As Fathers Day Approaches

Last month my 23 year old son and I took a quick road trip. We were headed to the Grand Canyon, but never made it past Hoover dam. That’s ok, as my goal was just to spend some time with him and it didn’t matter where we went. We did stay away from Las Vegas though (except for a visit to a vintage guitar shop) as that would have defeated my goal and made our trip a visit to deception.

It was important for me to just spend time with him. This is becoming more and more difficult to do as most parents of young adult children I’m sure are aware.  What happen, when did we stop spending time together, not just him and I but when did families get so busy that they needed a calendar? It’s easy when they’re young, they were always home, they wait for us. But is it that they get busy and stop spending time with us or that they just realize that we don’t really have time for them?

I could go on about women’s liberation and feminism, and the assault on the family that it has brought, but many women would most likely be offended, and I would be labeled a male chauvinistic pig even though I believe that women have taken on a role reserved for men because men have failed. So I will focus on the men and male irresponsibility and male liberation.

Scripture tells us the man is the head of the household, the leader, the one responsible for the success (or failure) of his household and his marriage. Regardless of what your wife or children do, God holds the man responsible. Now this is not to undermine or by any means diminish the role that a woman plays in a home, as it is quite significant, I do not mean bring them down a notch, as much as I believe men just need to step up a notch.

Unfortunately many homes are run by women; they make the majority of the decisions concerning family matters, business matters, children matters, etc. Why? Because men don’t step up. Men have created a world outside the home. At the very cost of the family and often everyone involved.

Where are the strong husbands, the leaders, the fathers? They have developed their own agendas, their own goals; they follow their own desires strongly active in their world of business, while ignoring the home.  They work hard, making decisions, pursing deals, making money, while in the home, they are often passive, indifferent and negligent, leaving much to the wife they claim to support. How can we build a nation of strong leaders when the very backbone of that nation – the family, has been left without the very leader it one day hopes to emulate?

In his book “Where’s Dad? Weldon Hardenbrook wrote:

I humbly but firmly submit that the soul of our nation is in crisis in large part because American men have — from ignorance and for various and sometimes even subconscious reasons — abandoned their God-given role of fatherhood. They have discarded the notion of being responsible for the physical and spiritual well-being of those around them.

A series of historical events, beginning at the Industrial Revolution, traversing the search for American independence and the Second Great Awakening, and culminating in Victorianism, has had the net result of disestablishing American men from a true role of fatherhood and moral leadership in our land. The American male, at one time the ever present guide of the close-knit colonial family, left his family for the factory and the materialistic lure that the Industrial Revolution brought. The most numerous and most active members of the church, the men — who commonly debated theology in the colonial marketplace — were, in time, to be found arguing business practices in the tavern. The fathers who labored hard to instill the value of cooperation in their offspring, in time gave their children the example of unlimited individual competition. Men who once taught their children respect and obedience toward godly authority came to act as though independence were a national virtue. Men who once had an active hand in the education of their sons relegated this responsibility to a public school system dominated by female teachers and feminine learning patterns. Once the leaders of social progress, American men came to look on social reform and mercy movements as women’s work and, in time, became themselves the objects of that social reform, in the case of movements such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Over the course of 150 years, from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, American men walked out on their God-given responsibility for moral and spiritual leadership in the homes, schools, and Sunday schools of the nation. As sociologist Lawrence Fuchs notes, “The groundwork for the 20th-century fatherless home was set. By the end of the 19th century for the first time it was socially and morally acceptable for men not to be involved with their families.”

All that I have mentioned above, I too am guilty of. Often times I find myself coming home from work  at which time I consider it the end of my day, while my wife comes home only to continue in her toil until long after I am asleep. 1Pet. 3:7 tells us to live with our wives, to grant them honor, we should understand them, consider her needs and desires. This is often the opposite of what we as men do. We look for our own needs, our own desires; we look out for number 1 which we falsely believe is us. This we teach to our sons and so the cycle continues.

Now What?

We as fathers need to understand that our family does not need for us to pursue “The American Dream” at all cost. Because that cost is just too high. We need to just be dad and let mom be mom. We need to take a step back and determine what is important; I think we’ll find that has very little to do with wealth, business, or desires and more to do with the little kids clamoring for your attention.

Come back this weekend, as I salute those fathers who have done things well and been an example to me. Let’s learn from them so we may teach those that follow us.