Role of Man

How do you define masculinity?  What does it mean to be a man?

Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church, looks at the first three chapters of Genesis and contends that man is wired to be a builder, a cultivator, and achiever and that this distinctive role informs what it means to be husband and father.

Matt was the voice in my head as I ran this past week.  I have no hesitation in recommending these 3 talks: Defining Masculinity, Role of Man as Husband and Role of Man as Father.

Here are a few of my take-aways:

• God has given man the primary (not sole!) leadership role in the family
• Being there and taking initiative are key
• God is committed to who we are right now as men, not to some future version of who we ought to be
• Where our present situation and practice is less than God’s ideal, that is the place where God’s grace abounds

Six reasons why we put off doing stuff

Procrastination and its sources were addressed by John Maxwell in a recent on-line article. He identified six reasons behind our tendency to avoid taking initiative. I have reworked them into the following summary:

• Lack of enjoyment – we put off what we don’t like
• Lack of competency – if we are no good at it, we move on
• Lack of planning – if it’s not on our “radar”, we don’t do it
• Lack of familiarity – if something is foreign to us, like new technology, we are slow to plug in
• Lack of capacity – we avoid those confrontations and issues that drain us
• Lack of return – if something is going to take a lot of effort and yield little, we pass

I can see all these at play in my life. To start with a simple example, I don’t formally plan to write a post to this blog…so it is easy to push that aside and focus on what is scheduled. Around the house if it is a “repair’ that is new to me, well I can easily think of a bunch of reasons not to tackle it. With parenting teenagers there are times when I don’t enter into a confrontation because I am not sure I have the emotional capacity to handle the issue well.

I believe as men we need to be taking initiative in our homes, in our families and in our marriages. I don’t mean rushing into situations with no head or heart. Being servant leaders to those we love does not mean initiating half-witted, cold-hearted dictums. Yet at the other end, the next time I find myself shrinking back, dithering and dawdling I need to probe what is behind my procrastination and let that prompt my prayers and my next steps.

Green side out!

He talked about his journey toward God, while he moved the cube that his hands held. This way and that way went the cube, as did his journey. Then the moment came and he came alive to God in Christ; the green tiles of the multi-coloured cube were now aligned all on the same side. He turned the green side outward toward us and said that this represented his Christian ‘face’. By looking at the green side, he said, we might think that everything in his life was now together, but…he turned the back side of the cube toward us…there are still facets of his life that are not yet all together. Just like the backside faces of the cube they remained a jumbled array of coloured tiles.

It was an illustration with which I easily identified. I prefer to turn outward those ‘faces’ that are together, but I know that there are aspects of my life which are still being moved into full alignment with God’s purposes. For example, as a father there are too many times that I miss the teachable moment with one of my kids. I fail to build sufficient margin into my world so that I have both time and reserve to enter theirs and speak words of encouragement and gentle correction.

Anyone relate?

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Php 1:6)

Raising boys

Raising boys, that is the topic of this post. I have three and let me say right out of the blocks that I am no expert. I have learned that each of my sons is not like the other: one loves guitar, another basketball and the third politics. So…I am learning…my approach to each one needs to be customized. With that I need help. Maybe you can relate.

An article entitled “How to Fix Boys” caught my attention. It is an interview with Leonard Sax, family physician and research pathologist in Maryland. Here are some quotes that caught my attention:

The six-year-old boy and the six-year-old girl differ from each other much more than an adult man and adult woman do. We all wind up in the same place: there’s very little difference in terms of adult men’s and women’s maturity, ability to sit still, how they learn. But there are huge differences in the ability of the average six-year-old girl and boy to sit still and be quiet.

Policies which ban children from playing with pretend swords or toy guns are not grounded in any research findings demonstrating that those policies accomplish anything good.

If you have such a son, who is very much engaged by competition and mastery, these games [video games] may pose a particular risk. They can be addictive, and I use that term speaking as a medical doctor: literally addictive.

The most startling change between teenage culture today and 30 years ago is the way more and more teenage boys have moved away from the courtship of girls. Online pornography has displaced the pursuit of real girls for a significant number of boys.

Dad has an important role to play, but boys have to see a lot of different men to have a healthy sense of what it means to be a man. They need a community of men, and we don’t provide that.

Look again at the last point. The church needs to be a place where boys find healthy role models. I would love to hear what your church is doing in this regard.

Kids and substance abuse

Substance abuse among our kids, when does it start?  High school?  That is pretty much what I thought, until I read an article that cited a study about drug use among youth in my area.  That study found that 31% of seventh graders had begun to abuse alcohol by the sixth grade!

Time to get my head out of the sand and realize that being intentional about forming my sixth grader’s understanding about alcohol, prescription drugs and street drugs is upon me.

That same article indicated that a positive parent-child relationship plays a key role in drug proofing my kid.  Recently my sixth grader talked me into playing a ‘first-person’ video game along with him.  Seriously, I stink at video games. I am a digital alien who can count the number of hours spent with a joy stick with two hands and still have fingers left over.  But my son looks forward to this “time” together, and I am finally seeing that for me it isn’t about the video game but about building relationship with him.

Finding my way around “The Golden Compass”

In an earlier post I talked about feeling like a “dial-up dad” in a “high-speed” world. One of the things that I struggle with is trying to stay informed about the various media influences that swirl around my kids. The recent release of the movie “The Golden Compass” is an example of that. What is the good, bad and ugly? I need to know because I want to have an answer for my kids before the “buzz” begins. I stumbled upon this excellent review by Al Mohler while sifting through my feeds and thought I would recommend it to you.

A tip for “dial-up” dads

Do you every feel like a “dial-up” dad in a “high-speed” world? I do. Change is constant and can feel overwhelming.

One of the things that I have done to broaden my “bandwidth” is to learn to use a feed aggregator. Simply put an aggregator is a piece of software that enables me to subscribe to various types of web-based content (e.g., news, podcasts, blogs) and brings it together in one place where I can scan, read or save it.

There are a bunch of free aggregators to pick from; I currently am using Google Reader. For sure it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to subscribe to, but now in about 15 minutes I can interact with a wide swath of news, trends and current affairs from my “world” and my kid’s.

What are you doing to up your “bandwidth”? Let the rest of us “dial-up” dads know!

What makes your kids happy?

How happy are the young people in your life? The happiness of American youth (aged 13-24) was the focus of an MTV/Associate Press study. Let me recap some of the findings I found noteworthy.

1. General Happiness – 65 percent of respondents say they are happy with the way things are going in their lives in general and 62 percent think they will be happier in the future than they are now.

2. Parents, Family and Relationships – Parents are seen as an overwhelmingly positive influence in the lives of most young people. Remarkably, nearly half of respondents mention at least one of their parents as a hero.

3. Religion and Spirituality – 80 percent of those who say spirituality is the most important thing in life say they are happy with life in general, compared with 60 percent of those who say that spirituality is not an important part of life at all.

4. Fortune and Fame – 70 percent say they want to be rich – and nearly half think it’s at least somewhat likely they will be someday – but just 29 percent want to be famous. Only 17 percent think they will be famous.

5. Technology – And contrary to popular views of technology as a source of stress, many young people would be more stressed out without technology, with nearly half saying they never turn off their cell phones – even when they’re trying to chill out.

I see some of this in my own kids, particularly regarding technology. Instant messaging, texting and Facebook is their tech-enabled “hanging out”. The means have changed from “back in the day” but not the goal. Do I need to cut them some more slack?

Hey did you read that parents are still considered as heroes by their kids! Could it be we have more influence than we think, more than they might be willing to let on? For me that stat was a little boost to keep on speaking into the lives of my kids…they might secretly appreciate it.

What caught your attention?

Family Supper is…

When it came to having meals together as a family I thought we were doing pretty well. Let’s review. Last night all of us ate together. Sunday night, well my daughter was entertaining friends downstairs, but we all ate the same stuff. Saturday, hmmm — oh yah we were out. Friday, nope again; one was at work and another at a youth thing. Thursday, nope; we were busy at the church. Wednesday, yes! Tuesday, nope; I was traveling. So what is that? 2 out of 7?

Isn’t that pretty good?

It is not according to a study done at Columbia University regarding the importance of family dinners.

The study found that in comparison to families that have frequent family dinners (5 or more per week), those teens that have supper with their families twice or less per week are:

• three and a half times likelier to have abused prescription drugs
• three and a half times likelier to have used an illegal drug other than marijuana or prescription drugs
• one and a half times likelier to have drunk alcohol

The study also reported that:

• 84 percent of teens prefer to have dinner with their families rather than eat alone
• Teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week are more than twice as likely to do poorly in school

I don’t come away from reading these findings thinking that if we just have more meals together as a family that everything will turn out rosy. But the studies have reinforced for me the importance of regularly plugging into my kids’ lives.

What do you take away?

Raising sons to be more than big boys

As a dad I want more for my three sons then that they get bigger, stronger and learn to eat their vegetables. I want them to develop inner strength, character and spiritual maturity. I don’t want them just to be big boys playing at life; I want them to be men of God leading with integrity.

Dave Conklin at Warrior’s Hand posted a list of ten needs of a fourteen year old boy. I have reproduced that here,

1. To climb a mountain and look down from the peak.
2. To sit around a campfire with team mates and good friends.
3. To test his strength and his skills on his very own.
4. To be alone with his own thoughts and with his God.
5. To reach out and find the hand of an adult willing to help.
6. To have a code to live by…easily understood and fair.
7. Play hard for the fun of it…and work hard for the thrill of it.
8. To have a chance to fail…and know why.
9. To have good friends and to be a good friend.
10. To have a hero…and a vision to measure him by.

I love this list. In particular #8 caught my attention. It is tough to see your sons making choices that you know very likely will lead to failure. Tough because you would like to spare them the pain of it. But pain sometimes is the better teacher. So when do you as dad intervene and say, “No you can’t do that”? When do you give advice but give them the freedom to make the final choice even if it leads to failure? And how do you effectively give feedback when failure indeed is the outcome of their choice?

Any thoughts?