This is the next verb in the Triad: Help Teach Protect. The verb of focus today is "teach". We need to teach our children how powerful they are to teach others. So, as we think especially about our boys and how to channel their energy, we want to avoid suffocating their power and instead redirect their power with positive foci. So our family motto is Help, Teach Protect. Let's consider ways to teach our children to teach others and themselves well.
Teach him...
...to create.
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| Photo by Ethan Hu on Unsplash |
Consider relationships, music, and art in various media like movies, books, youtube, and traditional tv shows and in real life. Who are you close to? Who’s music inspires you? Whose art do you love to enjoy? John Eldredge offers a quote from an ancient culture that is along the lines of, “Don’t give a man a sword until he can dance.” How many boys have been told that being artsy is “girly”, or worse? Yet, how many of your favorite artists and musicians are men? Let's help our children understand what all those credits at the end of a movie mean, and what those people did. Let's talk about why some shows seem cheesy due to poor acting or poor editing, then try to create a short video with your kids to communicate something important. If the heart of the message is goodness, truth, or beauty, it will be hard to do it justice and be satisfied with what you have created. It is easy to slap a video on the internet, but to create a truly beautiful video, relationship, or song takes a long time. Goodness, truth, and beauty in relationships and art are not easy and are not everywhere. They are difficult and rare finds.
Why don’t men and boys create more often, with more skill, and over longer periods of time? Here’s a couple of forces acting on our creative lives to kill, steal, and destroy our creativity.
Quantity of content and cheap art: with the “easy everywhere” (read Andy Crouch's book, The Tech-Wise Family) ethos of the internet, all art is visually accessible to anyone who’s online. Films are more accessible from your couch than ever before. Streaming music makes all music a bit cheaper even as it makes beautiful music more available than it has ever been. When I was a kid, songs came on tapes or CDs with cover art, credits, and foldable inserts with lots of lyrics and information about who contributed to producing the song. Now, many ways we consume music, for example, give very little information other than artist, album, song, and sometimes lyrics.Hard work is not valued like it was even 40 years ago. The age of apps and touchscreens and the “easy everywhere” culture we live in now has made struggle and effort so incredibly grotesque, unfamiliar, and agonizing that virtually no one wants to get near it. The phrase, “The struggle is real” is a meme caption and usually is applied to silly things that highlight how little we want to work for results.
...to offer.
To offer is the opposite of to steal, the antithesis of lazy, aloof behavior. To lean in, with heart, and to offer something great or small, with true love is now exceptional. But it should not be uncommon. Jesus taught that the Samaritan acted as a simple neighbor… he offered the man left for dead a room to heal in, care, and touch like a nurse’s. How does that jive with manhood as portrayed in modern sitcoms? In our upbringing? In our families? Sadly, the Samaritan in Jesus's story puts us to shame. Finally, the very heart of God is to offer, but we usually smack his hand away or avert our gaze as the next text, notification, or “like” that washes over us, or we reach for the snooze button.
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| Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash |
As we offer, we need to reflect on our consistency, our depth, and our love. If we expect in return, that is not an offer, that is an exchange. That’s paying for candy, a trade. God is not transactional, and nor should we be. God makes an offer, knowing that we will most often fail to hold up our end. An offering is not dependent on the recipient's reaction. It is an offer, held in our open hand. It can be snatched, gently removed, or looked at briefly and dismissed as too small, too much, too boring, too whatever. I don’t like working hard on dinner for my wife to hear her say I burned the chicken. I hate it when my boys turn their nose up at my offering, of time, dad’s attempt at dinner, or a Christmas gift I thought they might enjoy. I call folks and say I’m just calling to say “hi,” but my heart longs for them to call me back. I post on social media and I return to look for how many positive comments it has generated (that’s why I’m very careful on social media about the quantity of time I spend and try to remain focused on my goals for using it). Transactional relationships are simply easy and they are not truly offering, they are trading. To be in a transactional relationship is to need someone, not to love them. Ed Welch has written a phenomenal book about loving vs. needing called When People are Big and God Is Small. Really we focus on offering to avoid a bait and switch of the heart that is transactional-- you read my posts, become part of my following, and I get a puffy ego and self-importance, along with the hit of dopamine that goes with seeing you like my offering. Boys need to be taught what it is to offer, to be generous and cunning, knowing that many will reject our kindness and generosity. We need to teach our kids to count the cost and love knowing it won't be returned as we expect. Jesus offered so much so often in his earthly life. Our children need to work through the feelings of having their offer accepted and the feelings of others’ refusal and persevere (see the Help them to persevere in part 1) this is truly a journey of hard work, not a place to arrive and take it easy. Why not teach our children to offer early in life? Likely precisely because it is hard, and we ourselves have too little experience in offering simply because we love, and require no response from the other. Whew, to do that is to be holy! Let's be holy and different, self-satisfied that we are simply offering what we can as best we can.
Let's stop there and do a Part 2!
More blog content Mondays and Wednesdays, new podcasts Fridays. Follow @maninmanyroles on Twitter. Subscribe to email notifications using the button at the top of this page. Please comment below what was helpful to you. I will do my best to inspire you to live as a great father in many roles.
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