THAT, WHAT MAKES YOU A FATHER

At its best, being a father is a gamble. Your genes may be awesome, you may be financially secure, you might have a spiritual pedigree four generations back, but like I said in the last blog, you are making another human being with a mind of its own. The only difference between you and your Heavenly Father is that He knew exactly what His kid was going to do. You don’t have that luxury.  You don't know how your child is going to turn out. You can wish, and hope for the best, pray, prod, plan, and shed huge alligator tears as they make their way through life, but in the end, your little one will make their own life choices. If they turn out okay, you take a deep breath, and thank God they made it. That’s why I wanted everyone to know that when we measure a father by what his child is like we are using the wrong measuring stick. Being a good father is what you are, and can't be measured by whether your children follow you in your faith.  God is a good father, yet his first child rejected him.  What I said last week is a rebuttal of the modern idea of determining a good father.  If we apply that modern day method of measuring successful fatherhood to God and Adam, then you would have to call God a failure. We all know that isn't true. So, I’ll say it again, you are making another human being, not a clone. It's a risk that our own heavenly Father knows all too well.

What makes you a father is that squiggly, wiggly, bundle of joy that keeps you awake at all hours of the night.  Being a father isn’t a job title, or position, it is what you become the minute your little sperm joined with your spouse’s egg.  Ta Da!  Suddenly you join the ranks of the divine.  Yes, you read that right.  Fatherhood is divine.  You just became like God in all of His creative glory, and you didn’t  even plan it.  Or, maybe you did.  I would venture to guess that more than half of all humans born into this world were created in the throes of pleasure without any thought of what would be the consequences.  It’s amazing how such a simple act, that usually requires less than ten minutes of ‘work,’ produces such a complex result.  The bottom line is, you can’t be a father without a child, and once you are a father, you can’t undo it.  It is what it is, and even the death of the child can’t change you from being a father. In sincere humility, let me take a moment to honor those men who choose to adopt a child in order to become a father. No matter what your reasons, the beauty of loving someone else's creation is something I've never experienced.  Sadly, it is easier to abort a child than it is to adopt.  Isn't that a mind-bender?  

For most of us, what began as a super pleasurable moment will produce a mixed bag of moments depending upon how you view it.  If you didn’t plan the little bundle of joy, remember one thing; God saw that precious life at the beginning of time.  There are no unloved, or unplanned children in God’s eyes. Even life conceived out of wedlock is precious.  That little life in your hands will forever be in God’s hands. It amazes me how the argument FOR reproductive choice negates the will of the life within.  We offer more protection to animals than we do for the innocent life of a child within the womb.

Because that life you created is precious in God’s sight, you have to have a serious understanding of what you created in order to be a good father.  God intended fatherhood to be the means of replacing you, and carrying forward the divine.  Just as God wanted children, so to, He wants you to have children.  The problem is; this fleshly container we live in isn't eternal. No matter how hard you work to stay young, you are going to get old, and eventually die.  You will wither like the green grass, and then your body will be returned to the earth.  Thankfully, your child is the continuation of you.  They won’t be a clone of you, but they will carry you forward in them.  This is the biological side of the process.  It is honorable, and yet at the same time, it can be just an act that you casually jump into without regard for the consequences.  The Bible makes it clear that God doesn’t approve of casual sex, because He doesn’t want unwanted people walking the earth.  God created one man, one woman, and then they had children. HE WANTED CHILDREN, and He wanted His children to have children. He commanded them to fill the earth with… more like them. This commandment is easily the most enjoyable commandment God made.  Still it was not His intent for you to be a reproductive butterfly flitting from flower to flower. We would like to think that we are the only generation with a reckless disregard for God’s purpose concerning the reproductive act, but that would not be true. Nothing is new under the sun. It is true though that our ability to stave off, or interrupt the conception process has resulted in many couples living together without the bonds of matrimony.  It has also resulted in a lifestyle of ‘unencumbered sexual relationships’ devoid of emotional bonds.  This not only increases the chances for sexually transmitted diseases, but it also runs the risk of creating an unwanted child.  I remember one young man I counseled while in the Air Force, after he got a young woman pregnant, and she reported it to our commander. The airman brazenly replied that it was her fault for not using contraception, and she should have an abortion.  To add insult to injury he proudly proclaimed that if she was pregnant, it wasn’t his fault because she assured him she was on the pill. Needless to say, it didn’t go well for the young man. 

YOUR CHILD IS NOT YOURS.  Our government affords every citizen certain protections that are codified into our Constitution. The Constitution codifies the lofty hopes and dreams expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Every child has the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to pursue what makes them happy.  The bouncing, jiggly, wiggly, pudgy, baby you take home from the hospital is not your possession.  They are a U.S. citizen just like you.  Under the Constitution, they have the same rights as you. I know we all say “my child,”  but the laws of our land recognize something that very few nations accept.  A child is not property.  You may be ‘legally responsible’ for your child, and as their parent, you are awarded guardianship of them through a Doctor certifying that you are the parents.  However, the State may  take guardianship of your child if you’ve neglected them.  They can assign you custodial rights, or terminate those rights by rewarding adoption to another individual.  Your parental rights do not give you license to murder your child, and you may not inflict severe injury on your child.  In each instance the State has a mandate to ensure the health and well being of a child.  From birth ‘your’ child has the same rights as you. This includes protecting them from abuse at your hand.  

I’m saying all of this because in future lessons I will use the term “your child”, “my child,”  and other terms that appear to denote ownership.  Let me state it again; No parent ‘owns’ a child, and ownership was never a ‘God’ idea. As a quick side note, I still have never understood how a child within the womb of a woman’s body isn’t afforded the same protections given to any other citizen.  How that NEW creation is deemed disposable is a mystery to me.  Maybe someday, we will wake up and realize that we have no right to destroy what we don’t own. 

Within western culture our legal term ‘guardian’ is probably the most accurate description of what a parent is.  It reflects the true nature of what God intended the family unit to be.  As the father, and because of your physical strength, you are the ‘protector’.  This role is to equally protect the mother of the children, as well as protect the child.  This implied role has changed as societies have changed throughout the centuries.  Even in matriarchal societies, the male is still charged with the protector role.  The role of guardian was more important when we were threatened by wild animals, and other clans of humans.  I don’t know how long our present ‘equal’ role of parenting will last, but I suspect if we were to have a global natural disaster that destroyed technology, and industry, the role of protector would be needed again. I don’t hold to Hollywood’s fascination with dystopian futures, and the level of bestiality they portray.  Still, in the absence of a legal presence, I guarantee you every father will default into the ‘protector’ mode our physical strength affords us. 

Physical protection, and provision isn’t the only thing your child needs from you.  Guardianship also implies ‘training’, guidance, and education.  Your child’s success as an adult is greatly affected by the amount of energy you put into them.  This doesn’t apply 100% of the time, but is true enough to warrant our best efforts.  In my lifetime I’ve seen fathers with no high school diploma turn out children with college degrees.  It is because of our great Republic that men and women can step beyond their ‘social class’ and become more than their parents.  There was a day when only the wealthy, or well connected could succeed because only the wealthy had access to higher education.  Thankfully, in our western culture, this isn’t true anymore.  In our great nation, we are not bound by caste, financial status, or even by reason of ancestry.  Your child is free to make a choice about what they believe, and what they will do. 

Over the last couple of months I've tried to lay a foundation for the universal idea of fatherhood while lauding the eternal impact of Christian fatherhood. The nuclear family as WE accept it is an essential element for bringing our children to a knowledge of Christ. Throughout the last century and a half, as Communism, and Socialism has gained traction, the primary resistance to their ideology has come from those who hold a Judeo-Christian viewpoint.  The destruction of religion is a stated goal of Socialists, and in their mind, the 'archaic' nuclear family is the breeding ground of religion. It doesn't take much for someone to realize where the Church should stand.  As we move forward in this study, we’re going to focus more on the role of being a Christian father, and what you can do to steer your child to eternity.  For right now, suffice it to say, without a child, you wouldn’t be a father.  When that child is placed in your arms for the first time, you have the opportunity to affect another generation for good, or worse.  The demands of fatherhood in the first couple of years are mostly to do with endurance, stamina, and creative engineering.  The more children you have, the easier it is to tell what the newborn needs.   Every child needs their parents, and it is up to you to figure out what they need, because when they frustrate you, you can’t put them back.  Once a father, always a father.  Yep, there is another human with your stamp upon them.  Now that the preliminaries are over with, it is time to move on to how to take fatherhood to the next level.