This afternoon I just watched the movie 10,000BC. I know, I know, it’s not the stuff of War and Peace and it’s not likely to win an Oscar.  But hey, it’s my kind of movie, the good guys win, bad guys lose and in the end, the guy gets the girl.  As the story goes, a young hunter from a small tribe is raised up to lead his people, and several other tribes against a cruel tribe that has been capturing and enslaving the other tribes.  This young man’s father was a tribal leader but left the tribe when the young hunter was just a boy.  Rumor was that the father was a coward and had abandoned his tribe. In truth however he was a great leader and left for noble reasons.  Throughout this young warrior’s life, he was limited, even cursed by the image he held of his father.  When the young man came to discover the truth about his dad, that his dad was in fact a noble warrior and leader, the young man was empowered.  There was a great line in the movie where an older tribal leader looked the young man in the eye and said, “Go be like your father!”

See, even the movie makers seem to understand the power of a father image.  Psychologists, counselors and therapists certainly understand this…heck they make their living off of people who struggle with their own self-image due to the absence of a father or perhaps the presence of a dad growing up that wasn’t there emotionally.  Fathers make or break their sons and daughters.  At least that is far too often the case.  Yet the culture wants to play down the incredible importance of a strong father who is actively involved in his children’s life.  No offense to Rosie O’Donnell and other celebs who decide to raise a child without a dad in the picture.  But kids need a dad.  Certainly there are millions of single moms out there who would give anything to have a dad active in their children’s lives. Our hats and hearts go out to them.  But I’m not writing to those who don’t have a dad in the picture as if to somehow make them feel bad.  God says He will be a Father to the fatherless.  No, I’m writing to dads…as a reminder that you have this amazing opportunity to have that significant, meaningful life you so desire.  It doesn’t come from how much money you make or how many people you have reporting to you…It comes from you being there for your kids.  It comes from you not giving up on yourself or them.  It comes from you being consistent in loving your sons and daughters not just when they bring home “A’s” but when they’re sassy or wreck the family car or fail to pick up their room or strike out even in T-Ball.  So go ahead, be the kind of man, the kind of father that people will want to turn to your children and say, “Be like your father.”

There’s an amazing story from the book of Numbers, which is the fourth of 66 books that comprise the Bible.  In it the children of Israel were murmuring and complaining and the Lord decided He’d had enough and was going to wipe out this ungrateful and stubborn people.  As a plague began to spread, Moses, the leader of the band of people instructed his chief priest Aaron to go out into the middle of the people and make a sacrifice to the Lord.  There, in the midst of this race of people, where Aaron took his stand, the plague ceased.  Aaron literally stood between the living and the dead that day.  All who were before Aaron in the throng of people died, over 14,000 of them.  All who came after Aaron were spared. 

Why do I share this story?.  Because I am aware that many of us as parents, especially dads, have the same opportunity to stand between the living and the dead.  Recently I’ve had conversations with a couple different men, friends of mine, who were raised by alcoholic, abusive men.  Their dads were just not so great at being a good role model and showing their own sons what it means to be a man of honor, strength, character and worth.  In fact these men, not only had less than ideal dads, turns out that before them, were generations of fathers who instead of passing on traditions of love, acceptance, forgiveness, passed on their own hurt, fears, inadequacies and insecurities. The abuse and neglect went back several generations.  So what did these friends of mine do?  Somewhere along the journey of their life, they made a choice to be like Aaron and stand between the living and the dead.  They chose to say, “I will break the curse, the tradition of failure that I inherited.  And I will begin a new tradition, a tradition of blessing my children, of loving them unconditionally and honoring their worth.”  Wow!  Maybe you are a dad (or mom) who was not raised by Ozzie and Harriet.  Your own childhood was marred and scarred by a less than ideal parent.  So what will you do with that loss and pain?  Will you pass it on?  Why not?  Society expects you to.  I mean, nobody would blame you for being a dysfunctional parent knowing the dysfunctional childhood you experienced.  But thank God that with His help, each of us can make a choice.  Each of us can choose to break the generational curse of abuse and neglect and choose to live our lives as an offering to God, standing between the living and the dead, so that our children, and their children, and their children’s children, can inherit a heritage of blessing, love, acceptance, forgiveness and joy.

We live in a culture that’s changing at such a rapid pace that emotionally, I’m not sure we are keeping up.  More and more, it’s a throw-away society.  For example, I found out my stereo receiver, which I just bought a few years ago, is, according to my friend, already “old school” technology.  Geeez. 

What has this got to do with parenting you ask?  I am constantly amazed at how important creating and keeping family traditions are to our kids.  This morning I was having coffee with a friend at McDonalds.  I noticed a dad having breakfast with his son.  It occurred to me that if that dad has breakfast with his son on any kind of a regular basis, he is creating a powerful tradition that will be more meaningful and helpful to that young boy than that father could possibly realize.

Our kids long for and need consistency in their lives.  It’s an insecure, unreliable world in which we live.  So anything we can do as busy moms and dads to create traditions, memories that our unique to our children’s experience, well that’s powerful stuff.

Over 15 years ago I started a tradition where on Christmas Eve, I would make a tunnel out of cardboard boxes that meandered through the house and ended up in front of the Christmas tree.  On Christmas morning the boys would wake up and couldn’t go downstairs to open presents until I gave the all-clear signal.  They had to go through the tunnel to get to the tree.  It seemed like a fun idea initially.  But being a guy, every year the tunnel has to somehow “outdo” last year’s monstrosity.  This year the tunnel started out of the upstairs bathroom window, down a box-covered  extension ladder, into the back of my oldest son’s Avalanche, around the car, through the garage, past trap-doors and “decoy” tunnels that lead to nowhere, down the back hall, nothing but net…to the Christmas tree.  Close to 200 boxes and several hours after the start of the project, the tunnel is complete.  Now understand that I have one son out of college, one in college and the youngest is a junior in high school.  It’s not like the tunnel is a kid-project any more.  But none of my sons want to give up the tunnel creating event.  Why?  It’s a tradition at our house.  It’s something that we share together as a family that nobody else (that we know of) does.  Therefore it’s a powerful communicator of my love to my sons, that they are special and that we have something special we share between us.  It’s a tradition.

So what traditions can you start?  It doesn’t have to be as complex as building a Christmas even box tunnel.  It can be as simple as Saturday morning breakfast with your child at McDonalds.  Don’t discount the importance of making memories, anchored in love through simple traditions you keep with your kids. 

I was speaking at a conference last week and ran into a good friend of mine, Jean Thomason.  Jean has a particular passion to see parents of preschoolers get the tools they need to effectively raise their little ones.  Jean has a delightful character she portrays on a series of CD’s and DVD’s called “Miss Pattycake”.  Jean and I were talking and she began to share with me the story of a distraught mom whose child was not sleeping through the night.  The little girl kept waking up with bad dreams.  It’s not an uncommon situation.  My friend shared with the mom, “You know, there is more than one way to reach a child.”  Curious, the frantic mom asked what she meant.  Jean proceeded to share with her the importance of not only reaching and instructing a child through their mind, their intellect, but also their spirits.  Most often we think about impacting a child by training their minds.  The success of Baby Einstein products gives testimony to the eagerness that most parents have to want to educate their children well, to prepare them to succeed in life and reach their potential.  Nothing wrong with this of course. However, one of the amazing things about being made in the image of God, which is something unique to human beings, is that there’s more to us that mere flesh and bone.  Beyond synaptic nerve endings and electrical stimuli, there is a mystical, magical aspect to our nature.  Call it our soul, call it our spirit.  Whatever you call it, it’s the part of us that was made to connect with the divine. It’s what makes us truly human.  An just as our bodies need to grow and be exercised, our minds need to be challenged and trained, so does our spirit.  Anyway, my friend Jean gave this woman one of her lullaby CD’s that she recorded specifically to provide children with a way to encourage their spirits and to draw them closer to the One who is Spirit and who divinely created each of us.  Long story short, the woman e-mailed Jean a short while later exclaiming how her daughter hasn’t had a nightmare since and has been sleeping soundly through the night.  In training our children, be aware of the importance of training not just their minds but their spirits as well. 

This past weekend I attended a memorial service for a long-time friend.  The guy was a legend, a pioneer and of the course of his life had amassed a slew of awards, accomplishments and accolades.  I was impressed and if I’m honest, felt like perhaps I wasn’t living up to my potential to be all that I could be.  The competitive nature in me kicks in pretty easily.  Whenever I meet someone who is accomplishing great stuff, it challenges me to ask, am I doing all that I can?  Yet, amidst the service, which was very moving I thought, at least as memorial services go, there was something sad that I noticed.  It seemed to me that the man’s children who were at the service (and not all of them even bothered to come), didn’t see to share in everyone else’s celebration of his life.  I’d like to think it was their grappling with their own sense of loss and grief that held these grown children back.  But I don’t think that was it.

As noble and visionary as my friend was, he wasn’t perfect.  And who is?  But throughout much of his younger days, while he was working, pioneering and conquering, he was away from home and probably not investing in the lives of his own children like he could have.  If he were alive today, I think he’d tell you this was probably his greatest regret.  In First Corinthians 13, known as the “love chapter” it says that if I do all these great things, give away lots of money, help lots of people but have not love, I am nothing but a noisy gong or a tinkling cymbal.  Well the parenting corollary to those verses would read something like this: “If I amass a great fortune, and become famous for my contributions to society, if I start ministries and help the homeless, but don’t invest the necessary time and attention in my own children, well, I’ve sacrificed my highest calling on the altar of fame and success.  I am nothing.”  God’s design for us is to embrace our role as His children, receive His love and then pass that love on to and in to our own children.  Start there.  Accomplish that and everything else that you achieve in life is just a bonus!

I’m not sure I know the answer to this question but there must be something.  The other day I was speaking to a new acquaintance who spent years as a missionary.  As I typically do, I asked about his family, his kids.  He proceeded to tell me how each one was doing, how they were making their way in the world.  I admit I was jealous.  Each child was living life with a sense of mission and purpose, making a difference in the world.  This is not the first time I’ve talked to a current or former missionary and discovered that not only are their kids well adjusted, they are thriving. So what gives?  You’d think that kids who are yanked from the security of family and friends and carted off to some strange part of the globe would wind up angry, resentful and somewhat a mess.  Now I’m sure there are some children of missionaries who would identify with this.  But in general it seems to me that missionary kids grow up with a real sense of purpose, solid self-image and are, well healthy.

I suspect the answer lies in the simple fact that they grew up in homes (or huts) where they saw their parents living with that sense of mission and purpose and so guess what, they grow up with a similar understanding that they were created by a loving God who has a mission for them.  They live their lives on purpose and for a purpose.  Maybe they don’t have it all figured out…most of us don’t.  But instead of assuming that they are some random being in a random world, they grow up believing that they can accomplish something…that there’s a mission for them to fulfill and they go after it.

Living with that sense of mission in purpose is more caught than taught.  So it begs the question, how do you live your life?  What values are you instilling in your kids, not by what you say, but by how you spend your time, what things you make a priority in life.

These days our kids spend more and more time connecting and communicating on the internet. Between IM (Instant Messaging), E-mails, Text Messaging, FaceBook and MySpace, our kids connect in more ways that we as parents just didn’t have access to when we were kids.  With us it was either face to face or on the phone conversation.  That was it.  But now days, a large percentage of our kid’s conversations from middle school through college transpire in some form or another over the internet.  And since it’s every kid’s mission to divulge as little information to their parents as possible and likewise, it’s every parent’s challenge to find out as much information as possible, if we are to stay “in the know” as proactive moms and dads, we have to become internet sleuths, or in truncated text-speak, IS. 

Why is this important?  Well for example, the other day my son tells me that he was at a party at a friend’s house and assured us that the parents were home.  However, in reviewing some of his internet communications we learned that not only were the parents not home but there was alcohol and smoking going on at the party,  Funny, how that didn’t come out in the typical “So how was the party” recap conversation we had with our son.  By being good internet spies we’ve learned certain code words.  When a kids says he needs a “band-aid” that’s code for AL (alcoholic beverage) and if a kids says he’s going to the “weight room” that’s code for a party.  Of course these codes are not universal and so don’t assume if your child says he’s staying after school to go to the weight room to work out that he’s really heading for trouble.  My point is simply this, that as parents we have a responsibility to pay attention to what’s going on in our children’s lives and to not naively assume that everything they tell us is the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.  All I’m saying is that if you have teenage children in the house, you have a responsibility to be proactive in knowing what’s going on in your son or daughter’s life.  Let them know that being on the internet is a privilege and not a right and you expect them to both be responsible in their actions and communicate with their friends in an honest and proper way.  You should insist on knowing the login password to all their accounts and let them know that you have the right to periodically check their correspondence.  If you find improper language or behavior coming from your son or daughter, don’t stick your head in the sands of denial, deal with it.

First off, I should qualify this rant by reminding you that I am the father of three boys.  I don’t have girls and assume it’s because God either saw me genetically inferior and had pity on me or just likes me better.  Ask any parent of both boys and girls and they will almost unanimously say that boys are easier to raise.  Having said that, I notice a particular syndrome with dads of girls that I don’t quite get.  They seem determined to raise their daughters to be their little princess.  Mind you, I don’t consider this a good thing. What do I mean by raising a “princess”?  Well it’s a female who seems to posses the combined traits of being rather self-absorbed, having a sense of entitlement and appearing totally helpless in most any situation besides navigating her way around a mall. 

How does this happen?  Well it seems to me that this princess syndrome is largely bestowed upon girls by their fathers.  This comes from a well-intentioned desire to take care of and protect their little angel from all danger, distress and harm.  For example, if my son forgets his to pack his lunch as he heads to school, has a flat tire on the way home from soccer practice, gets picked on by a neighborhood hooligan or finds himself in any number of simple life lesson situations, the parent typically takes some version of the “well you got yourself into this, you’ll figure something out” type of response.  But the parent of a princess rushes to her aid every time.  As a result, we see girls set up to fail or be highly frustrated in their dating relationships because, Oh my, not every guy has the understanding that he is to wait on this frail waif hand and foot as her daddy did throughout her growing up years.  Are all females helpless little princesses?  Fortunately no.  And some girls who were raised as princesses manage to grow up into solid, caring mature young women.  But some unfortunately, spend their whole lives in the misguided mindset that the world revolves around them. So parents, and especially dads, if you have a beautiful little cherub who is the center of your world, please don’t handicap them by pampering them to the point that they develop into a “princess”.  I and all the other fathers of boys who may one day fall for your little princess beg you!

I’m reading a wonderful book that was recently recommended to me called “The Shack” by William Young.  It’s a novel about a typical 50-ish man who had a pretty dysfunctional childhood yet managed to come through adulthood in reasonably good shape, married well, had kids.  Then an unthinkable tragedy strikes that sends him into a tailspin.  He winds up having a life-changing encounter with God that’s well, unique.  Anyway, I won’t give up the plot.  But one of many truths I see in this story is how each of us is wounded.  We are damaged goods and our pain causes us to see life and respond to life in certain, unhealthy ways.  The sad fact is that unless we are exceptionally diligent, we bring our pain and dysfunction into our parenting style.  We parent our kids through our pain and as a result, often leave them scarred and hurting as well. 

Most of us would never intentionally hurt our kids.  But unfortunately, in our desire to hold on to our hurts, in our fear of pushing past the pain of old scars into wholeness, we selfishly thrust on our kids all sorts of unhealthy and unholy attributes and perspectives.  Seriously, we have to be willing to unselfishly lay down our hurts, get the prayer, the counseling the comfort and help we need, if not to live better ourselves but to be more effective parents.  I’ll never forget that many years ago when Amy and I announced on Christmas morning that we were going to be parents for the first time, my dad, who up until that time had been a chain smoker, responded by saying that by the time his first grandchild was born, he would have given up smoking.  In other words, the unhealthy habit that he was unwilling to give up for himself, he would willingly choose to lay down for his grandchild.  He wanted to be there for him.  That was unselfish parenting, or in this case, grand parenting.  So what are the weights that tend to hold you back?  Why not make the choice to move past your pain if not for yourself, then for your children.

This morning as I was driving into the office I was on the phone talking to my wife about our son Jason.  I am out of town on business so she was filling me in on the activities at home that I missed.  Last night, coming home from a soccer game, Jason made a passing comment that he was questioning if he was cut out for college.  As a Junior in high school we have started quizzing Jason about what sort of interests and preferences he has about degrees and schools.  As with most boys, Jason doesn’t typically open up and share what he’s really thinking, at least not with his parents.  So whenever we get an insight into something that he’s obviously wrestling with internally, that’s gold.  I made the comment to my wife that I wished Jason would invite me into the questions and issues he wrestles with more easily.  To which my wife commented, “Well, part of the problem is that you’re just not here that much”.  Ouch…didn’t see that one coming.  I quickly protested, but what am I missing? I come to his games, shoot hoops with him on the weekends, watch movies with him. When I am out of town it’s during the week when he’s at school or soccer practice anyway.  She said, “It’s just spending time with him.  It’s the little things, driving him to school in the morning even if he doesn’t say three words.  Honey, you just can’t measure the impact it has when you just spend time with your son.”

I guess it’s like the oil in a car’s engine (see, guys have to relate everything to either cars or sports), The oil doesn’t make the care look any better.  It’s certainly not the most expensive component, but without it, the car just doesn’t run right and will quickly break down.  Spending time with your kids is like that.  It’s not flashy.  They won’t talk about it or praise you for doing it, at least not until they are grown.  You don’t usually see any immediate fruit or results from spending time with your kids.  But fail to do it and watch how quickly the lines of communication and relationship break down.  In raising kids, few things have more enduring and  endearing impact and influence on our children than our commitment to spending TIME with them, lots of it!