Though it happened many years ago, I remember the moment as if were yesterday. My ten-year old son, Luke, snuggled up to me after dinner as I was reading in my chair, and he said, with big eyes and a sweet face, “Dad…can I ask you a question?”
I knew he was after something. Cookies maybe. Or permission to run down to a friend’s house. “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Dad…can I have a chain saw?”
The things these boys come up with. It cracks me up. He was dead serious, by the way.
You understand. We all — as men — pretty much want the same thing. We want power. We want to have an impact. We want to leave our mark on the world. A boy with a chain saw is a powerful thing. Just imagine all he could do. In a short time there wouldn’t be a tree left standing in the entire neighborhood. Which, of course, is why I did not give him one. A ten-year old with a chain saw is more powerful than he ought to be. But I understand the desire. It’s essential to the masculine nature.
Boys who play baseball don’t want to strike out. They want to hit that ball hard. They want to knock it over the fence. My boys love to wrestle with me, but they don’t simply want to wrestle — they want to pin me. They want to be on top. This is true of every man. This is what’s behind men and their fascination with fast cars, or power tools, or politics. It’s about power. A man may take it in the wrong direction sometimes, but the bottom line is
a man needs to know he’s having an impact.
Or think of it this way: What’s your worst fear as a man? Isn’t it some version of failure? To royally blow it? To really screw things up? Lose your job. Drive your company into bankruptcy. Wind up pushing a shopping cart down the street. If you’re a doctor, you fear misdiagnosing a patient’s fatal disease. If you’re an attorney, you fear losing the big case. Because all those things in some way prove that you don’t have what it takes.
You, Dad, are the most powerful man in the world
Not so for a woman. A woman’s worst fear is abandonment. Most women survive a career setback that would send men into a tailspin. Failure doesn’t seem to matter as much because a woman fears that she won’t be loved. It shouts to the world, “She wasn’t worth pursuing; she wasn’t worth fighting for.” But
for men, the dog at our heals is failure.
We need to know that our lives mattered. That when the time came, we had what was needed. We came through. There was something powerful about our lives.
So let me say this as clearly as I can: You, Dad, are the most powerful man in the world… at least in their world. Your children are looking for you to answer the deepest questions of their lives. How you handle their hearts will shape them for the rest of their lives. Never forget that no one is as powerful as you are in the lives of your sons and daughters.
Please note I am not saying Mom is unimportant. Not at all. Mother teaches us unconditional love, and she teaches us about mercy. She is a comforter. When boys or girls want to do something adventurous, they don’t ask Mom; they ask Dad. But when they skin their knees or cut their fingers, when they get their feelings hurt, who do they run to? Mom, of course. Even wounded soldiers on the battlefield are known to cry out for their mothers in their last moments. Mother is love and tenderness and mercy. She is a picture of the heart of God.
But identity — especially gender identity — is bestowed by the father. A boy learns if he is a man, if he has what it takes from his dad. A girl learns if she is worth pursuing, if she is lovely, from her dad. That’s just the way God set this whole thing up. This power he has given to you.
Excerpted from You Have What it Takes: What Every Father Needs to Know by John Eldredge, copyright John Eldredge.
Not sure I can agree with everything John says, but as a dad, I still want the kids to come to me for advice…meaning I still want to have the answer to their questions and needs, even though they are well into raising families of their own. The father can only bestow on his family things like gender identity, and having an effect to shape their lives, if he is a godly man and is leading them first of all to the throne of grace and mercy. God made those children and loves them more than we do!
Pastor Dale