Your favorite moments – the best parts of your life – probably don’t revolve around things like money, achievement, material goods, a bigger house, a higher station; all of the things we think about when we think about a “better life.”

I’ll wager that you’ve never “arrived,” i.e., found the life you’ve always dreamed of.

I don’t know anyone who has.

Regardless, especially if you’re under 50, you’re likely in hot pursuit, convinced that your best life is out there, just beyond the horizon.

I have two sets of “best memories:” the first is very early, when my life revolved around friends and family, doing a bunch of stuff together, shared memories, and little to distract me from enjoying the life that was in my lap.

When I hit 30~ish years, I dove instead into the open arms of vocation, and some new, much bigger things to chase. These promised a very clear place of arrival; an end-point where I could finally sit back and be happy enough, so long as I worked hard, made the right decisions, played all the games, etc.

So, up until about 5 years ago, my life revolved around pursuing things I believed would change everything.

It wasn’t all bad. I made money, met people, learned things, perpetrated a few impressive deeds, had some adventures. Almost died. Twice. I lived with much hope, initially, which is never a bad thing. Even a hope that’s impossible to attain is better than no hope at all.

Like a Bad Husband

I chased a ton of things – more than most people, even “arrived” on occasion – but never managed to find the life I believed was out there. I did however arrive enough times to question whether or not the life I’m hoping to find actually exists.

That’s a nauseatingly painful thought when you’ve spent the brunt of your life in pursuit of something that gave you so much hope.

It felt like I was giving up on hope.

But it turned out to be a necessary step towards a better life, one that I never found in so many hot pursuits.

In 2017 I kicked the vocation siren off the boat and signed up for stay-at-home-dad duty. I didn’t totally give up on big dreams, writing here and there, hoping to at least get published somewhere worthy of bragging rights.

Fortunately, I’ve been on this trip long enough to know that none of that will appreciably change my quality of life. Fun and lucrative as it might be, pining away for that life isn’t worth missing this one.

The infinite wisdom of the cosmos has stripped me of any and all dream-chasing opportunities, forcing me with great power to, instead, interface with the life I’m living, the one that’s in my lap, the one that doesn’t require any chasing.

Having embraced that for a few years now, I’m beginning to realize that a different situation – more money, a bigger house, a place on the beach in Hawaii, an easier life, etc. – won’t feel much different than this life.

The first glimpse of this came in 2013 when we bought our current home. It’s bigger, newer, and nicer than our previous one, and for a year or so it did feel like a big, positive, meta-change. But it wasn’t long before life went back to what it was, with all of it’s mundanity and associated maladies.

That cosmic experience makes it much easier to appreciate and enjoy the house I have, and to stop dumping on it every time I see one that’s “better.”

The same goes for my current vocation. I’ve pursued 4 careers to date, all with their ups and downs, none of them leaving me with the impression that I had arrived, or removing my very strong desire to keep the chase going.

Imagine what my marriage would be like if I lived in the constant, agonizing belief that there was a better wife out there, just over the horizon. The same holds true for our hopes and dreams: so many of us are like bad husbands, missing the life we’re living because we’re convinced a better one is out there, tailor made, waiting for us.

But it won’t wait forever – if we don’t chase it now, we’ll miss it.

We suffer, literally, from the pursuit of happiness. We are always on the run, on the move, and on the go. Our goal is not to enjoy the day, it is to get through the day. We have always to get to somewhere else first before we can relax and before we can savor the moment. But we never get there. There is no point of arrival. We are permanently dissatisfied. The feeling of success is continually deferred. We live in hot pursuit of some extraordinary bliss we have no idea how to find.

Nothing makes life more miserable than the belief that there’s a much better one, just within reach, and we’re perpetrating some immorality if we don’t go after it with everything we have. I’m not suggesting that “bigger things” shouldn’t be pursued, but when they leave us dumping on the life we’re living, we’re truly wasting our days, and, ironically, missing our best life.

One Place Free

I’ll always be a big fan of C.S. Lewis, gauche as it is to quote him these days. His thoughts about human desire should always be in the back of our minds, especially when we’re in our pre-50’s “chasing” era. According to him, human desire is too big for this place: we’re meant for something else, a place that’s more suited to what we really want.

Here, however, we’re not chasing houses, or careers, or a “better life.” We’re chasing “heaven,” or whatever it is that humanity is headed for. I have to assume that, if God is real, that place will be tailor made for humanity’s desire for hope, intimacy, belonging, significance, joy, adventure, meaning, pleasure, etc.; the desires that are common to all of us, the ones that refuse to evolve away. Sure, they frequently get corrupted into things like greed, selfishness, pride, gluttony, etc., but if you’re human – from any era – you’ll want what lies at the core of those things, and you’ll understand why I believe that God put them there.

And if God put them there, it’s OK to believe that we’ll end up in a place where they have no barriers or constraints.

But for now, barriers and constraints seem to be all we have, with one very important exception.

We can’t have all the fame we want, or money, or fun, or beauty, or joy, or pleasure. We get glimpses of them, but nothing near what we truly want.

It’s interesting to note, however, that there aren’t many barriers on human intimacy. You can have all of that you want, if you have the courage for it.

And note that if you audit Jesus’ 20 something commandments, they’re all tailor-made to drive us closer to each other, to force us, just as the cosmos does, to value human intimacy above everything else.

If you want to spend your life and your money and your emotional resources chasing something, chase that, and place great hope in the life that comes from it.

My second set of best memories happened in college. I had aspirations of becoming a pilot, but that never got in the way of a few amazing friendships, and a ton of friends. My life revolved around people, doing stuff together, etc., much as it did in my first set of best memories.

No matter what you chase, life is going to feel – frequently – mundane and colorless, disappointing, boring, “less than,” etc., especially in those moments where you see something on the shelf that looks oh so much better than what you have. Sadly, these unsavory things come part and parcel with any and all pursuits. That’s why super rich people keep buying/changing/chasing things, and why they’re not frequentlly found bouncing off the walls about how great their life is.

This is all very preachy, I know, but one day we’ll be old and frail, hardly able to get around on our own, incapable of chasing anything other than the bathroom and a glass of water. In that era, all we’ll have is people, much like our younger days.

We can understand that now, and live the life that comes with it, or wait until our last few years, wishing we would have figured it out earlier.

We’ll also have our memories, and the best of those won’t have anything to do with nice houses or amazing careers. They’ll be full of the people that we managed to love the best, and all of the moments they brought with them.

 

Photo by Mārtiņš Zemlickis on Unsplash

If you’re an American Christian, especially a conservative one, you’re not cool with this decade’s assault on mainstream pronouns and it’s many underlying factors. To you, a girl is a girl and a boy is a boy. If we entertain any shift in grammar that suggests otherwise, we’re lying. Many feel that it’s destructive.

America’s values are under attack, and must be protected.

You’re also not going to address a singular person in the plural, because that’s just bad grammar. “It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” a friend of mine recently said.

I get it. As a 56 year old, Southern born, formerly conservative Christian, I can’t say I’m comfortable either. No old person likes it when their culture makes such a massive shift.

My world is changing so much, so fast, that it feels alien to me sometimes, like I can’t go home.

But calling the people who are driving these changes evil, and/or feeling like I have to lay aside Jesus’ agenda so I can fight them is a bit outside of the Gospel metanarrative, far as I can tell. In any cultural movement, we’re compelled to understand what’s happening and how we got here so we can best respond.

Distancing ourselves and pointing fingers isn’t a biblical response to culture, and it certainly isn’t saving America.

We love to say, “Be in the world, but not of the world,” i.e., Jesus wants us to interface with everyone regardless of religion or moral code, while avoiding whatever destructive, “sinful” patterns and perspectives they embrace. But we’re not very good at that. The way we handle things like money, justice, equity/equality, etc. suggests that we don’t have much of a problem with the broken ways that our world operates.

Scripture handles things like justice, equity/equality, and money far differently than we do.

But when someone messes with mainstream gender norms, we blow our tops, disconnect, call the outside world evil, and distance ourselves from it, while at the same time – with much irony – embrace so many of its other values.

Listening, connecting, serving, etc. seemed to be Jesus’ preferred posture towards his world, with the exception of the distance/finger-pointing crowd.

To my Christian friends who are angry, what follows are a few things to consider before you engage in disengagement, and the two-sided condemnation that follows.

They/Them God

According to scripture, God’s pronouns aren’t techincally “he/his.” In the Genesis narrative of the Old Testament, God is neither male nor female, while at the same time fully representative of both. In addition, God is often referred to in plural form (אֱלֹהִים elohim), and the church has confessed for millenia that he/she/it exists in a mysterious “triune” state; the “father,” “son,” and “spirit” living, building, and breathing as one unified being.

In our culture, we call him “him,” but it would be more accurate to use “they/them.”

In this story, God’s image is said to be male and female. To drive it home, the narrator reiterates:

“in the image of God he created they them.”

Somehow, it takes male, female, and both in union to represent whatever God is.

And a singular human represents a part of it. In additon, scripture alleges that each one of us “bears his image.” While addressing someone in the plural assaults some grammatical/cultural rules to be sure, it’s not nearly so far afield from the bible’s anthropology.

Either way, it won’t kill you to address someone as “they/them.” Neither will it hurl our world into some mindless, immoral abyss.

Righteous Anger?

Christians have gone to war over cultural shifts since America’s inception. Dancing, Rock and Roll, bikinis, abolition, Civil Rights, the sexual revolution, divorce, et-al, etc., all made us grumpy. And, by the way, we lost, every time. If it’s our job to drive/preserve/protect culture, we really suck at it.

Most of us are no longer upset about these things, so you have to wonder, when a bunch of us get mad at some cultural development, are we really mad at what we think we’re mad about?

Sure, there are times when our anger is driven by a righteous response to something, but most of the time it’s more closely related to fear mixed with the belief that it’s our job to get grumpy.

Everyone thinks their anger is righteous. But it almost never is.

Given our propensity towards the wrong kind of anger, we should engage in a bit of brutal introspection when we go to war with culture.

We could start by asking if God is mad at this new pronoun thing, and turn to scripture for guidance. But that’s tricky because the Christians who went to war against abolition, for example, were convinced that God hated it too. They even managed to find a slew of Bible verses to back themselves up. So did anti-rock and roll Christians, and many others. Turns out we can make the Bible say anything we want, and, in turn, craft a God that hates everything we hate.

I think the best place to start is by asking if you have any friends who support alternative pronoun usage and/or the underlying shift in gender identity. If not, why not? As a former conservative Christian, I could list many reasons why straight, white, conservative, suburban Christians keep their distance from the rest of the world. The church has been doing this for a long time. I can tell you that the underlying motivators are less than holy.

What’s the harm in having coffee with someone from the queer/trans community, or a flaming liberal, or, God forbid, a Black person? If you can’t handle something that simple, are you qualified to engage this issue?

Another good step is to audit your posture towards the church. When is the last time you critiqued it with the same passion and frequency that you critique the outside world? Racism, greed, whatever-a-phobia, gluttony, self-righteousness, and a host of other maladies infect today’s church. I’ve been deeply connected to many congregations over the past 30 years and I’ll tell you that things inside are just as dirty as they are outside. It just looks different.

The idea that the church is “cleaner” and “holier” than the outside world is garbage.

If our anger was righteous, it wouldn’t be so biased.

Modern Humanity’s Gender Mess

We’ve been using gender specific pronouns for a really long time. Right or wrong, it’s always been important to dilineate between who’s bilogically male and who’s biologically female.

But that history is also full of the belief and praxis that females are “less than” male; often abused, marginalized, etc. Even in our modern, progessive world, women are paid significantly less than men, a fact that makes few anti-pronoun Christians angry.

Historically, our gender norms have played a dubious role in American culture, ensuring that women exist below men in a legion of categories. Why are we so surprised that people are challenging these norms and the structures that they’ve birthed?

Instead of leading with understanding, humility, and connection, we go to war, like we always do, making a futher mess of our country.

Regardless of what we do or don’t do, our culture is going to make drastic changes that we don’t like. Our political activity and/or social media rants simply don’t have the power to stop them. Maybe that’s because we’ve sacrificed our influence on anti-culture campaigns that only end up shooting us in the collective foot. Now, nobody wants to listen, adding to our anger, fear, and isolation, ever more convincing us that we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

To hijack one of Jesus’ favorite phrases, “Repent, for God’s world lives, walks, breathes, heals, and does so many other powerful things, right under your nose.” There’s something bigger going on than trying to conform the world to our image. We’ve been ordered to “turn” (the literal meaning of repentance) from our selfish, fear-full agendas so that we might have room to embrace God’s.

With all of that, i dare you; sit down with a singular they/them, or anyone else with the “wrong” prounoun, and listen to their story. Don’t get sucked into a debate or waste your time trying to bring them back into mainstream pronoun usage. And don’t just listen, leave with the ability to articulate their side of the story.

If you can defend it, regardless of whether or not you agree with it, you’ve understood it.

If you can manage that, you’ll understand that these aren’t evil people trying to destroy your world.

Jesus talked about evil people, but he more frequently referred to the misdeeds and broken perspectives of the bible-believing, god-follower crowd, especially, again, those who placed great faith in distance and finger-pointing.

I only have one, and I’m not sure how they’d evaluate my parenting up to this point. They’re amazing; killing it in school, uber-responsible in most other arenas, respectful, and curious. We’re proud, and get a ton of joy from watching their transition into adulthood.

But this isn’t the era to teach new values. To them, Mom and dad are a bit clueless, with no real-world knowledge about the things they’re going through. They’re in the process of differentiating from us into their own person. The values that will aid in steering their course were set long ago, right or wrong, and can only be altered with much travail.

I think the best way to teach teenagers how to live is before they become teenagers, before they decide that we’re full of sh8. It might be too late for our other two as well, still “into” us, but both fast approaching their teen years.

I’m not suggesting that teenagers can’t learn anything, but because of their posture towards adults, and the “I’ve got it all figured out” arrogance that attends young America, it’s best to teach them everything we can before they board the boat to neverland.

With that in mind, following is my non-expert, not-so-experienced opinion about things that will serve our teenagers, and their parents, when they start driving automobiles and doing things they’re not supposed to do when (they think) we’re not looking

Rigor

When we first started teaching our kids how to clean things it was a trip to the devil’s front yard. At first, it seemed like we were asking them to saw an arm off – the crying and screaming was awful. Years ago, for example, on a camping trip, I asked a five year old to sweep out the tent, literally a ~5 minute task. The entire campsite suffered for that one, and I lost the battle.

We quickly learned that most kids don’t have whatever emotional strength is required to do something like clean a room. So, instead of force, punishment, etc., we helped to build that ability, introducing little bits at a time, trying not to overwhelm them while turning up the heat when appropriate. The chores they have now are much more advanced than they were a few years ago, and our house, much cleaner.

Homework has a similar history. One of our kids loves school and comes naturally to the academic arena, though it was a little rough in the beginning. The other two have been much more difficult, getting overwhelmed frequently, in need of some patience from this not-so-patient at-home cajun who garnered no applause when it came to academics.

When they feel overwhelmed, they get discouraged, convinced that they’ll forever fail in the subjects that are most difficult. But our job isn’t just to help them get their math homework done, it’s to teach them how to hang tight when they feel overwhelmed. The more we appropriately push, the more they learn how to respond when everything inside wants to quit.

It’s taken Elaine and I a minute or so to get on the same page with this. I came to parenting with a very “white” view of raising kids, not wanting to push them too hard for fear of hurting them. There’s some truth there to be sure, I know plenty of people who were pushed too hard by their parents, now uber capable folk who struggle to relax.

Elaine, on the other hand, came to parenting with a much more rigorous approach. At first, it seemed that she was being too hard, and I’ll admit that I felt like I had to step in and “protect” the kids from time to time. But I realized that, because of Elaine’s approach, our kids were growing in their ability to handle hard things, and that my soft, squishy brand of parenting wasn’t serving them well. I’m not suggesting that “softness” is always a bad thing – there should be a balance between work and fun – but if our kids are going to have any chance at a good life, they’re going to have to be pushed.

But pushing kids is a tricky business: if we go too hard we hurt them, and vice versa if we don’t push hard enough.

What I’ve learned in this journey is that they don’t have to be pushed all at once. We don’t have to force them to go from constantly dirty room to constantly clean room in one simple transaction. Building strength in our kids, “pushing” them to be stronger, can be a journey that happens over time.

“It’s not a transaction, it’s a process,” I like to say with annoying frequency.

To the point of this post, there’s a window. Younger kids will respond to being pushed, however we do it, much more easily than a 15 year old who’s never been pushed.

Identity

I’ve never met a teenager who wasn’t struggling to understand who they truly are.

Not only is this a time when kids pull away from her parents, mom and dad pull away too. We’re older and a bit worn out from raising kids while our teenagers send us message after message that they’re not interested anymore; a necessary, albeit heartbreaking transition. We don’t know what to do, so we give them the space and distance that they seem to be longing for, forgetting that they do truly love us, difficult as it is for them to show it.

At the same time, mom and dad are responsible for their identity formation, i.e., the idea that they possess unconditional value. If we fail here, they’ll wander through life searching for ways to feel good about themselves, many times in places that are false and/or destructive.

I’m not trying to frighten you, but our role in identity formation is crucial to their future happiness.

What sucks is that most parents don’t have a healthy sense of identity. How then are we supposed to pass on what we don’t possess?

It would be easy if we could simply sit them down from time to time and tell them that they matter, but that rarely works. We have to connect on their terms, when they’re ready, in ways that are meaningful to them. Those opportunities are much more frequent when they’re young.

If we’re too busy with work, or never emotionally available – especially if we’re abusive – our kids will grow up thinking that there’s something wrong with them, that they’re not worthy of our time and attention.

On the other hand, if we can at least manage a functional level of identity formation, our kids have a shot at enterting adulthood with something that few adults possess.

Authority

When we were seeking to adopt, the state of Colorado required a visit from a mental health professional to ensure that our household was running properly. She was very nice, and seemed to be deeply concerned with the welfare of our future child.

When we discussed discipline and authority, she shared that she didn’t believe in spanking. Instead, when her kids were bad, they would get sprayed with a water bottle. If the parents misbehaved, they’d get sprayed by the kids. A few years later, I saw her at a restaurant talking with one of the employees. When the waitress asked where her kids were, she threw up her hands and said that she couldn’t take them out in public anymore.

I don’t believe in spanking either, but I certainly don’t believe in spraying kids, although I might start doing it just to annoy them.

I’ll post a video here if I do.

It’s easy to miss the authority piece and we can easily find ourselves punishing too much or not enough, trying to avoid “hurting” our kids, confusing discipline with retaliation, or coming up with weird ideas that simply make things worse.

I’m not qualified to unpack what healthy authority looks like, but I’ll say that the internet is packed full of articles from reputable sources on the matter if you want to do some homework. Suffice it to say that, whatever we do to correct/teach, it has to be with authority. Our kids need to grow up knowing that there are people who know more than they do, that they are not their highest authority, that their feelings don’t always dictate truth, that they’re part of a family, and that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

Without authority, there can’t be any humility, and humility is core to a happy life.

But, like most things, there has to be balance. If we underdo authority, we hurt them just as much as if we overdo it.

Granted, teenage kids will challenge our authority like no other time in their life. But if, up to that point, we’ve abused our authority, giving them no “base” from which to operate, they’re much more likely to do their own thing, shunning authority for the rest of their lives.

If I could go back and try again, I’d do the dad thing much differently of course. Nobody comes to parenting without a startling lack of experience. And American culture doesn’t help, especially in the above arenas. But if you’re reading this, thinking through the base elements of good parenting, I hope my perspective is helpful.

Ultimately, whether we like it or not, us parents have more influence over our kids’ cosmic posture than anyone else, until they hit the teen years. We’ll still have some influence to be sure – it’s not time to completely check out – but the adolescent era will go much more smoothly if we do a functional job at getting our kids ready for it.