Signposts | September 23 | Honor Your Father and Mother
5 Minute Bible Study
Signposts | September 23 | Honor Your Father and Mother
Proverbs chapter 19 verses 26 and 27, "He who robs his father and drives out his mother is a son who brings shame and disgrace. Stop listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge." Now, this sounds a little bit like raising teenagers to me, Eric. He who robs his father and drives out his mother is his son who brings shame and just know, obviously, not every teenager is so bringing shame upon the household. I think the reason I said that is right now I'm reading a book that I do recommend to anybody who has basically like pubescent daughters as I do. I have a 12-year-old and it's a massive change. It's a massive change. You've got this sweet little girl very attached to her parents and all of a sudden she goes to this all this detachment and I'm just trying to understand how that works. The book is called Untangled. I can't remember the author's name right now, but it's really good and helpful. That's very much top of mind for me and my wife Nancy right now as our daughter goes through that. What's helpful though is the book really shows what's normal when the daughter holds up in her room and shuts the door and doesn't want anybody coming in the room. That's actually quite normal. It's quite expected and it's actually healthy for her to kind of audition for adulthood as what she's doing. She's kind of setting up her own little pretend department, even with the safety of her own home outside the door. Anyway, I guess I bring that all up because I want to put this proverb in some context. He who robs his father and drives out his mother is a son who brings shame and disgrace. Stop listening to instruction my son and you will stray from the words of knowledge. I don't think they have the phrase teenager back in Solomon's time when this stuff was written, so I don't know what he was going through, what made him observe this when. By that time the woman with the young girl, the daughter was getting married. Right, that's true. Good point. This time was working in the, you know, wherever. This whole teenage thing where they don't have enough to do and they're going through all of the transformation stuff, it's confusing to them. It's very confusing. I think this is my own house, my older brother. Those years were a nightmare for everybody in the house and my parents had no idea what was hitting them and they had no response because of that. And these very powerful forces that are embedded in all of us because we have to go from that sweet little daughter to someday, hopefully a wife and a mother. And that whole process is a long process, but as it goes, but by the time she's 16, 17, I don't know if it's going to be worse or better, but I, it's certainly going to be truly different. Yeah. Well, you know, with our daughter, you know, she does the stuff where she wants to go be in her room and not be around the family, but she's also still very sweet and very loving. She has a real faith. She's a delight. She's amazing, actually. She's an amazing athlete. She's hilarious. She's artistic. She's kind of a renaissance woman. And I think the reason I mentioned that too is I guess I'm trying to put this proverb in the context of giving, like you said, this whole teenage season that we've manufactured really, it's not necessarily the way God designed it and it creates all these pitfalls for these kids. And like we said, a few days ago, when I was, I felt led to have compassion on little kids, you know, for all that they're going through. This leads me to have some compassion on our teenagers. The stuff that they have to navigate is so hard, especially these days with technology and everything. So once again, the takeaways, compassion, trying to have some sympathy for these kids. I think the, you know, there, I was going to talk about something else, but I think this is a very important subject. And I have gone through my youngest child, who is autistic is 32. And the oldest is 42. And we're all going to decamp actually to the Tetons in the latter part of this month. As a family, 12 of us are going to show up cousins, my brother, one of my brothers, et cetera. And so for a three day road trip, really. And it's all about really being in the most beautiful place in the world for a short period of time as a family. I'm thinking of doing a little book for this event called Road Trip. And it'll just have 24 photographs in it. That's it. No message or anything else. But really, what I'm driving out here is the role of the father and the mother must adapt to the changes in the teenagers. The adaptation, the prior to the adaptation, when they're pre, you know, adolescent, if that's the right word for it, they're still the baby. They're just bigger, but they're still the baby. And the general relationship is protection. And that's how it goes. And then suddenly, it's different. So how does the adult parent react to this? And when I say adult parent, I mean parents, the mother and the father, sometimes the mother is more inclined to keep the child where they are in life and not progress into that next phase. The father can be an obnoxious disciplinarian because they're doing something different and sort of rebelling a little bit. And that's probably an inappropriate response. So what I'm trying to drive at here is doing things in the family outside of the normal routines of life, whether it's hiking, you know, a nearby trail or even simple things, but not necessarily things produced by the culture, things produced by life traveling up to some farm or, you know, just doing things though. I think that that is sometimes it's not going to solve every problem, but I think that it's refreshing. And it allows the parent to grow into that new phase in their own life that is going to never, it's never going to revert back to what it was before. So there are two changes going on that are hugely significant, both for the parents and the children. And I think a good summer camp can do that too. My daughter went to focus camp last August and came home just, it was just the right thing for her man. She's so loved. It's a Christian camp and she got to really connect with God and with other Christian girls and good leaders and it was doing all the things that you're talking about. It was just perfect for her. I just want more thing on this as to my own life. I went when I was I think 10 turning 11. I went to summer camp, whether the one I talked about on another day, Camp Hamajawassa, my father had gone there. I remember my father's stories about the camp. So I remember showing up in Grand Central Station, this is 1954, and the bottom of Grand Central Station was filled with kids, thousands, and they were all taking trains to the camp. I only bring that up because it was such a startling thing to see it. And all I wanted to do was go. My father had been telling these stories and I just wanted to go and experience them myself. And then later on, when I'm older, I want to get out of town. I want to go to boarding school and I went to boarding school and changed my life for the better. I mean, in a thousand different ways, discipline rules and regulations. I'm not sure boarding schools actually live by that anymore, but they certainly live by it then and you could get thrown out. You could put on detention and all these other things that are, I think for at least boys, it wasn't all boys school. So there was no trouble of discipline. They just did it. Anyway, it's, I think there are a lot of strategies, but we have to attend to the need, not the need so much, but the inclinations of the parent to revert back to when they were more helpless and or, you know, just younger people. Because that's a wonderful part in life, but it doesn't last. And so that's really what I'm driving at. The parents have to adapt. [BLANK_AUDIO]