TIME

First of all let me state clearly that today's lesson is not about judging anyone. At the same time whether we realize it, or not, many of you have been given a gift.  You've been given an excuse to shelter in place with your family.  Someday in the future, we’ll look back at this time of upheaval, and make an accounting of whether we did it well or not. It’s easy to look at our lives from the confines of our tiny homes, and forget that others just like us are going through the same thing. We won’t know for a long time what we did to our children until they become adults.  The Wuhan Chinese Coronavirus has forever changed the course of the world in ways we would have never envisioned less than a month ago.  How this relates to us, and this study into fatherhood depends upon what you have done during this time of self imposed isolation.  Like our parents before us, and their parents before them, this is our watershed moment.  

Much of what I was going to share with you in this lesson has been altered by the pandemic. Whether you’ve been isolated, working, or simply practicing social distancing, your children have been unwilling participants in this process. That is true of life whether there is a pandemic or not.  Your children didn’t ask to be brought into YOUR world. Truth be told, we all make the best of whatever our family situation is.  The problem is when you are thrown into a situation like we’re experiencing today, what you do and say will have a big effect on your children.  How are you handling this?  Are you angry, frustrated, scared, and worried?  Are you calm, confident, even tempered, and patient?  Be ready to share your honest appraisal Sunday morning.  For your information, a survey was done about a week ago that determined that 9 out of 10 children are happy to have their parents at home during this pandemic.  At the same time, another survey found that parents aren’t so happy.  Time for a little honesty on our parts.  I’ll start with myself, and since my children are all raised, I’ll have to reach back in time before the world changed.

I was not a good father under stress. Actually I don’t even judge myself to be a good father.  My children are wonderfully who they are because their mother was a stay at home mom till they were all in school. I was an angry, out of control young man, ruled by my hormones.  Don't get me wrong, I was never violent, but my anger was a seething fire that often fell upon my children's lives in non-violent ways. Nearly 20 years after my last child left home I’ve come to grips with my failures, and with my successes.  Still, I wish I’d have done the fatherhood thing better.  That is one of the motivations for this study, to empower you to do it better while you can make a difference. You have a tool I didn't have.

Growing up, I didn’t have the benefit of a men’s group that allowed teenage boys into its midst. I wasn’t mentored, or given the same level of involvement from other godly men as you’ve been.  While it would be easy to blame my failures as a father on external factors, the failures were all internal.  Like I’ve told you before, I was not invested in the role of father.  That isn’t easy for me to say, especially in this very public forum. Much of what you’re going to read over the next few weeks is what I learned from my failures, not my successes. 

Right now, during this pandemic, the world is resetting itself.  I don’t know what it is going to look like on the other side, but I can tell you that now is the time for a serious, and truthful discussion of time and fatherhood.  You may not want to hear what I have to say next, but it is the unvarnished truth.  As a new father, my attention was focused more on my wife, succeeding at my job, being a youth pastor, keeping our cars running, and a myriad of other things that made my attempts at fatherhood less than successful.  I would be willing to guess that many of you were the same way.  Simply put, I didn’t give enough time to my children. 

Throughout the upcoming couple of lessons you will hear the mantra of time.  Every aspect of being a good father is based upon making time to be a good father.  In retrospect, it was the one thing I can say I didn’t give enough of.  I’ve apologized to my children, but that doesn’t make up for what they didn’t get. Of all the things we can replace in this life, time is the one thing you can’t reclaim.  You can redeem what time you have left, but there is no way to GO BACK.  Their innocence, wonder, and joyful essence happens only once.  Dear God in heaven I hope you don’t squander it.  More than anything, I hope you are documenting this time together with pictures, videos, and even letters.  That is why I enjoy watching all of you raise your children, and why I enjoy your children.  

  

Don’t get me wrong, I was thankful for my children, but I wasn’t as focused on them as I should have been.  I always thought just being a good person would make me a good father.  Not true!  Earning money, being a husband, and fulfilling our duties as a Christian can press deeply into our efforts to be a father.  Fit in a few hobbies, or distractions, and the amount of time you have with your child is deeply limited.  Put the mother of your child into that mix, and someone is going to feel slighted.  I’m going to press all of you full grown men to look back into your childhood, and remember that one thing you wanted from your father more than anything was his time, and attention.  I wasn’t the best son, nor am I the best husband or father in the world. What I’ve learned over the years is that being a good parent involves planning, purpose, and patience, but most of all simply 'time'. 

I’ve told you before about the arrangement  Glenda, and I made was that she would stay at home and raise the children till they were in school, and I would focus on them as teenagers.  It worked, but as I look back, it was a stupid plan.  Don’t get me wrong, I was there when they were babies, and toddlers, but I was more of the discipline guy.  Glenda was the ‘fun’ one who took them places, and did things with them. If you could see our photo albums, I was the one taking the pictures. I was on the outside looking in.  In other words, I was the missing father.  In my own estimation, as I evaluate my parenting skills against what I told myself I would do, it was one big fail. I failed them in the early years, and I failed them in their teenage years.  Like I’ve said in a previous lesson, I had to  ‘Embrace the fail.’   I didn’t fail against other fathers, I failed to accomplish what I told myself I would never do, or what I wanted to do.

Trust me, you will fail as a parent, but there are things you can do that will prepare them for their failures in their future, and that is the purpose of all parenting. Almost all of my failures as a parent were the result of a lack of time given to the task of parenting. Thankfully, if we have to be absentee fathers, our partners can help us make up for the lack of time, or at least help the child to understand why their father is absent.  There was a time when I was working two jobs just to be able to afford our home, so that Glenda didn’t have to work while the children were little.  It was super important to me that she stay at home for them. Then when I went into the Air Force, the demands on my time became even worse.  Twelve hour shifts six and seven days a week, left very little time for my family.  While the ‘job security’ was awesome, the ability to be a father was less than optimal.  The one time that I complained about it, I was told that if the Air Force had wanted me to have a family they would have issued me one.  When I explained that I’d come into the Air Force with a family, the same individual questioned my intelligence.  Later, I would understand the idea that an employer has a need to make money, and do his job without the pressure of whining employees.  Something other than the Air Force would have to change in order to give more time to my kids.  I never made that choice.

So, I’m going to ask you; What are you doing different during this pandemic?  How much time are you spending with your children?  Do you find yourself looking for ways to play with them, or are you simply enduring them until we get the all clear to go back to work?  There are a ton of articles about how parents are coping right now with children being at home all day.  My simple question for more discussion is; Do you kind of wish things could go on like they are, are are you ready to escape back to work?

  

I don't know how my Dad would have handled this pandemic when I was a kid. I can look back at my own childhood with a different set of eyes now.  What I believed about my father’s lack of attention wasn’t true.  I know now that he was doing his best to provide the best he could.  His generation had endured a terrifying world war, Korea, Vietnam, and the threat of nuclear war.  The values of his generation were different than mine.  As our culture is changing at breakneck speed, his generation ‘appears’ to be archaic to the point of being ignorant.  This is the nature of fatherhood through time.  Each generation should leave the next with more wisdom and knowledge than they had.  Which, in large part, is why this study is important.  It is time for Christian families to focus on the next generation.   My confession, my failure, was failing to give my children the one thing I longed for; TIME!   Take advantage of this ‘time’ of forced isolation, and discover your children.