Fatherhood- Responsibilities, opportunities and dangers

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

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Welcome to The Masculine Journey. I am really glad, and I know you think I'm going to say that you're listening to us today, which I am, but I'm really glad for our producer, Keith. Because he knows that we need to have this mute button before we come on the air. Because we were laughing right up until the time the music started playing. So we started the show without you this week. Just having some fun with Harold like we do every week. Yeah, I actually took a picture, and I've got to figure out a way to get it up on Facebook or something.

Because we have these, you know, due to COVID, we have these white covers that go over the earphones, part of the headphones. And so Sam, right before the show starts, noticed that Harold had a great deal in common with Princess Leia. I had a weirder thought than that, though.

He probably looks better than she does now. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Anyway, we are very glad that you're with us this week.

And Robby, we're not that far away from boot camp. Do you have any idea how many Eves it is? Well, I know it's four weeks, so. Is it like 28? Yeah. Something like that. We'll call it 28.

Yeah, that sounds good. It's definitely going to be here before you know it. And I, you know, personally, I'm like, Whoa, I'm so excited.

Yeah, it's a week and two days away from the show today. And so, guys, it's time to register. I know guys are always late at registering. You know, we start talking about it like right after the boot camp for the next boot camp, you know, and we talk about it every week. And invariably, it's kind of the same thing.

Guys are just like, Yeah, I'll do it later. Well, you know, people are registering. So we need you to get registered so we can make sure we save a slot for you and that we can get the right food in for everybody. So it's important that you do it sooner rather than later.

So we'll ask you to go to mashlandjourney.org and register now, not during the show, but right after the show. And we'd love to see you there and love to see what God has to do for you, with you and for you while you're there. Yeah, to hear from God, especially for me, you know, on the subject of what we're talking about today, you know, it's going to touch your heart, I hope and you're going to think, God, what do I do with this? Because I'm really struggling in this area.

And I'm looking around the room and everybody in this room is struggling in this area. So, you know, what an opportunity it is to grow closer to God to get some answers. Yeah, the topic for today was one of them that kind of came to me as I was watching some shows, just catching up on some TV shows and some things and finding, you know, just how much more and more in shows you're really seeing the father wound play out. You know, it's in almost every TV show that I've watched at some point, they're dealing with a father wound, you know, and it really made me think about the importance of fatherhood, you know, and some of the shows they, you know, treat dad like he's the idiot, you know, everybody loves Raymond, you know, as much as I love that show, you know, Raymond was always kind of the idiot, you know, according to Deborah and, you know, and she was kind of showing that in front of the kids a lot of the times. And so fatherhood is not really thought very highly of in some ways, but it's very impactful in other ways. And it plays out in shows, you know, and so I was really thinking, we do a Father's Day show, you know, but that's once a year, it's probably something we should talk about a few times a year. And so this one was, you know, fatherhood, the responsibilities of being a father, the opportunities of being a father and the dangers of being a father.

And we're gonna try to touch on each of those. And we're gonna start with a really fun clip from you, Danny. Yeah, surprisingly enough, it's from the Andy Griffith Show. It is surprising.

It's shocking, actually. But it's from an episode called Opiate a Spoiled Kid and this new kid and his family moved to town and he is a spoiled brat. And the clip just kind of shows the contrast between the way Andy's father and his views as opposed to the father's view of the spoiled kid. And there's some transition in it, but it's just an enlightenment of good. Andy is always shown as a strong father and there's always some sort of life lesson in it.

That's kind of why I like the show, but that and my wife made me watch it a bunch. So, but anyway, it's a good clip. Yeah, in this clip, the boy's bike's been confiscated, right? Yes. All right, Barney's confiscated and the dad's in demanding the bike back. Yeah.

Okay, we'll pick it up there. Arnold was warned and continued to ride his bicycle on the sidewalk. Now we're going to impound that bicycle. He learns to use it according to regulation. Can't you see this is a very sensitive child? Obviously, you don't understand it. Arnold's a good boy.

You just... Oh, I think I understand him. I spirited perhaps, but were we all his age? I wasn't. Well, how's the law, Mr. Winger? We don't teach children to live in society today.

What's going to happen to them when they grow up? For heaven's sake, Sheriff, the boy's not a criminal. I didn't say he was. Now, what he does at home is none of our business, but when he gets out on the street, he's going to have to answer to us. I can show you in the statute book, the minimum punishment for this offense is impounding the bicycle for one week. When you can't do it, I demand you return that bike to him now.

Now, you look here. You're that boy's father. You're responsible for his actions. Now, he's too young to be locked up. If you're not going to take responsibility, maybe I ought to lock you up. You ever think of that?

Yeah. Well, my dad ain't even scared of that, are you? Make him put you in jail. That'll show him. Go on, Dad. Show him they can't push me around.

Go on. Put him in jail. He won't care.

How's that? My dad will show you. He's tough. You want me to lock your father up?

He ain't no idea. I don't want to lose my brand new bike. I just got it.

You'd rather I put your father in jail? I want my bike. Sheriff, there won't be any need to impound that bike.

How's that? I'd like to have it. I want to sell it. Sell it? You're going to sell my bike? That's right, Arnold. But it's my bike. You can't sell my bike. Be quiet, Arnold. Marty, you won't go get the bicycle. I won't let you.

You can't do that. Arnold, be quiet. Mr. Winkler, would you like to continue this father and son discussion in quiet, huh?

I say, would you like to continue this in quiet? There's a real nice woodshed out back. Woodshed?

Good old-fashioned woodshed? Real nice. Come on, Arnold. Is Arnold going to get his bicycle? Don't you think he deserves it? I don't want to say.

After all, he is one of my own kind. So, Dan, that was a pretty good clip. I enjoyed that. The woodshed part and opies, hilarious.

You might need to explain that to people under 30, though. Yeah, the woodshed used to be a place where you got punished. They take you out behind the woodshed for a whippet, which I know is not a popular subject anymore. Yeah, I had to go pick my switch. That's what it was off the little switch tree. Yeah, that was brutal. I guess what it makes me think of is if you've been around a child at all, you don't have to teach a child to be selfish.

No. It's part of the fallen nature, I think. Obviously, Arnold is a very selfish, self-centered child who's thinking about his bike. He's going to let him lock Dad up. But Dad has other plans toward the end of the clip. But I think about raising my own children and the challenges that that brings to teach a child. I think scripture says that teach a child in the way they should go. When they're old, they won't depart from it. But it's that gray area in between that verse, I think, that you have to teach them the hard knocks. They'll respond one way or the other.

It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to stay on script all the time. I love Opie's perspective. Is he going to get a whipping?

Don't you think he deserves it? I'd rather not say. He's one of my own kind.

Yeah, he's one of my own. I thought of a story about my son when he was little, my stepson. He knew how I felt about the kids lying. My daughter used to finagle the truth quite a bit.

Cody saw all this because he was the younger child. One morning, we were making breakfast. I asked him if we were packing lunch. He said no.

I accidentally took two yesterday. I didn't think anything about it. I'm busy doing other things. That afternoon, he's a little beef fella. He's about six years old.

I won't ever forget it. He comes marching into the bedroom with his lunchbox. Me and his mom hadn't been married too long.

Usually, he's in there to see mom. He marches right around mama and comes and stands up man-to-man to me and says, I need to tell you I lied about my lunch. His confession overwhelmed me to know that because God says, if you confess your sins, but he was as big a man as I'd ever seen.

Those are the precious moments that I think we have in parenting. Why did he lie? You know what caused him to lie? I don't know why he lied. I don't remember why he lied.

He was human. That's always easier. That clip for me, you hit it on the nail on the head, falls under the responsibility. As a father, we have the responsibility to train our kids up into integrity, into those types of things. We have responsibility to provide for them and to make sure they have food and all that kind of stuff. That's part of the responsibilities. But we do have responsibilities to lay the groundwork of what a man is supposed to look like. Either that's through stuff that we do or through an association of men. Have another men around them to help them learn life lessons and those types of things, whether it be a grandfather or whether it be a grandfather or whoever that might be.

It's pretty important. My son was talking last night, ironically, about a time that he was between three and four, I believe. We lived in an old farmhouse. In his room, in the closet, the windows were like six inches off the floor. They weren't very high off the floor.

It was like an addition 50 years ago or whatever. We'd ask him to go clean his room. He had to go clean his room. He's up there cleaning. All of a sudden, we get a ring at the doorbell.

We open the doorbell. It's our next door neighbor. She's like, there's all sorts of clothes flying out the window and landing in the bush outside. Went upstairs and he was cleaning his room, but it was all going right out the window. His mom said last night, she's like, Caleb, I'm sure you probably got spanking for that.

He's like, oh yeah. He's three or four. He remembers the spanking. The spanking wasn't as much for throwing the clothes out the window. It was the danger of him being able to fall out the window. At that age, that window was just barely off the ground. He remembered that lesson.

He never threw anything out the window as far as I know again. It's part of that, just helping him understand the right and wrong of it. You're talking about kids lying. When my kids would lie as they were growing up, they had to do the whole bar of soap thing. They had to put a bar of soap in their mouth for a minute.

That's nasty. It does tend to work pretty well. Makes them think about lying, moving forward. You didn't go blind. You didn't. It cleaned out their system. It didn't hurt them.

It wasn't like there's anything terrible. They did remember it. To this day, my daughter who got the brunt of it really doesn't like people that lie.

She just really doesn't have a whole lot of tolerance for it because she doesn't like to be a person that lies. Go to masculinejourney.org. Register for the upcoming boot camp.

You can do it quickly during the break or you can do it right after the show. Please do it soon. We want to see you there. God wants to see you there. It's going to be an amazing weekend, masculinejourney.org.

What if one weekend wasn't up to you that you could go and God would orchestrate it all? Masculine Journey Boot Camp. Basic training designed to give men permission to be how God made them. Passionate warriors for the Kingdom. Based on John Eldridge's Wild at Heart, experience four days purpose for God to come after and perhaps reawaken dreams and desires He uniquely placed in your masculine heart. Fall Boot Camp coming up November 18th through the 21st. Go to masculinejourney.org and register today. Mail it to P.O.

Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina 27285. Someday he wants to be like his old man Welcome back. That's the Zac Brown Band.

I'm actually going to see them tonight in Charlotte, going with my youngest son to see the band. It's just an amazing song called My Old Man. Robby, you want to say something? No, well. Well, you kind of andied up to the mic. Andied up. And not Andi. Oh, we've been missing Andi. Yeah, we do miss Andi. Maybe those are Freudian slip. I can't tell him I miss him, you know, because then it would just burn that whole, you know, hate relationship.

It's a whole new term. Whenever I look at him now, are you Andi-ing up? Andi-ing up is what I meant to say. I just didn't enunciate very well.

Anyway, you do have my clip tuned up. And apparently, you know, this opportunity, it's a really hard subject for me. If, you know, being completely transparent, you know, one of my biggest, you know, things I think about all the time is, you know, man, I feel like I blew it a lot as a parent.

And, you know, you see the results of that in so many different ways. And so this is a neat clip for me, because it's from my grandfather's standpoint. He's, um, it's a difficult clip, and it's a little bit hard to listen to, but it's from a movie, um, If I Stay. And the poor girl that is in a coma that the grandfather will be talking to, she was in an automobile accident, and all of her family was killed, her mother, father, brother, sisters. She's the only one who survived, and she's in a coma fighting for her life. And the grandfather apparently is in the situation where he begins to talk to her about her father, when the clip starts, and what a great dad he was, and where he wasn't, you know, what he perceived his son to be, and his son's sacrifices that he had made for the daughter. What you don't know, because you can't see the clip, is that the girl is sort of out of her body too. Not only is she laying there in the coma, but like somebody, you know, like the idea of somebody going to heaven or whatever, she's outside of her body, and she's listening to the grandfather talk to her in the coma, and she's responding. So you'll hear a girl speaking, and she talks about her daddy, and then at the end, she'll say, thank you, grandpa. Well, that's actually the girl herself responding to what's being said.

And the beauty of this, well, we'll talk about it after you listen. I've been trying to think of what Denny would want me to say to you. The kid was dad, wasn't he? He sure had me beat. I remember the day that he quit the band. He just, he up and said, that's it.

The time has come. I was surprised. I never really liked the way the band sounded, but I knew how important it was to him. And so I asked him, I said, why are you quitting? And he said, you make sacrifices for your kids, for your kids.

He said that without even thinking. That's why he quit the band for you. It was when he heard you play so well.

I think that that's what it clicked for him. You're incredible talent that he, he just, he couldn't believe it. And all he wanted to do was to give you more. So he quit the band.

He sold his drum kit and he bought you that cello sacrifice. That's what we do for the people that we love. And here's my, and Mia, I want you to live.

I want that more than anything in this world. I want you to fight like to stay with us, but with everybody else gone, I know it might not be what you want. It might be too hard for you to keep fighting. So if you want to go, I want you to know it's okay. It's okay.

I understand. And I think for me in so many ways, it illustrates that love overcomes a lot of mistakes and you can hear that from the grandfather, you know, from the father and, and all those things. And so I remember when I came, you know, to my first boot camp, I'm a little bit older than some of these guys. And so my kids are adults and, you know, and I learned about father wounds, painful stuff, realizing that, you know, not only obviously did I have them, but clearly I had been, you know, the, the, the person that had delivered some of those and what was so cool. And one of the reasons that I, that I hope that you'll consider coming to boot camp, this is you get a chance to go out and talk to God about it, right? And the covenant of silence is you take this stuff that, that comes up in these sessions that you really are struggling with. And this is one of the areas I struggle with and you take it to God and you say, what do I do with this? And, and the story isn't over, you know, there, that's what God told me.

It's there's time and, and you can still love your adult children. And, and how do we go about doing that? Well, how do we call out their glory? How do we pass the gospel onto the next generation? And I think those are things that are very, very, very valuable to me.

And, you know, if you'd consider coming, you know, we can share the journey. I don't have all the answers, but man, I'm all about trying to love on my kids like that. Like the sacrifice of actually giving up like that grandfather was willing to. Yeah. Even though he felt like he didn't really have what it takes when his kids were there. Right. He was able to speak, you know, literally tried to speak life into his granddaughter, you know, and that's the opportunity we have as fathers definitely is to speak, you know, condemnation into the lives of our kids or to speak life into the life of our kids, you know, and we find ourselves where we've fallen on that first side, you know, we all have at some point. Right.

But we don't have to stay there. And that's the great thing about that clip is, you know, there's, there's the opportunity tomorrow, there's the opportunity now, there's the opportunity the day after that, you know, it's being intentional and trying to share from the heart and share life with your kids. Yeah.

Excuse me. You always trying to give more to your kids. And it's such a struggle sometimes because you, you want them to grow up, right? You want them to behave, you want them to do things that are right. And you can so easily go overboard with any one subject. You know, I'm too lenient like the kid in the OP clip, you know, I'm so lenient, I let my kid push me around that I give them everything they want, they become a brat. Or you can go to the other side where you're so mean and overbearing that they're scared of everything and won't venture outside the house won't do anything. You know, they hate life.

It's trying to walk that life and balance it so hard. And just, I can remember when for me, it clicked because yes, my anger issues blowing up, you know, in the family, letting things get to me. I remember the first time it was such a relief for me just to understand, to say, I'm sorry.

Because I know it was probably Ben first, because, you know, he's the oldest. So, you know, just a young age, I forget what it was, I have no idea. But I just remember saying, I knew I should say I'm sorry.

It was kind of like, well, should I really do that? I'm the father. I'm, you know, I'm supposed to be right all the time. And I get, you know, that's the kind of morbid thoughts that are in your head, you know, about who, what a father is.

Because there's so many other people putting thoughts as to who you should be, that those thoughts are coming from people in a society that have no idea what a father is supposed to be. And I, you know, I just said, I'm sorry. And I was like, had a little talk.

I just remember that being so good. I'm like, and I got to do that more often. And next thing, you know, I did that much more often. And it started to become something of a, something that, that I'm like, I got to commit myself to that, because Lord knows, I screw up so many times, right. And it's like, if I could just start at least admitting that to myself, admitting that to my kids, was a great place to start and trying to be a better father. And because I was like, I realized I wasn't going to stop screwing up.

So I'm like, okay, let me just find that place where I can say, I'm sorry. That was a big, big, big healing moment for myself. For me, God orchestrating some ways that my boys could come to boot camp was a big part of taking the opportunity, and you guys have all been a part of that, of speaking into their life, you know, of joking with them, or, you know, talking to them aside, you know, sharing some of your story, that type of thing, and letting them be around men who are living and trying to be authentic. Not that we all don't struggle with posing, you know, at times, but to try not to live that way, and to let them know that there's, there's a different way than what society says to live. Right, especially as they were young and teenagers, you know, coming up, it's been very impactful, you know, and it provided a background for me to talk to them when they were struggling in relationships, you know, to tell a 18-year-old or 17-year-old, you can't love her well enough to heal her and have them understand the context of that. Right, that only God can heal.

You can love them well, but the healing is not up to you, you know, and remind them of some of those truths and just how grateful I am that they have been able to share that time, you know, and so again, it's not a promo for the boot camp, but I'm just talking about how impactful it's been to my family, you know, definitely hopefully to generations to come as a result. I'm a little jealous. My boys are in their 40s and I've been inviting them since we started these and haven't got one there yet. Holding out a little hope for this one, one of them coming, but and thank you for that clip, Robby. It took me a lot of places that, well, I'll go to getting a clip. I played around with Father Knows Best and My Three Sons and a bunch of really oldies and nothing really appealed to me and then I landed on, okay, I want to do Cats in the Cradle. I'm very glad I didn't and since we're doing this, we'll talk more about talk more about that in the next show, but I could not have gotten through that playing it because that resembles how I view my fatherhood quite a bit. Yeah, and we come back for the after hours. We haven't touched on the dangers of being a dad, which there's plenty of those, and we're going to touch and share more of our own personal stories in the after hours. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for bootcamp, to download the latest podcast, or you can go to Spotify, to any of the podcast outlets and get their show. Masculine Journey Radio is what you want to look up. Again, it's the after hours show. We'll talk to you next week. Have an awesome week.

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