Morgan Freeman narrates the documentary film The March of the Penguins. It follows the epic journey of the Emperor Penguins of Antarctica 70 miles inland to their breeding grounds. It is an arduous walk as they tilt side to side through the ice, snow and natural barriers. The film captures the life and death struggle of these three-foot-high birds in an extremely hostile environment. After the penguins have made the trek to their mating grounds, the females produce a single egg, and then the male and female penguin perform an intricate dance in order to exchange the egg from the female to the male before it freezes in the cruel Antarctic winds. The mother swaps her egg from her feet to the father’s feet, and a flap of skin covers the fragile egg. The mothers then march like waddling soldiers back to the feeding grounds. The fathers, however, remain and shuffle toward each other and huddle together to protect themselves and the eggs on top of their feet from the storm. They do this for more than two months without relief. The temperature is colder than anything you have ever experienced, and they have not eaten for a long time, and will not eat till they trek back 70 miles to their feeding grounds.
Freeman narrates: “As the fathers settle into their long wait at the breeding grounds, the winter’s second storm arrives. The temperature is now 80 degrees below zero. That’s without taking into account the wind which can blow 100 miles per hour. Though they can be aggressive during the rest of the year, at this time the males are totally docile, a united and cooperative team. They brace against the storm by merging their thousand bodies into a single mass. They will take turns, each of them getting to spend some time near the center of their huddle where it’s warmer.” (Scene begins at 00:28:20 and ends at 00:29:50)
Just imagine getting into bed with someone who has been standing on the Antarctic ice when it is 80 degrees below zero and the wind has been blowing at 100 miles per hour! Imagine how difficult it is to be a Penguin parent. But sometimes human parenting here in the U. S. can seem as cold and difficult as balancing a delicate egg on your feet for months in the Antarctic. The challenges of parenthood are very complex, demanding and sometimes painful. It call for a lot of self-sacrifice. It is also our greatest source of joy which makes all the other stuff tolerable.
As Christians, what are some of the keys to what we see as important. I want to propose three key elements to parenting this morning. There are many others that we could bring up as well, but these stick out in my mind as primary. The three keys are prayer, modeling and training.
The first is: Prayer. I pray constantly for my family. Here are the things I prayed for my children and now pray for my grandchildren. I pray that part of the Lord’s prayer that says “deliver them from evil,” or more accurately “deliver them from the evil one.” My primary concern here is that they be delivered from the evil one who wants to separate them from God and destroy their relationship with him. I pray that they will be delivered from those who perpetrate evil on others. I pray that they will be daily transformed into the likeness of Christ. I pray that they will do what is right before they do what they think will make them happy. I pray that they will seek God with their whole heart. I pray not so much that they will be spared from the challenges of life as I do that they will have the strength and godly wisdom to triumph over those challenges. I pray that God would guide them to the person they will eventually marry; that already God would be ordering the circumstances to one day bring them together. I pray that they will be good, and thereby be a blessing to the world; that they would be part of the solution, rather than being part of the problem. I pray that God would use them powerfully in this world to bring about his kingdom on earth. I pray for protection over them so that they may continue to live and thrive in order to carry out God’s purposes for their lives. I want them to be happy, but not at the expense of their character. I want them to enjoy life, but not at the cost of missing their purpose in life. I want them to understand and live out the words of Jesus when he said, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).
I love the spirit of parenting that Erwin McManus exudes. He never wants his children to escape the reality of life, but have the strength to face it squarely and Christianly. He tells the story of what happened in his home when the twin towers were struck. He says, “When I came home on September 11, 2001, I stepped into one of the most horrific moments of my life. I could not believe what I was watching on the television, what had happened in this country. And all day long they kept replaying that same scenario over and over and over again. We had people in our house, and they were frantic. Some were panicking. Some were there to pray. Some were just powerful intercessors. But throughout the whole day we never took time to process our children. And so the next morning my wife, Kim, said to me, ‘Erwin, you’ve got to talk to Aaron and Mariah.’ Aaron was 13; Mariah was 9. And I remember sitting down with our kids. Now, I knew what I wanted to tell them. I wanted to tell them that old cliché — the safest place to be is in the center of the will of God. Haven’t you heard that? The safest place to be is in the center of the will of God. It’s so beautiful. It’s just so unbiblical. I wanted to tell them, ‘Look, we’re Christians. We’re followers of Jesus Christ, so this would never happen to us. We’re on the other side of the country. It’s really, really far away. If you’ll just walk with Christ, you don’t have anything to worry about.’ In fact, what I wanted to do was give them a good, old, Christian lie. But I knew that I had to tell them the truth. And so I told my children that morning that what we learned is that we have no control over when we die, or even how we die, but what we have control over is how we live.”
Only when we have as our primary motive the desire to see our children follow God and live well in the face of the distressing things in life do we really know how to pray for our children.
The second key to parenting is: modeling. There is an email going around that shows a mother duck with several of her chicks walking behind her. There are three pictures. The first is the mother duck with the little chicks confidently walking behind her feeling perfectly secure. In the second frame the mother duck walks across a storm grate in the street. Momma duck has no problem crossing the grate, but her six, small, downy ducklings have yet to venture across. The third frame shows the mother looking down through the grate with only one chick beneath her. The rest are nowhere to be seen. The mother has turned around and is peering through the holes in the grate to whatever is below.
The title of the email is “Bad Parenting.” The question that begs to be asked is: “If your children follow in your footsteps, where will they end up?” You can’t just tell your children what kind of person you want them to be, you have to show them what kind of person they can become. Be sure that if you talk about being a Christian that you are demonstrating what a Christian is.
According to Newsweek magazine in a special issue about “Your Child”: “81 percent of mothers and 78 percent of fathers say they plan eventually to send their young child to Sunday school or some other kind of religious training.” Karen Springen, in the same issue, writes about “Raising A Moral Child.” In it she discusses parents who are increasingly concerned about raising a child who is empathetic, knows right from wrong, and attempts to follow the Golden Rule. Many parents are becoming less concerned about their child becoming wealthy or President. Parents are searching for ways of instilling moral values as a priority. She says, “But in today’s fast-paced world, where reliable role models are few and acts of violence by children are increasingly common, the quest to raise a moral child has taken on new urgency.” In the article she quotes professor David Elkind who says, “The way to raise a moral child is to be a moral person.” It is interesting that even secular people are becoming concerned about moral character.
The third key to parenting is: Training. Don’t be afraid to teach your children your values. If they want to reject them later, that is their problem — but at least they will know what values are. We have become so sensitive about not shoving our values on other people, including our children, that we have failed to help them understand values at all.
We have found in our work in outreach that the most difficult people in the world to reach are those who have never had any religious background or training. Those who respond are often those who have a touchstone in their past — a place of training and teaching that they may have rebelled against and rejected at some point, but are now are seeing in a new light. They have a framework on which to hang spiritual concepts and realities. There is reality in the scripture that says, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6). But this cannot happen if parents are not willing to do the hard work of being parents.
In an article in Policy Review entitled “Eminem Is Right,” Mary Eberstadt writes for the Standford University publication saying, “If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. . . . To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them.”
Many young people are feeling this abandonment, even when their families are living together, because they are living together without really being together. Everyone is busy doing their own thing or checked out emotionally. There is the semblance of a family without the reality. The secret to parenting is the willingness to do the hard work of being a parent, not a pal or a popular person, but a parent. It takes time and commitment to build values into your children. It is not always appreciated, and it is a lot easier to just avoid the conflict, but the cost of not doing this is much higher.
Time magazine had a story of Jamie Foxx, the actor portraying Ray Charles in the movie Ray. He tells how he never had the relationship with his father that he wanted. His biological parents lived 28 miles away in Dallas, Texas, but rarely visited or noted his achievements. He said, “I passed for more than 1,000 yards, the first quarterback at my high school to do that. I was making the Dallas Morning News, and my father never came down. That’s weird. Even to this day — nothing. But that absence made me angry. It made me want to be something. I said, ‘I’m going to make you look up one day and say, “That’s my son.”’”
There are many children today bringing up themselves. It is never too late to start, even though you may have failed in the past. The story of the rebellious son in Luke 15 has a happy ending. After all the time the son spent in rebellion and misuse of the father’s goods, he finally came to himself. He remembered what his father was like and the lessons he had learned from him. There was a time of reconciliation and a new beginning. The father said, “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate” (Luke 15:22-24). It is never too soon or too late to begin. With a commitment to forgiveness, prayer, modeling and training there can be a celebration in your story as well.
Rodney J. Buchanan
August 6, 2006
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
