Trade Up

Last Friday I go where few grown-ups have gone before: I attended our church youth group's small group.

Well, now I've made it sound like it was intimidating! I have a son who just turned 13, and he's involved, so it was totally legit for me to come (in fact, he asked me if I would). However, I do think that we adults can have a tendency to shy away from groups containing more than one or two teenagers at a time. Maybe we think that, I don't know, acne is contagious, or that they will call us "old bald person" or something (although the Bible tells us that if they do, God will avenge us... just kidding!) Anyway, the kids in the youth group at our church are the greatest kids ever; I actually enjoyed the evening quite a bit!

One of the things we did was a game where each team (we had three) was given a plain old can of soup, and we took it around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking to trade it for something. We could trade it for anything we were offered (well, anything except for a human or animal!) but the idea was to try to "trade up" - get something more valuable than what we were offering. The story is that in the past, teams who have played this game have traded up to quite valuable things, like cars. We didn't expect to get a car, but we did our best to get something cool!

My team actually had the most interesting story to tell when we got back. We traded our soup can for a real, whole pineapple. Then we traded the pineapple for a pretty cool CD carrying case; it was made of red plastic, and it could open on both ends and folded out like an accordion. We traded that for a ceramic statue of three ducks with an umbrella; the umbrella actually had a solar cell on top, and under the umbrella it was supposed to power a little light; we couldn't get the light to work. In our last trade, we got a racketball racket with good strings but a kind of sticky handgrip for the ducks. When we got back, the response from the other teams was, You had CERAMIC DUCKS, and you traded them for THAT??? Apparently, the other teams thought we had traded down on our last trade. The ducks were cool, and they might have won the game if another team hadn't traded up for a working Keurig coffee machine (!), but in my opinion, a racketball racket is actually useful. A broken duck lamp is not.

My wife likes to go to the grocery store on the weekends. I still don't really understand why she wants to do that and take up time we could be doing something as a family (or resting!) when she could go during the week while the kids are in school and I'm at work, but that's how she likes it so that's what we do. Usually she goes by herself, but sometimes for various reasons she asks me to go along. Now, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I'm happy to go or that I don't put up a fuss to get to stay home, but if she really wants me there, I go with her. I push the buggy sometimes, I load the stuff into the car, I take it up when I go home. She's my wife, and she needs me. I can afford an hour or two for that.

We have a friend named Danny Cahill. Now Danny is quite famous, but we did know him before he was in the public eye. In the autobiography he and his wife co-authored (it came out a few months ago), Danny talks about how as a young man he dreamed of being a professional musician, but because of some errant ideas he was taught growing up, he believed that when he got married and wanted to start a family, he needed to give up those dreams and (basically) "get a real job." When he gave up his dreams, he gave up on himself, and wound up weighing 460 pounds with a crushing gambling habit. (After years of struggling with his weight, he scored a spot on season eight of "The Biggest Loser", a "reality" game show in which very overweight people compete to lose the most weight in a certain number of weeks. Danny lost 239 pounds and won the show!)

The point of the game we played in the youth meeting was to think about making trades. The team who wound up with the coffee maker obviously traded up from a can of soup. We and the other team (who ended up with a case of bottled water) traded up too, but most of the teens thought we had gone backwards with the racketball racket. After everyone told the group about their adventures, we discussed the story about Esau trading his birthright (the right to become the head of his clan after the death of his father) to his younger father for nothing more valuable than a single meal at the end of a long day. It's pretty clear that Esau did NOT "trade up." We talked about making choices that we later discovered (or knew all along) amounted to trading something valuable for something less valuable - choosing to hang out with friends at the expense of studying for an important test in school, choosing an exciting-but-no-good boyfriend/girlfriend over a better-but-less-flashy one, and so on. Teenager-level stuff.

But later I got to thinking about things that happen to adults. Danny had traded the most valuable thing a person can have, a dream that gives them a reason to get out of bed in the morning, for a lie. Later, he traded that lie, which had brought him to a point where he was so unhealthy that he was very likely to die young, for the truth that hard work can lead to extreme results; in the process he got his health back, and he even got to play a song he had written on national television. Now Danny is a recording artist and a motivational speaker; look him up on Facebook sometime!

I haven't done anything that extreme, but I have given up little things for what seems at first like a lesser reward. Giving up my Friday night, for example, for the opportunity to go tromping around a neighborhood trading soup cans for ducks. Trading part of my weekend afternoon to push a shopping cart around for my wife. Even giving up my chance to watch a TV show I like so my kids can play a video game, or not buying some electronic gadget I've got my eye on to pay for dance lessons for my daughter or a band trip for my son. As a married person and as a parent, there are so many things that you sacrifice, knowingly and without hesitation, and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all; it's just what a parent does. Danny does that too; I know his wife and his children, and he would do anything for those guys. But Danny went one step too far: he sacrificed a destiny God had given him for the sake of a picture of a family man that was not what God intended for him. If he were standing here right now, I know he would tell you that was the wrong choice. Some things, things from God, should not be sacrificed.

Don't get the wrong idea: I do not think that an adult should sacrifice his family on the altar of his career either. After your personal relationship with God, your career should take distant fourth place to your spouse and to your kids. But if God has put something in your heart, God knows how to make it happen without causing suffering for your family. In fact, if you are honestly chasing God's plan for you and for your family, they will flourish because of it.

Don't trade something precious for something hollow. Plan your course, but let the Lord order your steps. When you do, every trade will turn out in the end to have been a trade up!

Movie Smackdown: The Hunger Games vs. October Baby

I'm annoyed, and a bit offended, by something that just showed up in my inbox. It's an ad for a movie I've never heard of called October Baby. Obviously it's a "Christian movie" about abortion. Now, I am totally 100% opposed to abortion (because I think that human beings are human beings from the moment of conception, and I oppose the killing of innocent human beings), but the copy of the first paragraph of the email got under my skin. Here it is:

This weekend, when the biggest box-office hit is expected be a film based on a popular book about young people being forced to fight to the death, OCTOBER BABY hits theaters with a resounding message about the sanctity of life. Talk about a culture in need of a wake-up call!

I'm annoyed because that paragraph unfairly implies that The Hunger Games is against the "sanctity of life" (which is almost the diametric opposite of the truth), and I'm offended that whoever wrote it either decided to take a pot-shot at a movie they haven't seen and don't know anything about, or thinks that I and every other Christian out there is too stupid to know baloney when we see it. The whole message of The Hunger Games (which, full disclosure, I have not seen yet on the big screen, but I've read the book series and from all accounts I've read, the movie is remarkable in its fidelity to the book) is that life is too precious to be manipulated and exploited for the entertainment of others. The story does not glorify the fact that the kids are killing each other in an arena; the arena combat is absolutely painted in a negative light. You might as well say that Star Wars is a story that celebrates the idea of blowing up whole planets full of people. Ridiculous.

The cherry on the ice cream sundae is the crack about "...a culture in need of a wake-up call." Ironically, The Hunger Games IS a wake-up call. The underlying themes are about a too-strong totalitarian government manipulating their population into complacency by using "reality TV" as a propaganda tool. Over the past half-century, real governments have become better and better at using the media to spin the facts to their own advantage; take a look around in an election year and see for yourself. At the same time, "reality TV" becomes more and more outlandish. Government-sponsored and approved violence could, given the right set of circumstances, become reality one day in this or any country. Just ask first-century Christians, who, depending on who was in charge, might wind up getting eaten by lions in public. Cruelty of man against man, heightened by the fact that the persecuted persons are children, is totally, unequivocally condemned by The Hunger Games. When we wake up to the fact that although they are not physically cutting each other's throats, many times the players in "reality TV" programs are mistreating each other publicly for their own ends, and we watch it and call it entertainment, then we will have learned the lesson of The Hunger Games.

According to reports on the Internet today, The Hunger Games has already sold fifteen million dollars worth of tickets, even though it doesn't actually open until tomorrow. It's obvious that some marketing person at October Baby is somehow trying to get a piece of that. I'm not sure what the exact idea is (viewing their movie as a protest against another movie?), but it's not going to work. The millions of Hunger Games fans are not going to say, "Oh my goodness, you are RIGHT! I will throw away the ticket I stood in line for and now buy a ticket to see YOUR movie instead!" In fact, the only thing I can see this kind of advertising accomplishing, if it accomplishes anything at all, is to put the idea in the head of a parent who is too lazy to really find out what The Hunger Games is all about that it is harmful to their teenagers, and forbid the teenagers to see it. What's that going to do but drive a wedge in families? The kids will either sneak out and see it anyway, or miss out on what could actually be a highly positive message for them (violence is bad, and so is believing that everything you see on TV is okay). Shame on you, American Family Association.

AFA, if your film is any good, you don't need to slam other good movies to sell it. Especially not films with a positive message. I won't be wasting my time with October Baby, but I will see The Hunger Games. Because I enjoy a movie with a positive message.

God's Faithfulness, and Proper Uses of Words

This morning in church I was struck again with something that's been a large part of my worship experience since I wandered deep into the Old Testament last year. The thing that keeps coming to my mind is God's faithfulness to His people over the course of many centuries. He has never given up on us, He has continued to love us, all the way from the fall of Adam through Noah and Abraham and Joseph and Moses, through Godly leaders and through unGodly leaders, through our faithfulness and our apostasy, on and on through thousands of years of time, right up to now. God is still faithful to His people. It gets me every time!

Pastor touched a couple of times on the power of words, and he mentioned this passage:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.
(Matthew 5:21-22 ESV)

In context, Jesus was taking a number of serious transgressions of the Law (lust, divorce, breaking an oath, etc.) and saying that once the deed is done in your heart, it's as sinful as if you had done it for real. In this case, though, Jesus is basically saying that if you speak out to someone in anger, it is tantamount to murdering them. And I got to thinking about my relationship with my kids.

Are there any parents in existence who don't ever get frustrated and angry with their kids? I doubt it! Kids are kids... they haven't learned how to act like adults yet, and they haven't become as emotionally and mentally mature as their parents (hopefully) have, and sometimes we see blossoming in them things that we once struggled with and finally defeated. Emotionally it's like finally clearing your yard of dandelions, and then the next day waking up to see the whole yard yellow again. I certainly know that I've raised my voice to my children in anger before! I try to be very careful when correcting my children, and always tell them that even if they've done something stupid (messing with something that could hurt them, going somewhere dangerous, etc.) it doesn't mean that they are stupid... it means that their actions were stupid, even though they are both very smart kids. But I wonder if raising my voice to them in anger actually really does kill something inside of them. I don't want to be the murderer of any part of my children; I'll be reevaluating how I communicate with them in those kinds of situations. I think God can teach me how to always be someone who heals and reconciles and never someone who kills with my words.

Your Name, Making Kids' Lives Harder, and the Church Says Yes

photo © 2008 David Hopkins | more info (via: Wylio)This morning we sang a Paul Baloche song in church that goes "As morning dawns and evening fades, You inspire songs of praise that rise from earth to touch Your heart and glorify Your Name." I think the imagery of the song rising up from Earth to Heaven is beautiful, but this morning it made me think about how God causes all kinds of things to rise from the Earth toward Heaven. Trees, plants, animals... and His Son from the grave and us with Him. It struck me that God's will always tends toward things rising up from Earth and moving toward Him. Maybe that's part of the reason that many Christians like to stretch out their arms and hands toward Heaven when they sing worship!

After the music portion of the service, we had what we call "baby dedications." Basically those are just a time for new parents (or even not quite as new parents... one of the children we prayed over today is in the toddler class!) to kind of present their children to the church, pray for a safe and Godly upbringing for them, that sort of thing. For some reason I started thinking about my own two kids and how sometimes I'm pretty sure they think my wife and I get great mirth and joy from making their lives miserable. That is of course not the truth of the situation, but I was a kid once... I remember feeling that way sometimes! I realized today, though, that my job as a parent is to make my kids' lives harder... if they are not doing the right thing. My job is to make sin as difficult and unpleasant as I can, but when they are doing the right thing, my job is to grease the rails for them and empower them to succeed. I never thought of myself as a standing-in-the-way kind of parent, but if I'm standing in the way of my kids getting hurt or messing up their lives, I'll stand in the way of a speeding train if I have to!

Later in the service our associate pastor was talking about some of the things we are doing as a church to help needy people in the community, and I was thinking about how I usually feel sort of disconnected from those kinds of church ministries. After all, nobody asked me if we should help that person pay his rent or give him groceries or whatever. But then I realized that just because I don't make the actual decision to help that particular individual person, it doesn't mean I'm not a part of the decision... because if someone had asked me my opinion about it, I'm fairly certain I would have said "yes." In fact, I think it's safe to say, based on what I know about the people in my church (and I've spent time visiting with quite a lot of them), that we would as a body say "yes" if we were asked whether we should help someone who needed our help. When there's unity in a church body, the pastor knows that when he says "yes," the church says "yes." Come to think of it, the reason the pastor says "yes" and the reason the church says "yes" is because when someone calls out to Christ Jesus for help, His answer is "always yes" — within constraints of the church's budget, helping hurting people is always a top priority. That's how I feel, I know that's how my fellow church members feel, and I know it's how my pastor and his staff and board feel... so if Jesus says "yes" and leadership says "yes," and the church is of one mind with leadership, then the church also says "yes!"

FINALLY the girls get their book! James Dobson's "Bringing Up Girls"

When I was a freshman at Oral Roberts University in the late 1980s, one of the first things I learned was to hold doors open for the young ladies. There was no etiquette class for freshmen, no university-wide rule, no obvious reason for this at all. There was just a culture of the young men taking care of the young ladies. For anyone who wasn't born yet then who might be reading this, let me emphasize: this was the eighties, not the fifties. Holding a door open for a young lady when you weren't on a date (or maybe even when you were on a date) was certainly not the societal norm. But I think I learned more about servanthood and about respect for the opposite sex from that one tiny repeated act than anything else before, or maybe even since. What's more, the young ladies expected that kind of treatment; some would even refuse to go thorough a door with a young man unless he opened and held it for her. Training girls to understand that they deserve dignity and respect and should expect it from the males in their lives is a main focus of James Dobson's new book, Bringing Up Girls. To some the book may seem unforgivably old-fashioned in its treatment of the fair sex. Others will find something to get offended by, and some may even be astonished at some of the ideas expressed (I know I was!) But I think if you open your mind a little bit, forgive Dr. Dobson for some attitudes that may seem at first blush a little too much like something out of Leave It To Beaver for the twenty-first century, and look at the heart of what he is saying, you'll get some valuable insight before you're done.

Bringing Up Girls:  Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Women
By Dr. James Dobson

This book is, for most intents and purposes, a follow-up to Dr. Dobson's 2001 book, Bringing Up Boys. If you've read that book, you will see a lot of similarities, particularly in the early chapters. Dr. Dobson seems to like to break the ice by including a few "lighthearted" letters from "fans" (in this case, some of them were unintentionally funny letters from child "anti-fans" who did not appreciate Dr. Dobson's stance on corporal punishment in previous books!) and telling a few stories about childhood. He has a grandfatherly sentimentality that is pretty hard to resist. But that sentimental side doesn't stop him from being brutally honest about some things, and that made some of the later chapters a tough read for me.

Like Bringing Up Boys, this book contains a lot of statistics about its subject: in this case, females of all kinds (not just little girls, but also teenagers and even grown women.) The basic theme of the second and third chapters, in fact, is that society is a dangerous place for females. There are extensive discussions about such things as the fragility of a girl's ego, the harmful effect of certain things in media, the aggressive marketing of those things to females, the accessibility of materials on the Internet through both computers and portable devices such as cell phones, the moral anti-absolutism of our 21st-century culture, and cultural changes such as the acceptance of public nudity. There was one section I found particularly difficult to get through - it was about "cutting," a practice in which people (often teenagers) will physically cut their skin with a knife or other implement in an attempt to dull emotional pain with physical pain. I've known that cutting existed for some time, but revisiting it in such detail was chilling. I found myself wading through those chapters as though I was hip-deep in toxic water; the information is awful to be exposed to, but you've got to get through it to get where you're going.

Then sometimes I would come to a spot in the book that seemed like a breath of fresh air. When I got to chapter 16 ("Good News About Girls") it was such a relief after spending the two previous chapters wallowing in the filth of media culture. The odd thing is that the whole point of the book is that the danger of a girl falling into those dire straits is greatly reduced by the presence of loving, involved parenting as she grows up. The kind of negative statistics in the "hip-waders" chapters would seem to be the kind of thing you would use to convince someone to read the book. Once I'm reading it, I've already decided that I want some help and advice; I don't need to be convinced. All that to say, I think maybe the book dwells on the negative a little more than is necessary; some parts are wastelands of discouraging numbers and trends. You can go for chapters and chapters and never actually learn anything practical to use in your parenting. Sometimes I felt like saying, "Okay, Dr. Dobson, you made your point twelve pages ago. Growing up is hard for girls. Can we get on to how I can help my girl now, please?"

And of course, the "how can I help" information is there, too. In fact, I would encourage any mother of a girl to at least take a look at chapters 5 and 7, and any father of a girl should at least take a look at chapters 8, 9, and 10. Chapter 8, in particular, is a must-see for dads: it is a series of heart-rending first-person stories, told by young women in college, of the huge effect their fathers have had on their lives. The basic message of the book is that girls need to be endowed with a sense that they are valuable, not commodities, and the girl's parents are in the primary position to do that for her as she is growing up. If we parents can help our daughters understand that they are valuable persons, they will be less likely to do things like using their sexuality to get what they want or trying to hold on to the affection of a boyfriend who is finished with the relationship. The idea is not to exert control over females, but to free them to control themselves as adult women. To empower them to not feel like they have to resort to drastic measures in order to get what they want. To free them to want what they really want, instead of what society all around them screams that they should want.

There are a number of opinions Dr. Dobson expresses in the book that strike me as controversial. He is against mothers of young children working outside of the home unless there is a dire need, for example. He is against same-sex couples raising children. He is against co-ed sports, particularly with teenagers (he believes that having members of the opposite sex on the team changes the dynamics of how the team works together and reduces the value of the whole thing for everybody). He believes in sexual abstinence before marriage for both genders. He says that casual sex with multiple partners physically rewires the brain and makes the eventual relationship with a lifelong partner less satisfying in the end. He seems to believe that body piercing is psychologically related to cutting (really? What about one earring per ear? Is that cutting? What about two? or three? Why is a belly-button different from an earlobe?) I could see many people being turned off by some of those assertions - although presumably, the kind of person who is going to strongly disagree with those kinds of things is probably not going to be reading books by James Dobson anyway. I personally have very little trouble with most of them, and I see at least a grain of truth in each. But if any of those statements bothers you more than a little tiny bit, you might seriously consider whether you want to get into this book.

I found his discussion of what he calls the "princess movement" particularly interesting. This is the same thing that I've referred to for years now as the "pink aisle"... you know, the toy aisle that is almost blindingly pink because it's where all of the "girl toys" are. These days, a lot of the "pink aisle" toys have Ariel, Snow White, Cinderella, Pocahontas, and other "princesses" from the Disney repertoire on them, and little girls eat them up. He characterizes the movement as a (mostly) positive thing, giving girls an outlet for their natural "girliness" and showing them that it's OK to not be the same as the boys. However, he does criticize culture's obsession with "beauty" in a lengthy section that, oddly, turns a very sympathetic eye on celebrities Anna Nicole Smith and Farrah Fawcett, both of whom suffered during their lifetimes because they were physically desirable (he quotes Farrah as saying, "How would you like to be photographed every day of your life?") The general sense is that a girl needs to be taught that she is a princess, yes, but not only because of physical beauty; she is a princess because she is a child of God.

Chapter 11 discusses the Father Daughter Purity Ball movement. This is a kind of formal party, sort of like a prom, to which dads take their daughters. Dads and daughters dress up in formal clothes, they dance, and the daughter pledges to her dad that she will keep her virginity until marriage, and the dad pledges back that he will help her protect her virginity. That probably oversimplifies things a bit, but that's the main gist of it. I had heard of this before, and it has always seemed a bit odd to me, maybe a little bit creepy... and this chapter did not change my mind. The whole thing extends the (perfectly okay) princess fantasy unnaturally from childhood nearly into young adulthood, and uses it to convince a girl to sign a contract that specifies what they will do sexually. But the way I see it, no document is going to change someone's mind in the heat of passion. And honestly, I'm not really sure that it's the father's job to "protect" his daughter's virginity; I think it's the father's job to teach the girl what she needs to know so that she will guard her own virginity. I'm going to teach my daughter what I believe the Word of God says about sexuality, but I'm not going to stand out on my porch with a shotgun waiting for her to come home from a date (I probably will wait up, though!) If she makes the wrong choice and has sex with a boy, what good will a written, signed contract do anyway? It will only make her feel guilty, and she'll hide the whole thing from me. That's not productive. It seems to me that taking your daughter to one of these things amounts to doing something outlandish to make up for years of not properly training her like you should have been doing all along. I'm sure in many or most cases it's not like that, and if one day my daughter asks me to take her to one of these, certainly I'll do it, but it seems over the top to me. Dr. Dobson's take on them is very positive, but personally, the whole idea strikes me as weird.

I had a similar reaction to the charm bracelet story in Chapter 17. Essentially, the story is about parents encouraging their daughter to stay away from any affectionate contact with boys until she is sure of the one she is going to marry. This includes kissing, saying "I love you," and even holding hands with a boy in addition to getting engaged and getting married. Their encouragement is in the form of a charm bracelet, the (rather expensive) charms of which must be given away to the first boy with which she has that sort of contact. The girl in the story, as it turns out, was wise enough to use that gentle pressure put on her by loving parents to keep her out of trouble, and after she was married, she still had the whole charm bracelet. But I have to wonder: is this bribery? Is this replacing a strong moral upbringing with a materialistic love for jewelry? It seems extreme to me, especially penalizing their daughter for even holding a boy's hand. (For that matter, what if she is in a class at school and everybody is holding hands as part of a lesson? What if they are holding hands in Sunday School for a prayer time? In my family, we hold hands to pray over our meals. Would those situations count if she happened to be next to a boy?) It's not my style to manipulate someone by giving them a gift with strings attached. Then again, maybe that's why I'm not a psychologist. Maybe that's the language that a little girl speaks most fluently, and I just don't know it yet.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the book very much. I didn't enjoy the "toxic statistic" parts, but I enjoyed the rest of it, even the parts with which I had a difference of opinion, because I enjoy seeing someone else's perspective. I enjoyed hearing about Dr. Dobson's daughter Danae, in part because her love of dogs reminded me of my little girl. In fact, it wasn't just my daughter that I saw reflected in the pages... I sometimes saw my wife there, too! I came away from the book understanding that for girls and women, relationships are the number one key to everything. If I can maintain a healthy relationship with my girl, she has a way-better-than-average chance at leading a very successful, happy life. If daughters of loving fathers look for a mate who is like their dad, I want to make it next to impossible for my daughter to find a man who will measure up, not because I want her to be alone (I don't) but because I want her to be with someone who loves her, and who loves God, at least as much as I do.

Are Dr. Dobson's perspectives old-fashioned? Sometimes, maybe... or maybe they're not old-fashioned, but a jarring reminder of a higher standard that should be held toward and by women. Girls and women are valuable and precious, and should be treated as such. If we all treated our daughters like princesses (not the spoiled kind, but the kind who know that royalty also comes with responsibility), and they all acted like princesses... wouldn't the world be a great place to be? When my princess grows up, I hope she still has the same attitude she had the other day when she wanted her mama to take her somewhere. "We can't go right now, sweetie," my wife told her. "Daddy has the car." My little girl replied simply, "Okay. I fly!"




I received a complimentary review copy of this book from Tyndale Publishing.

Dropping the Ball

I'm reading Dr. James Dobson's new book, Bringing Up Girls (review coming soon, by the way) about parenting, and as designed, it has me thinking about my own job as a parent, not only of my daughter but also of my son. I was thinking this morning about some of the things he needs to understand that I've learned in my lifetime. I want to pass on those nuggets of wisdom to him so that he doesn't have to spend 20 or 30 or 40 years trying to figure them out. I thought, if only my own father had taught me some of those things better, he might have been able to help me out that way when I was a kid. And the fact is, he did teach me a lot of things he had to learn the hard way himself. I am quite grateful for the things that he managed to get through my thick skull and help me incorporate into my life. Passing on wisdom from generation to generation is critical; just ask King David, who many believe passed on the wisdom found in the book of Proverbs to Solomon, who later codified it in the book we have today.

But then I started thinking. The human race has been around an awfully long time, and there have been many, many very wise men and women in the world. Surely some of them were my great grandparents, or great great grandparents, or somewhere up the line. Somebody, sometime that I am descended from knew the things that I need to know. Why didn't they pass them down to me? Why didn't that knowledge filter on through the years until it rested in my lap, like a priceless gift from a stranger who seems vaguely familiar?

Well, it could be that the person who knew those things died before getting a chance to pass them on. That sometimes happens. It could be that there was a divorce, and a child never had the parent with that information as part of his life. Different children have different needs; maybe the parent who knew that nugget of information that I desperately need to know, simply never had a child who needed to know it. Maybe the child was just too hard-headed to listen to wisdom. There's an example of that, too, in the life of King Solomon; his son Rehoboam clearly had no grasp on the wisdom of his father, and instead of listening to wise counsel from older men, followed the advice of his idiot friends, and it cost him his kingdom (here, see for yourself in 1 Kings chapter 12). It happens to the best of us; there are any number of plausible reasons that knowledge might go to the grave with a parent and never be passed on to the child.

There is one reason, though, that haunts me a bit. I wonder if someone, somewhere in my ancestry, simply dropped the ball. Maybe they got busy with career, hobbies, social activities, politics, or whatever, and neglected to pass on critical information from parent to child, maybe even critical information that could save the child a lifetime of heartache. Maybe that child never learned what he or she needed to know, and thus was unable to pass it on to the next generation and the next. It could be that I have somehow managed to figure out something that some ancestor of mine hundreds of years ago knew, as plain as the nose on his face, but nobody else in my family has managed to get a grip on since then. As a parent myself, I have a responsibility, a duty to carry out, and that duty is to not be the weak link in the chain. If I can be a person who succeeds in passing on any and everything useful I have learned about how to be a successful human being to my children, then I will have gone a long way toward having been a successful parent. There is more to parenting than passing on information, of course, and given the choice between being a loving parent who passed on no wisdom and being a wise parent who did not love, I would go with being a loving parent and never look back. But if I can succeed in being both a loving father and a wise father, and pass both of those traits on to my children, then one day I will be able to face my maker with my children like trophies beside me and hopefully hear the two golden words that each of us hopes to hear from Him: "Well done."

Barnacles!

I love Spongebob Squarepants. It's a silly cartoon that doesn't ever get too gross, although I admit lots of times they push the envelope. Well, at Christmas my son got a Spongebob music CD called The Best Day Ever. It has lots of fun and funny songs on it, and he (and his parents!) really enjoy it! But today one of the songs came up in my random playlist and it gave me pause:

We all know that the alphabet has 26 letters... count 'em!
You can mix and match to make many nouns and verbs
But if you say the wrong one to your mama, it may upset her
So in Bikini Bottom, we have a word that's preferred

We just say "barnacles"
It's a word that's okay to scream
When you want to let off some steam
And say what you really mean
We just yell "barnacles"
And go on our merry way
Barnacles is the way we say what they say we can't say.

A cute lyric, isn't it? The music is cute, too... click here to listen to a clip. The only problem is that Jesus made it clear that evil comes from the inside, and although it may be displayed on the outside, the evil is really in the heart. I don't actually see anyplace in the Word where it specifically says that some words are evil, but I do see that it says anger (which is not of the "righteous" kind) is evil. So if I shout "barnacles!" in anger, is that any better than shouting "s**t!"? Sure, the word "barnacles" is less likely to offend those around me, but if the anger is there, the anger is there... and that's where the sin lies.

The reason that the song gave me pause today is that it struck me as a good way to teach children to swear at an early age. Once you are used to releasing your anger through speech, it's that much easier to start doing it with real profanity later. I won't take away my son's CD... I don't think it's inherently malevolent (well, except for Plankton, but that's his job!) , but it's one more thing that as parents we might have to deal with later. Thank you too much, Nickelodeon.

parent gifting

I've many times heard ministers talking about how when their son or daughter approaches them with a heart of gratitude and love and asks them for something, the child can get whatever he or she wants. This is used to illustrate how God provides us what we need when we ask Him in faith. The whole metaphor seems sort of flawed to me, though... if I had unlimited funds, would I give my son anything he asked me for? If I did, he would wind up spoiled and with no appreciation for any of it! And then again... does God give me anything at all that I ask for? Of course not. If I ask to be president of the moon, it's not likely to happen, at least not until someone LIVES on the moon. If I ask to be the owner of Microsoft... well, someone already owns Microsoft. And then there are the times when we feel we have made perfectly reasonable requests of God, and yet He does not seem to come through. What about those?

So what's my point? I don't exactly know. The Word specifically tells us that God will supply all of our needs... but I don't know that it says He will supply everything we want. I would never withhold food or clothing or shelter or love from my child, but I might withhold candy or a toy in certain situations. Maybe God, as our loving Father, works things out in a similar way. Maybe there's some sort of God-logic to when He answers "want" prayers. But I guess it doesn't hurt to ask, right? "You have not because you ask not" it says!

(I don't really want to be president of the moon, though.)

Flesh or Spirit?

Yesterday I finished a book called Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp. As I read it I kept tripping over things that I didn't particularly agree with, and sometimes I think Pastor Tripp contradicts himself in trivial ways, but by the end of the book I think I understood what he was driving at. Basically, by "shepherding" your children, you train them, over the course of their childhood, not just to "do what is right" but to do it the right way... to do it from their hearts, by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by willpower or whatever. Children are fallen beings, the book reminds us, like we all are, and cannot obey "the law" (Moses' law or Mommy & Daddy's law, it doesn't matter) by works of the flesh.

It's that "like we all are" part that sort of stuck with me. What about me? How often do I do the right thing because of my own willpower, or the knowledge that I'll get in trouble or get arrested or get fired if I do the wrong things, or because someone will get mad and yell at me, or...? Do we forgive others because God's nature rises up in us, or so that the fight will be over and we can go back to normal life? Do we resist chewing out that rude stranger in the grocery store because God helps us to have self-control, or because we don't want to make a scene or because we are afraid of reprisals by that stranger? I've begun to think that most well-adjusted, law-abiding adults act that way because they know that they have to or else there will be unwanted consequences. I want to train both my children and myself to live and act by the Spirit of God inside us as often as possible, and to do the right thing by fleshly means as seldom as possible.