Train in Morality

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

--Paul of Tarsus in a letter to the Christian Church at Ephesus

Sometimes as a father I feel the burden to prepare my kids for the ‘real world’. Usually this line of reasoning takes me into some moral gray zone where I start trying to justify lying or fighting or some other such thing. The truth is, God has given us righteousness as a breastplate and faith as shield to protect us from whatever may come at us in the ‘real world’.

If a child is trained from birth to know x, y, and z are wrong and that a, b, and c are right, he will remember these rules all his life. Even when he is of a rebellious age, it will be very clear what he is rebelling against and in what direction he must go to defy these rules.

If, instead, a child is given no guidance, if he is told not to talk about certain things like sin and morality because he may offend some people (usually those people who practice sin and prefer immorality for some reason), if he is taught that a thing is sometimes wrong and sometimes right, he will be lost. He will have no touchstone by which to test his choices.

Such a child is not beyond hope by any means. Every man is born with a conscience. But it is harder to find studs in a wall with a stud finder than it is to mark them while the sheetrock is off and they are plain to see.

What happens when you bring the stud finder to a wall so difficult to penetrate that it becomes unreliable? How then do you choose where to drive the nail? Eventually, things descend into a guessing game where nail after nail is driven until finally something solid is struck. This exercise leaves the laborer exhausted and the wall devastated. How much more do we see exhaustion and devastation as the results of thrashing around in moral ambiguity, trying every likely possibility and retrying when those fail.

Contrast that with the man who knows where to find the studs under the plaster. He knows because the one who built the house has shown him exactly where each one is. Such a man will not, if he is wise, waste energy where there is nothing solid to strike. Again, so it is in life. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.

We do our children no good service when we fail to mark the boundaries between good and evil. This is the purpose of morality. It is not only to please God, which it does, but to shelter us from the storms of this fallen world. It is to keep us safe, whole and in our right mind until our savior can rescue us.

Father’s do not forget to pass on these lessons along with all the other gifts you give. Do not fail to preserve your own integrity. Keep it. Protect it. It is a sacred trust intended for generations yet unseen. May it pass through our hands unharmed.

Daddy.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a family. Wanting such a thing is like wanting to get married. All you know is what you see other people doing and you want what they have. You don't know how hard it can be even thought they tell you it's hard. You don't understand how great it can be, even though you can see it in their faces.

When we got married, I felt like I was coming alive all over again. It was like something that had been missing so long I'd forgotten about it was suddenly back. When we had our first born, the feeling returned. Something I didn't even realize was gone had returned to me.

Since then we've rounded out the fold to four children, wild and wonderful. Each of them is so different, but so intricately connected to each other. I wonder if I'll ever really know them or if I only just see the things they show me. A few days ago, that first born, the one that changed my life forever, lost a tooth. I came home from work and that tiny bit of sharp enamel was sitting on the desk. This one is the benchmark, the child by whom I mark my years as a father, and now he smiles with a gap in his lower row. I think, my God, it's going too fast. Mommy says it out loud so I don't have to, so I can just be strong and proud of him for being older.

He smiles a lot now, too. There was time when he didn't. Families are organic.They grow and change, usually for the better. It's hard sometimes, changing. Sometimes it's too hard. Maybe we were just being selfish, but I couldn't let them go. I decided to teach them myself rather than let them leave me for a faculty of strangers every day. We learn together, reading books, learning about science and history and everything. We go to the park. We go to the library. We build, laugh, learn and love. And I'm there. I can see it all. If they figure something out for the first time, I don't have to wait for them to tell me or to bring home a test paper a week later. I saw the moment they understood.

I play with them. Not as much as I should, but as much as I can. They delight in play. I am a hero. I have the golden touch of play. Whatever I want to play with them becomes the best game in the world. Frisbee, Catch, Lego, it doesn't matter. If nobody wants to color with the little one, I can. If I do, they all will. Suddenly coloring in a coloring book becomes great entertainment. They all show me what they've colored. I look and laugh and notice all the right details and they swell with pride. They won't remember this as an adult, but they'll remember I always loved them.

I got called a lot of names as a kid. Most slid off without hurting but not all. But now I get called something that is as commanding as it is respectful. It is a higher calling that's common as dirt. From the lips of my children it can be the most endearing term of affection. They call me Daddy.

Vivid Technicolor Life

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
--Jesus of Nazareth, circa 30AD

When I was a kid, I loved to color in coloring books. For school you only had to have a box of eight or sixteen colors. Sixteen colors just didn't seem adequate. It didn't come close to capturing the  spectrum of possibilities a blank page presented. What if a sky was Slate or Periwinkle? What if a superhero had a Carrot-colored costume instead of the usual Orange? What I needed was one of those huge boxes with the crayon sharpener in the back. You know the one. It had metallic colors like Copper and Gold. It took two hands to lift and an hour to clean up if you dumped them out. If you had one of these bad boys on the shelf you were cool. People wanted to color at your house. You had options.

Kids get it. They want their pictures to be vibrant, vivid, vivacious. They want their picture to be noticed. By everyone. They ever met. Including that total stranger in the grocery store who desperately wants to pay for his milk and frozen waffles and go home.

We can learn something here. Do we, as adults, still want our pictures to get noticed? Don't we sometimes paint with a blander brush in the hope that no one will stop and look and maybe ask questions about our picture? Don't we limit our life to a box of eight crayons?

I think so. I think in this age of moral gray areas and religious blending, all the colors are starting to look alike. Spin the dial on your radio. Even the music starts to sound the same. Country sounds like rock sounds like jazz sounds like... You get the point. In art class, they taught me that when you mix two primary colors together, you get another color. If you mix all the colors together, you get a muddy brown that doesn't really look like any color at all. We're getting there.

I don't really want that. I don't want to be washed-out, muddy and inconspicuous. I want the big box of crayons. I want that vivid, technicolor life. Remember technicolor? When Dorothy stepped into Oz she saw a place painted in bright colors populated by equally, colorful characters. In the movie, Oz is in bold contrast to the drab Kansas (shown in black and white) from which she comes.

Our world isn't the paradise it was created to be anymore. There are things out there to be afraid of. But God doesn't really want us to be afraid. He really wants us to come to his house and draw a few pictures. After all, he does have the big box with all the colors and the sharpener in the back. And he'd like to share them with you.