The MANual
I thought I would post a teaser introduction to my next book…
Introduction
If you are a mom or a father reading this book I think we all would agree that life can be challenging for families of all kinds and cultures. We seem to be a world that is struggling in almost every area of existence with our lives and our children. We seem to be looking at more and more families that are struggling to be outside of the destructive culture of the day. We are seeing boys growing up into a men that have no sense of manhood, responsibility for life, themselves, women or authority. Yet they say they are a man.
True godly manhood has not been modeled for them. They see nothing but destruction of the home, failure of direction in their lives, and pain. They seek acceptance anywhere they can find it and they medicate their pain with whatever brings the most pleasure.
Nothings seems more of a struggle than raising a family. Our culture seems to be leaving all godly values and replacing them with their own. They have strayed so far from the truth that it is not even recognizable anymore. We, as a society, have compromised so much what truth looks like that it’s not recognizable to our children. They have no reference point for the most part to making godly decisions. The children are becoming lawless. The sons are becoming lawless and have fallen into a life of depravity. Why? Because of fatherlessness.
The result is more and more failure to live life the way God intended and an ever increasing failure of families to really be families.
Children and young teens today almost know nothing of moral boundaries and standards with which to live by. These boundaries have been either stretched so thin to the left or to the right that they are no longer visible to this generation. Children have no vision because parents have no vision to give them.
We have become a society, it seems, set on the edge of self destruction. We love self pleasure more than the things of God and that love of self-satisfaction goes across the board to many different things and enticements. It’s in our schools, our homes, our churches and society.
Our children have become more rebellious than any other generation. They seem to be imploding from the inside with their feelings and emotions. There are more rejected, wounded and soul broken males than ever before. They seem to have no real sense of right and wrong. This defiance in our children didn’t happen by accident. Oh no, the enemy worked through mothers and fathers and set it up. Mainly it came through the fathers, sad to say. The lines of good and evil seem to be very blurred for our sons.
Families are breaking apart more and more everyday. One main reason is that if there is already no father in the home, the rest of the fathers are leaving the home by either divorce or just walking out. They are walking out and leaving and giving no thought to the consequences of their actions on their family. When this happens, the kids, the sons, are left in the cross-hairs of adult decisions they have no control over, but they reap the greatest consequences of their fathers’ actions.
Children, women, wives, single parent homes and families are suffering a lot of burden and stress that is almost beyond comprehension because of this.
Is there a solution or answer for this? Yes, but to fix it you must first recognize the problem. This book will try to do that in some small way by giving you hope.
This book will cover what I feel is a major problem of broken families and hurting sons. I will not give you all the problems because they are many. I am addressing one. The problem, as I see it, is the problem of fatherlessness.
Fatherlessness is truly an epidemic in this country and around the world. I won’t attempt to solve the problem of fatherlessness with this one book but only to address and offer a possible solution to those searching for answers to the fall out of fatherlessness in their own homes.
This book is not an end all solution for how to raise sons. The words here contain some of the things I did by the instruction of wisdom and the Holy Spirit with my two sons as they grew up.
I put these wisdom instructions in each chapter of this book as I now see fruit of these characteristics in my sons’ lives.
Fatherlessness is defined in the dictionary as “lacking a father’s protection, not having a father, not knowing the identity of one’s father, having no known father, destitute of a living father, the state of being without a father, not having a legal responsible father”.
But what is the definition of a father? It is defined as “a man in relation to his natural children or child.”
I think that all these definitions are accurate but we as a society focus on them but miss others. I think they are all equal and important and if one part is missing that part is crucial to a child.
In the definition where it says “the state of being without a father”, “lacking a father’s protection”, and “a man in relation to his natural children or child” are the definitions I want to focus on.
No one is saying that a man is not a father when he biologically fathers a child. That is not the problem. We see that happening all over the place and in all sorts of situations. The problem is the definition I just read– the state of being without a father and ALL that entails being lived out, walked out, and modeled in the life of sons. I’m talking about the verb definition of the word “fathering.”
I’m talking about the actual day-to-day activity of fathering and the bond, heart connection that requires. I’m talking about the lack of a father’s protection and a father in relation to his natural sons.
This is fatherlessness and this is the meat of this book.
I said this book would hopefully give hope to some of you that are looking for answers. What answers? The answer of how you can raise your son or possibly daughter in a fatherless society or home. How can you do it and do it well. How can you do it with minimal damage to your sons.
I wrote this to give you some life principles that I used with my sons and still do that may help you counter the voice of our culture and destruction that may have touched your family.
You don’t have to give up or give up on your children no matter how bad things may look. There are godly principles that you can do that will work. When we do not know how to do things or how things work, we usually look to a manual. You need a manual and that is why I wrote this book.
My sons became fatherless at 8 and 14 yrs old and the principles that my husband and I were using up to that point in their lives, I had to make sure I continued to use them. I had to be even more intentional if I didn’t want to lose my children to the world, to the enemy of this world, to their broken hearts, and anything else that would pull them away from God.
They became fatherless in the sense that their dad left the family home and they no longer had his daily protection and no real relationship with their father like they used to. He was not active in raising them on a day by day basis, training them, instructing them, responsibility for them, protecting them, imparting into them or caring for them. Their relation to their father changed overnight literally.
I had to, on purpose, do what I will teach you in these chapters everyday or nearly every day on some level and hope and pray I would one day see the fruit of it.
Years have passed and are passing and I am seeing some fruit of the discipline I instilled and time it took to keep training them, but not because of me but because God is so faithful. He is a good Father to my sons.
But to first understand why fatherlessness is so wrong, we need to first look at why fathering is so right and what it means to be a father according to God to see why the enemy has attacked this area of society so hard. Once you learn this you will have hope beyond what you can see for your sons and for their future.