17 Jun Happy Father’s Day

Hi all, and Happy Father’s Day weekend to you.

Being a dad is a big deal, and it comes with massive responsibility and, quite literally, God-sized expectations.

As a pastor, I have heard countless times something along these lines:

“I never knew my father/my father was never there for me/my father abandoned my family…and that’s why I struggle to believe in God or that He is really there for me.”

And, I have often (thankfully) heard just the opposite:

“I know God cares for me because I saw my own father care for me.”

What’s parenting really all about? It’s all about connecting with your child’s heart.

So, in honor of Father’s Day, here are three ways you, as a parent, can connect with your child’s heart (or anyone’s heart, for that matter!)

1. Prioritize your child’s heart

There are a million ways this is expressed:

When children are babies, it looks like you doing the holding and the cleaning and the feeding and the burping and the bathing. That’s pretty much it.

In Pre-K and early elementary it looks like you getting down on the floor and engaging them in their interests—I have lost count of the epic Lego battles and Star Wars battles and car races I have been a part in. And when I am doing that, I am teaching them how to play fairly, what’s right and wrong, and in general I am literally down on their level.

But one way in particular this looks like for me as they’ve gotten older is just asking them, “How are you and I doing? How is your heart towards Daddy? Anything you’d like to talk about? Anything I could do better as a dad for you?”

About the only way you can fail at this one is to do what we have heard expressed in regret by many parents, and it’s this: Don’t ask about your child’s heart at all. Just make them do the whatever it is you think they are supposed to do, no questions asked—without any opportunity to talk about why their heart is funky about it.

Listen, when you just begin to ask those questions—how is your heart toward me? How do you feel my heart is toward you? You may not get an answer right away. It may be just, “Nothing. I’m good.” Or, “We’re fine”. And great—but what you are doing is opening up channels of communication and a feeling of safety with your children that is like oxygen in your relationship.

So ask the question consistently, “How are we doing? Anything you’d like to talk about?” And then, when something comes up…listen carefully.

2. Be vulnerable yourself

How many of you ever heard your parent(s) ever apologize for some way in which they harmed you growing up? If you did, you were one of the lucky ones. Most parents of my generation and certainly parents of the previous generation saw authority figures as people who were beyond questioning. This is a cultural and generational perspective on parenting and leadership, and it’s not necessarily Biblical.

Let me ask you, is God beyond questioning? If you think he is, it just shows, you’ve never read the Psalms or the book of Job.

“Where are you, God? Why is this happening to me? Why is this happening? Why are the bad guys winning and the good guys losing? Why have my friends left me?” These are questions asked of God by his children—in the Bible.

If God is not above being questioned, then neither are you as a parent. Now, God doesn’t always give the answers that people like, and sometimes he doesn’t answer at all in the moment, but the Bible never shows Him being angry at being questioned or having doubt expressed towards him.

As a case study, think about Thomas in the upper room after the resurrection. What did Thomas say? Unless I put my hands in his side and touch his scars, I won’t believe.

And what did Jesus do? Did he say, “Well, dude, tough luck! I’ve been with you all these years, I actually predicted I would rise, what’s your problem?” No, what did Jesus do? He showed him his scars.

And what was Thomas’ response?

It was worship. “My Lord and My God”, he said. And Thomas carried the Gospel to India.

Show your children your scars.

There are two ways to do this:

a. Tell stories of your flaws and failures.

One of the ways we construct a false picture of reality for our kids is when we only tell them stories of our successes and perfection, such as:

“When I was your age, I used to ______________. “

“I was the fill-in-the-blank awesome all-star of little league. What’s wrong with you?”

“I was the perfect student.”

First of all, no you weren’t. Personally, I had massive success in sports for many years, and when I think carefully about it, I realize I made lots of mistakes. I tend to want to remember and tell the story about the game winning hit I got, instead of the time I made the last out or made the error or gave up the hit that cost us the game.

And if we’re not careful, we can build up a mythic status in our kids’ lives that makes us appear perfect, which will cause them all the more to struggle when they 1.) can’t do it just like we did in our stories 2.) learn that their mom and dad aren’t perfect either.

We tell both funny and serious stories of times we blew it and did the wrong thing.

I tell them my testimony all the time. I say things like, “Before daddy was a Christian, he used to” to let them know I wasn’t always following Jesus, and I’ll say, “Even since I became a Christian, these things have been hard for me.”

And above all else, we say constantly, “This is why our hearts need a Savior, because we can’t save ourselves.”

b. Apologize

Sometimes, your child will not even know what’s going on. They may not even realize that you needed to apologize, but when you come to them and say, “I’m sorry for getting angry with you. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry for how it made you feel—and you don’t offer excuses like, “Daddy had a hard day” or “What you did was really wrong”—when you do that, you just won the gold medal in the Olympic 100 meter dash of parenting. You have no idea what kind of grace-based seed of connectivity you just planted in their heart.

3. Let your child’s identity be his own

How many of you had parents who tried to make you just like them?

How many of you had parents who tried to live their lives through you?

How many of you liked it?

Exactly.

Because some of my children play sports, I get a firsthand look at good parents gone bad on the fields and courts of Central Texas.

A quick story to illustrate the point:

Earlier in the year at Spring Baseball tryouts, I was walking to the fields, and I was passing a car where a junior high boy and his father were getting in their car, and it wasn’t good. What I gathered was that the boy had gone up to the moment of the tryout and then couldn’t and wouldn’t go through with it, and the father was literally cursing the boy for not doing it.

I walked past, then heard the cursing continue, then decided I couldn’t take it anymore, then walked back to the car, tried to flex a little bit and puff my body up and got up right next to the car, about 2 feet from the guy, looked at him, then looked at the boy in the car, and asked him in a firm voice, “Everything ok here? You guys need any help?” And he quickly calmed down and said, “We’re fine”, but you could tell by the absolutely frightened look on that boy’s face, he was not fine.

What was going on? Likely, the dad was feeling ashamed that either his boy wasn’t that good and couldn’t play baseball, or that his son was too scared to go through with the tryout.

Either way, the father was experiencing a loss of identity in that moment, and people tend to use anger as an emotional means of recovery. When something is lost—your money, your time, your reputation—you get angry to try to get back what has either been taken from you or you have lost yourself. Either way, what was happening in that moment was damaging to the boy.

God has made each of us to be…us, and part of the way we love our children, and each other, is to love the “us” that God has made.

I hope you can say amen to that.

I’ll see you this Sunday as we continue in our “Love Where You Live” series, and as we continue to look to “shalom” the city through our Love Where You Live Projects!

Morgan