Category: Foundations

The boy is…thankful

Silva

Thanksgiving!  Thank God!  It is a simple blessing of God that He would ensure a season of giving thanks remains in our otherwise spiritually-neutered and exhausting annual calendars.  Although the calendar around this time is really busy in my circles, its advent is a blessing.  So much of the year seems like we hold onto this life-raft only with great exertion.  Thanksgiving and Christmas intrude into this bleakness with respites and opportunities to think about other things (mostly).

I wonder if the boys are paying attention?  Boys are not normally thankful.  I know that mom’s and dad’s want to protest that their little charmer is the ONE who is thankful.  I hope it continues.

It won’t.  It won’t last because the boy lives with his parents.  His parents’ lifestyle of consumption will be written on his heart with an iron stylus.  We, parents, consume the resources of life almost without a second thought.  We do, and our children do (dance lessons, Scouts, youth groups, Spanish club, soccer team, choir…).  A kid who lives in a home where mom and dad are treating life as if they own its rights will translate that value to little J.  He will grow up to be a young man who sees life as his storehouse of resources to consume.  I will warn my daughters (and watch my son).

Consumption isn’t our only issue.  Expectations are a close second (if that).  Sure, some parents may pray before meals (which is good), but then live in expectation at every other time.  We expect to be given things, respect, raises, accolades, gifts and vacations.  (This whole financially ruinous season seems to scream lessons at us at this very level.)  What does expectation breed?  If someone asked you to choose an adjective that best describes our culture and you could only choose from “discontent” and “thankful,” which would you choose?

Foolish optimists might choose the latter.  Those who know what they look like in a mirror would choose the former.  I’ve seen discontent as a lifestyle; to some degree I have lived such a life.  We traffic in the sea of discontent riding in the ferry of expectation.  “I was made for so much more….” “I’m bored….” “I wish this tasted better….” “When will it stop raining?….”  We expect to be handed the world on a platter so discontent is easy.  Will that boy look at his aging wife  (my daughter) and be content when she’s beautiful in other-than-physical ways?  Will he live with this “I deserve a sexy and alluring wife” and be like so many I’ve seen who bolt for the door?

  • Will the boy whose families were committed to unbridled consumption learn to be a giver?
  • Will the boy whose parents acted like life owed them learn to serve?

He had better if he wants marry my daughter.

How?  Thanksgiving.  The pathway from the drowning waterfall of consumption is thanksgiving.  He realizes that foremost what he was owed (judgment) is spared by God’s mercy in Jesus Christ.  Then, he learns to look around at all that he has been given and say, “thank you.”  He grows to understand that a life consuming at every turn makes you fat in every way.  But he also recognizes that discontent is creepy and crafty and that it rides along quietly in his heart.  He gets used to asking himself why he gets angry when he doesn’t get what he wants.  He starts to see the people and places and things God gives to him are opportunities for him to invest and serve and build up.

Thanksgiving is a start.  So, mom and dad, get that boy started.

The boy doesn’t…pay back evil for evil

Silva

Who is good enough for my daughter?  Parents regularly say that only those “good enough” can date or marry our children, right?  I wonder if most of us have figured out what that means before it’s too late (e.g., bubba just rang the door bell)?  In other words, what type of boy will I let in the front door?

We continue this short series on the character qualities of the kind of boy that I want to hear ask me for my daughter’s hand.  First was, courage.  Today’s is that he shouldn’t be inclined to pay back evil for evil.

The Bible is clear enough that when it comes to vengeance or retribution, only God is expert enough to handle it.  Thankfully, this evidence is clearly stated,

Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord (Romans 12:19)

O LORD, O God of vengeance, O God of vengeance shine forth! (Psalm 94:1)

Still, we try.  Clear examples are all around us.  For many (especially boys), it’s on the ball field.  Surely the boy will find himself on what we used to call the “field of friendly strife” (i.e., athletic field).  When he does, he will be learning important lessons about life and about his place in it.  I spoke to a good friend recently about how when boys get on the field, each one is desperately trying to establish and maintain his place of prowess in light of all the rest.  Sometimes the overflow of this is seen in red cards (soccer), face-masks (football), hitting a batter (baseball) or charging (basketball).  When it happens, you can be sure that one has challenged another’s position in the rankings.  These challenges are evil.  Strictly speaking they are retributions, punishments, and vengeance-efforts.

Will a boy resort to this?

  • Will his lifestyle be one of “bowing up” or “kicking against the goads”?  Is his answer to authority to always resist and sometimes rebel?

Listen dad, you, out there, parenting that boy that will one day show up at my door.  Sure, every man has his moment but I will turn him away faster than he can say “bonehead” if his lifestyle resembles these things.  And I should and so should you.

Just why do we think God would take the time to state, illustrate and command us that He is One in charge of justice and vengeance?  Clearly, it is because we are so prone to want to be judge, jury and executioner.  As we parent our boys, do we instill in them the vengeance-ethic?  “Real men don’t take that crap.”  “Real men don’t get run over like that.”  “Men don’t get mad they get even.”  We secretly believe this slimy code of conduct and we inculcate it in our young boys.  For the sake of my daughters, don’t do it.

In a stroke of what was clearly the wisdom from above, I recently had a conversation with my son about this issue.  Of course, we started on the field of friendly strife and ventured into other fields.  Namely, what to do when you’re in the hen house and another rooster wants to fight?  Enough of the metaphor: he tackled a kid in football, the kid got up and tackled him from behind after the play.  What do we do with this?  I detected in my son a couple of response options rolling around in his head: a) quit the game to deal with the embarrassment, b) bust the kid’s head or c)??.  He was dealing with a) and c).  What does a boy do when, in the front of all of his peers, he’s the victim of a vengeful act?  What would God have him do?

(Here’s where the wisdom from above came in).  I told him that vengeance belongs to the Lord and if he were to have busted the kid’s head, that would’ve been sin.  I convinced him that leaving the field was bad for several reasons not the least of which is that the other kid’s act was sinful, and God tells us to confront sinners (Luke 17:3, Matthew 18:15, Galatians 6:1).  So, dad tells boy that next time, he turn, and confront the kid on his actions – put the ball in his hands (so to speak) – and stand there and wait to see what happens.  “Let God work on that kid’s heart” I said.  Predictably, boy asks dad, “What if he gets mad and comes after me?”  I told my little warrior that he stand firm, wrap him up and help him remember that interactions of this sort are costly for him (there were warriors in Israel, remember).

Not wanting that to be the last word then (or here), we ended on the process: play fair, confront as needed, stand firm and defend thoroughly as appropriate.

Listen, dads, if a boy shows up on my door with a battle record that reveals truth, tenacity, and self-defense, we’ll move on to other areas gladly.  If not, then he’ll be home early.

The more connected, the dumber?

Silva

I make it a habit to listen to a weekly podcast called the Whitehorse Inn.  This year’s theme has been “recovering Scripture,” or to put it another way, they are systematically dealing with biases in the church and the culture that keep us from seeing the beauty and usefulness of the Bible.

A recent podcast is called “Distracting Ourselves to Death.”  Host Michael Horton is interviewing college professor T. David Gordon.  Dr. Gordon has written a number of books like “Why Johnny Can’t Preach” or “Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns” (great books that play on the theme of the bestseller “Why Johnny Can’t Read” by Rudolph Flesch).  These books take the unfortunately ubiquitous church phenomena of poor preaching and poorer worship and unpack its source material.

This particular podcast regarded distractions.  Specifically the same theme about which author Nicholas Carr wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 2008 in his article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” We are distracted, it seems, by more than simply our commitments to ease, comfort and the satisfaction of the senses: our thinking may be in the process of being remade in the image of our connectedness.

Years ago, I exhorted a group of young single people to fight against the temptation to live with mediated communication.  In other words, that they would not be satisfied with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.  Instead, they’d want to be personal.  In this podcast, Dr. Gordon mentions that we have “plastic neurology.”  He said something like we make tools and then they make us.  He has observed in his college classroom that while students bring in laptops ostensibly to take notes, they are in fact using them to surf the web, send email or chat.  Nevermind, says Dr. Gordon.  What really bothers him is his theory that the students would not be able to function without all of this.  That if he told them to check their computers at the door, there would be a mutiny.

(Where would you be without your text plan?  What about your Facebook page?  How about internet connectivity?)

Plastic neurology is our God-given neurological malleability.  Check this quote from Mr. Carr’s article:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information [i.e., the internet] are many and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.  “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired‘s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.”  But that boon comes at a price.  As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.  They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.  And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplations.  My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

We come close to the line of responsibility in all of this.  Who exactly is responsible for our behavior?  We are – we do what we want to do all the time.  This is the clear conclusion of the Bible.  Yet, as we engage in what we love and welcome and use in technology, that medium may be exerting an influence back on us.  The effect of which makes other things harder.  I think we are in trouble in two areas: thinking and relating.

First, thinking.  More able writers can and have unpacked this concept of distractedness or plasticity (The Shallows, RAPT are book titles; www.roughtype.com is Nicholas Carr’s blog and there are titles that can be found there).  Consider this ancedotally: do you find yourself willing and able to wade through old writers, Puritans or poetry, perhaps?  In reading, do you bore quickly and find you need to get up or that you need to do something else?  Can you sit down with a passage of Scripture and study it: word study, history, grammar and connections to other books?  Must you always have music on?

Consider also recent political actions: health care, financial reform, or bail-outs.  Did you remember hearing that those bills were 1000’s of pages long and our representatives didn’t even read them?  (They should’ve; check this: Preventive Care Mandate.)  What was astounding to me was that this was never an issue with the majority of people.  None of us would blindly sign some document that had serious and grave implications on our family’s lives, would we?  But they did.  Maybe their brains are so effected that they can’t read, but did the populace give them a pass thinking, “Man, who has time to read all of that anyway?”

Biblical Christianity is a thinking religion.  Of course, it is a whole-person religion, but not before it presents to us truth claims that must be considered.  If we have lost our ability to think through things, then we are going to see our churches move more and more away from biblical Christianity.  Our people will move away from what it means to be people of grace and truth.

Second, relating.  Relationships take time and effort.  Facebook and its annoying clones and predecessors are not facilitating social connectedness.  That used to mean (rightly) time together.  Voices heard, expressions seen and analyzed, misstatements challenged, rebukes and forgiveness exchanged.  Not anymore.  Now, we believe it is adequate to rail against someone slanderously via an email.  Google might be making us dumber but it has certainly made us more cowardly.  The medium of pop-ups, broadband, multiple-tabs, and chat has reshaped our relationships so that we want them just like those other things: exciting, fast-paced, multiples, uncommitted and surface.

Who can really solve this by turning things off, you know?  That will hardly do.  Instead, at some point, the church will have to recognize we have discovered a new country with new joys and new sins.