invested fatherhood requires one to choose to not be an expert at anything. To be a Renaissance man. A dilettante. Someone who dabbles in areas of knowledge and skill without formally mastering any particular area. An amateur at everything.

Beth told me a story about a well-known and accomplished businessman and university president who was a guest speaker in one of her college classes. They class asked each visiting lecturer the same question: what is the single most important business advice you could give a college student? This formidable individual thought for a moment and then said, “Learn to play golf. Most business connections and profitable deals are not made in an office or over email. They are made on the golf course.”  I’m praying that this guy is wrong. Or at least that there’s another way to be successful. To me, success at my family’s expense is ultimately failure. So, I’m putting my eggs in another basket: the belief that I can remain professionally relevant and spiritually poignant while spending as much time as possible deeply invested in the lives of my children. The bigger payoff seems to lie there. Call it a hunch…but that’s what I’ll be doing. Check back in two decades and we’ll see if the gamble was worth it.

Minivan Discrimination! Someone Call the Authorities!

Beth went back to work today after 12 weeks of maternity leave. During her leave, we switched cars - she drove the minivan while I took the MINI cooper. For me, it was a nice change of pace. I started driving the van about three years ago when I stayed home with our girls and wrote my doctoral dissertation. You may think that driving a van is strange for a guy. I suppose so…but I just spent 3 months driving the MINI while wearing an Express for Men wardrobe. Trust me – that raised some eyebrows, too.

I want to discuss an alarming trend in our country today: minivan discrimination. Now, don’t get me wrong – I like the van. However, a certain stigma does follow it. Minivans are known for erratic driving and illogical traffic behavior. I used to hate minivans as well for these reasons. Until I became the van driver: handing sippy cups and snacks over the seat, spending the majority of my time looking in the rear-view mirror to referee a fight, and rifling through toys while driving with my knees. Each van is accompanied by this type of behavior, compounded with speeding since (of course) vans are late to every engagement all the time.

However, as you become what I am now – a van ninja – you can do all these things without signalling to the outside world what is going on. Van ninjas look as if they are driving calmly down the road, never steering into the next lane by accident. But don’t be fooled, people. This state of perfection is more difficult than the game of golf. However, I have noticed a disturbing trend now that I have achieved van excellence. People pull out in front of vans constantly. At least 90% of the time, though there is no car behind me, a driver will pull out in front of me without hesitation.

Most other drivers assume that all van drivers are slow and incapable of efficient driving. That’s hardly the case. I drive my van like Jeff Gordon. Chances are that van drivers are doing twelve things at once – something that most regular drivers would never do…nay…could never do.  And there’s also a good chance that there are no children’s songs blaring in the background. I may be listening to the newest praise and worship CD…but it’s much more likely that we are rocking out to Cheap Trick or the Foo Fighters.

So, this is a plea to all other non-van drivers in the world. Give the minivan a chance, bro. There are van ninjas out there everywhere just looking for the chance to show off their mad skills. Don’t pull out in front of the van. Pull out behind it, knowing that the driving you will be witnessing in front of you is a work of art.

Various Thoughts, Faux Pas, and Improprieties

While still writing more on faith and science (more on Monday hopefully), I thought I would bring you up to speed on other things. Obviously, as evidenced by the pictures in my last post, daughter #3 was born – she’s quite easy going compared to the first two as newborns. Still that doesn’t stop me from spending a lot of time awake at 2 and 3 a.m. The more this occurs the more I am reminded for the third time in my life that being awake at such a time is very unnatural. Possibly demonic. Still the child needs to eat and I cannot deny her the opportunity. Why doesn’t Beth get up you may ask? Well, for starters, Beth carried our child and birthed her. I think she’s been through enough, don’t you? The least I can do is feed Ella Gray now that she’s here. Besides, I like her. I am back in the church office on Monday. Sadly, though I was able to leave the church alone for a week, the church could not do that for me. Alas, such is the life of ministry.

Keeping me occupied at 2 a.m. feedings is my new Blackberry Tour 9630 Smartphone. I had a Verizon VX6900 for almost two years and I wore that puppy out so bad that it basically refused to work anymore. In the past, I have used Palm and Windows Mobile platforms, resisting the urge the jump on the Blackberry bandwagon. Why? The same reason I refuse to join Facebook. But I must say this phone is the best I’ve ever owned. I am in love with a machine. So I prop up the child and bottle with one hand and surf the web with the other. At first I was watching TV but there is very little on to watch at that time. I did see a riveting documentary on UFOs. It creeped me out a little and so I turned on a light…

 

I’ve told you in the past that I spend a good amount of time thinking about strange (though often insignificant) questions. These questions can occupy me for weeks on end. I don’t tell my wife about these questions simply because I want  her to stay married to me. And discussing them would certainly run her off. My first strange question is one that any self-respecting religious person should ask themselves: would I make a good cult leader? After mulling over this for several days, my answer is mostly definitely yes. I personally believe I have what it takes to embarrass God.

 The second mental riddle is a little more complex. DNA consists of four bases that are abbreviated A, G, T, and C. I begin to think that all of my daughters have at least one (if not two) of these letters as their intials: ARN, CGN, EGN. I begin to think: would it be cool if I could work the initial “T” into a fourth child’s name? Then all DNA four bases would be represented in my children’s names. How cool would that be? Now that’s genetic coding, my friend! So, I began to make a mental list of male and female names that could complete the “sequence.” I doubt seriously that Beth is going to allow me to complete my own personal family of nucleotides. My only hope is that next time we’ll have twins and my dream of naming them Bonnie and Clyde will come true…

What Constitutes “Good” Parenting?, Part 2

My last post reminded me of a couple of biblical examples that spoke volumes to me about the subject of Christian parenting.

The story of Eli and his sons is the first one (1 Samuel 2:20-36). Eli’s sons were priests and spent the majority of their time abusing their privileges in self-serving ways. No one would consider them “nice, well-mannered young men.” They were first class jerks. This passage often makes it into parenting seminars as an example of a gluttonous, lazy, and personally undisciplined father and the havoc that his lack of restraint causes. The inference is clear: Eli’s sons were horrible because Eli was a bad father. I can’t tell you the number of parents I’ve seen who, upon hearing about the inappropriate behavior of their children, are washed over with guilt for the actions of their offspring. And it doesn’t matter the age – the child could be forty years old and still the parents feel they are to blame in some way. The church reinforces those stereotypes, as if the personal humiliation isn’t enough on its own.

But here’s another biblical example we don’t talk about that much: the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 8). Do you know about his kids? They were just as bad as Eli’s – possibly worse! In fact, their injustice and willingness to take bribes is what casued the Israelites to want Saul for a king. That may explain why Samuel was so against it. Even as Saul is being appointed over Israel (12:1-4), Samuel is still carrying on about his sons still being available to judge Israel – as if they are a better choice than Saul. By all “Christianese” standards, Samuel is what a parent should be: a mighty man of God, modeling service and sacrifice to God on a daily basis. Someone to be admired and imitated. Yet, his sons reject his example, despite his efforts to influence them for the better. By chapter 12, it’s obvious that Samuel thinks a king is a bad idea – but more importantly, he’s so blind to his own children’s behavior that he actually thinks they are still qualified to govern Israel.

Okay, Sam, so what’s your point? Well, it’s essentially what I said in the earlier post. Good parenting is not about cause and effect or “if you do A, you’ll get B.” It’s not a formula. Parents have to believe that our parenting makes a difference. Otherwise, it’s an overwhelming task. But for Eli and for Samuel, regardless of personal devotion to God, the spiritual formation of any child goes beyond what even the best parents can do. Ultimately each person has to recognize the pursuit of God in their life and be willing to respond. I can do my best to create an atmosphere where the Holy Spirit can draw my children into relationship. But in the end, each child’s response is their solely their own. And that’s not a bad thing. God pursues relationship with our children regardless of our behavior, simply because that’s what he wants. And his desire for their salvation far outweighs any hopes I may have for my children. So I model my Christianity, not because it’s important for them to see it. I model it because my Christianity is important to me. And as God pursues them, one day their Christianity will be important to them as well.

What Constitutes “Good” Parenting?, Part 1

I’ve been thinking about what makes someone a good parent – or better yet, what we should consider good parenting skills. I’m finding there aren’t any hard, fast rules that determine whether your child turns out to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner or an ax murderer. And most kids end up somewhere in between anyway. A couple of books have brought this question to my attention.

The first was Freakonomics. One of the chapters attempts to determine the bearing of different parenting styles on children. What the authors find is that socio-economic status has significant bearing in a specialized way. Children in middle to upper income families do better because of the opportunities that money gives them. Intelligence has little to do with it. For example, a child who reads children’s books in his/her home is likely to do well in life. But it’s not because they read better than another child. It’s because a child whose parents have enough money to buy children’s books are also going to have enough money to buy piano lessons, art lessons, etiquette classes, a private school education, etc. Baby Einstein videos don’t do much for your kid, but a parent willing to spend the money on those videos will most likely spend that same type of money on other things to make sure their children succeed. Interesting point. But it says nothing of spiritual or character formation.

The other two books were religious. The first was George Barna’s Revolutionary Parenting. This book was pretty adamant that a particular type of parent turns out spiritual “champions” on a regular basis. The type of parenting? Evangelical and conservative. That wasn’t that surprising either – Barna is an evangelical. The point was that these parents modeled a Christian lifestyle for their children and gave them multiple chances for response. But I began to think about many of the Christians I know today…and whole lot of them were not brought up in a Christian home at all. And the more serious ones had a horrible upbringing. Maybe that’s because they actually understand the gravity of salvation since they were so far from God to begin with. Or maybe they understood the ravaging effect of sin in a more personal way. There is some truth to the idea that great sinners make great Christians. So Barna’s approach leaves out a whole lot of people.

The final book was Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength. In the second chapter or so, Dungy talks about the exceptional example his parents provided for him. They were strong, church-attending Christians and both had higher level educational training (the holy grail of secularists). Both were teachers. By our society’s standards, that’s the one-two punch. It’s easy to talk about how great his parents must have been and that surely this was the reason for Dungy’s successful coaching career. But the last paragraph of the chapter throws a wrench in that scenario. Dungy stated that it wasn’t until years later as an adult that he made a commitment to Christ. Huh? Wait a minute. If anybody should have been a great Christian from the start it should have been him. He had Christianity and education. But it didn’t impact him as much as we all assumed (or hoped) it would.

So what am I trying to say? As parents we have to believe that our parenting makes a difference. Otherwise, it’s an overwhelming task. By secular standards, socio-economic status determines our success in life. But for Christians, it has to be more than that. Yet in both of the Christian books I described, the spiritual formation of any child goes beyond what even the best parents can do. In fact, some Christian parents who do everything right, end up driving their children away from God. As much as parents would like to believe that model parenting matters (and it can certainly help things), ultimately each person on this planet has to recognize the pursuit of God in their life and be willing to respond. I’ve come to understand that there is no way I can really introduce my children to God. Now, I can surely model the importance of personal relationship before them. I can also place them in environments where the Holy Spirit can draw them to him. But in the end that’s between my child and God. And there’s nothing I can do about that.

But there’s hope. I also believe that God will go to the same extremes that he has done with me and my wife in order to develop a relationship with my children. God doesn’t pursue a relationship with my children because I want him to. He pursues them because he wants to. And his desire for their salvation far outweighs any hopes I may have for my children. So I model my Christianity, not because it’s important for them to see it. I model it because my Christianity is important to me. And as God pursues them, one day their Christianity will be important to them as well. Not as a cultural condition, but as a genuine love response to the overwhelming goodness of their Creator.

My Children Cause Me to Sin!

Children have a strange effect on their parents. Mine do. I thought I’d discuss one of the most unique ways my children have impacted my life.

Most Christians were taught to not take the Lord’s name in vain. After all, it is one of the commandments, you know. We normally assume this means not saying the phrase, “Oh my God” or something similar. Of course if you believe taking the Lord’s name in vain has something to do with stringing a particular set of words together, you may be missing the point of that commandment. It might have something more to do with actions than words alone (just a thought). But in the deep South, we have acceptable forms of “taking the Lord’s name in vain” that don’t apply everywhere else in the world. We have phrases like “Lordy, Lordy!” or my personal favorite: “Oh, good Lord!”

I say, “Oh, good Lord” all the time. My children elicit this colorful, yet worshipful response from me, particularly when attempting to get them dressed, to clean up their room, and most often at bedtime (specifically after the third call after I have told them to go to sleep). But I’ve noticed something. My traditional phrase has slowly developed a life its own with extra words being added depending upon the severity of the infraction being described. First came, “Oh, good Lord in heaven above!” Then came, “Oh, good Lord of heaven above and creator of all we survey!” No joke; I’ve actually said that.

However, last week, I hit the pinnacle of Southern “name-in-vain” taking. In a moment of abysmal desperation (caused by Annagale, no doubt) I said the following words: “OH, GOOD LORD IN HEAVEN AND CREATOR OF ALL WE SURVEY WHO HAS WROUGHT WITHIN OUR SINFUL HEARTS THAT BLESSED EVENT AFFECTIONATELY REFERRED TO BY MANY AS SALVATION!!” Or something like that.

That moment in time was a personal best for me. “Ninja skills” in taking the Lord’s name in vain, if you will. I believe Napoleon Dynamite would be proud of my newly acquired skills. The girls certainly were. The above phrase is at least the Southern equivalent of that time-honored Catholic phrase: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the saints!” It also may replace my previous personal best: “Son of a motherless goat!” which sounds much worse than it actually is.

Just another example of how my children push me to new heights of greatness. It is in these moments that I am most thankful for my children.

Godly Marriage, Pt. 3: What Does a Christian Family Look Like?

Okay, on to the famous marriage passage in Ephesians 5:18-33 (NLT):

“Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts…And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ…For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.

“For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word.…In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. And we are members of his body.

 ”As the Scriptures say, ‘A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’ This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

 There’s a lot in here to digest but let’s just pull some of the most overlooked parts out for a minute. Most pastors start with verse 22 – the part about wives submitting to husbands, passing over the preceding verses that qualify it. The whole passage starts where Paul talks about being filled with the Spirit.  What does he mean? He gives us an example – drunkenness, actually. When someone is inebriated, they have assigned their will over to a chemical that makes their decisions for them.  We call this impaired judgment – others call it being smashed.  In the same way, being filled with the Spirit is to allow the Spirit to affect your decisions and life strategies.  Make sense? We are to be “filled with the Spirit” to the point where it affects our judgment. Though I’ve never studied it out, I’ve heard that the grammar in the original here has a fluid, loose feel to it almost as if Paul was writing in a drunken way to convey his point. You Greek scholars out there can let us history people know if that’s accurate or not.

Next, before Paul says anything about wives submitting, he states in verse 21 that we are to submit to “one another in the fear of the Lord” (NKJV). Here we have mutual voluntary submission - a state of equality and interdependence under the Lord (similar to the concept of the social Trinity I might add…). Paul doesn’t say anything about the husband being higher up on the ladder of spiritual maturity than the wife. They receive equal investment under God.  After addressing this mutual submission under God, only then does Paul delve into the specifics of marriage.

I’ll finish up next post…

What Constitutes “Good” Parenting?, Part 2

I wrote about this a while back and have since been reminded of a couple of biblical examples that spoke volumes to me.

The story of Eli and his sons is the first one (1 Samuel 2:20-36). Eli’s sons were priests and spent the majority of their time abusing their privileges in unholy ways. No one would consider them “nice, well-mannered young men.” They were first class jerks. This passage often makes it into parenting seminars as an example of a gluttonous, lazy, and personally undisciplined father and the havoc that his lack of restraint caused. In other words, Eli’s sons were horrible because Eli was a bad father. I can’t tell you the number of parents I’ve seen who, upon hearing about the inappropriate behavior of their children, are washed over with guilt for the actions of their offspring. And it doesn’t matter the age – the child could be forty years old and still the parents feel they are to blame in some way. The church reinforces those stereotypes, as if the personal humiliation isn’t enough on its own.

But here’s another biblical example we don’t talk about that much: the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 8). Do you know about his kids? They were just as bad as Eli’s – possibly worse! In fact, their injustice and willingness to take bribes is what casued the Israelites to want Saul for a king. That may explain why Samuel was so against it. Even as Saul is being appointed over Israel (12:1-4), Samuel is still carrying on about his sons still being available to judge Israel – as if they are a better choice than Saul. By all “Christianese” standards, Samuel is what a parent should be: a mighty man of God, modeling service and sacrifice to God on a daily basis. Someone to be admired and imitated. Yet, his sons reject his example, despite his efforts to influence them for the better. By chapter 12, it’s obvious that Samuel thinks a king is a bad idea – but more importantly, he’s so blind to his own children’s behavior that he actually thinks they are still qualified to govern Israel.

Okay, Sam, so what’s your point? Well, it’s essentially what I said in the earlier post. Good parenting is not about cause and effect or “if you do A, you’ll get B.” It’s not a formula. Parents have to believe that our parenting makes a difference. Otherwise, it’s an overwhelming task. But for Eli and for Samuel, regardless of personal devotion to God, the spiritual formation of any child goes beyond what even the best parents can do. Ultimately each person has to recognize the pursuit of God in their life and be willing to respond. I can do my best to create an atmosphere where the Holy Spirit can draw my children. But in the end, each child’s response is their own. But that’s not a bad thing. God pursues relationship with our children regardless of our behavior, simply because that what he wants. And his desire for their salvation far outweighs any hopes I may have for my children. So I model my Christianity, not because it’s important for them to see it. I model it because my Christianity is important to me. And as God pursues them, one day their Christianity will be important to them as well.