Husbands, love your wives...

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

Ephesians 5:25 

One of the best legacies that my Dad left me was his example of how he loved my Mum.  It wasn't that he was showy and romantic (at least, not that we saw).  It was that his love was a bedrock for their relationship, and consequently for our family.  He anticipated her needs and wants.  He brought her tea in bed in the morning.  He chipped in with the housework and cooking.  He didn't work all-hours, came home for dinners, spent weekends with us.  He remembered important dates, and celebrated them appropriately.  He remembered unimportant details (often concerning us kids), and so helped carry Mum's burdens.  He always respected her, always spoke kindly and lovingly to her, never bad-mouthed her or her family, and never, ever hit her.


I always felt safe at home (even when I didn't like some of the rules!), and I never felt the least possibility that our home life would change before I left to make a home of my own.  The grace of God and the good example of my Dad was so solid that I had trouble understanding some of the family struggles of my classmates.


My first full-time job as a lawyer was a real shock to me.  As a Legal Aid lawyer, I was meeting people whose families were built on quicksand, not bedrock.  Would Dad come home tonight?  Would there be money left after the pub and the pokies?  Would he be quiet, or drunk and violent?  Or else the questions would be of a different kind: Why did he leave?  Did I do something to drive him away?  Who was he anyway?


As I grow older, and see more of the world (and more of my community), I am incredibly grateful to my Dad.  I value his example of one man giving himself completely for one woman - and so building a safe place for his family.

Fear at a 7-year-old's birthday party

Ok, so I'm not writing about the abundance of pink frills, girly squeals and kids tripping out on food colouring.  Although these are pretty fearsome things, they were in moderation at Eldest's birthday last week.  (And in the case of the food colouring, completely eliminated due to the brilliance of my wife and some strategically placed blueberry skins and raspberry jam).  No, the chilling topic today is the far more prosaic habit of children to try to scare themselves silly with ghost stories.

There are 0 ghosts in this picture.

We recently had four 7-year-olds and one 5-year-old huddled together in the darkened bedroom, with only a torch for protection, persuading each other that if they looked just right, they could see an eyelash.  That's right, THE EYELASH GHOST IS COMING!  Five little girls come pelting out of the bedroom, clutching at my legs for protection from disembodied optical follicles.  


"There's a ghost in my bedroom, Dad!  Friend#1 saw it.  It's real."
"Darling, there are no ghosts in this house, we don't let them in here.  Now what do you want on your pizza?"
"But it spoke to Friend#2, Dad.  I'm scared."


7-year-olds are really persistent.  So of course I exorcised the ghost as any good Dad would - turned on the lights, confiscated the torch, told the girls that ghosts weren't real and to come to the table and eat some dinner.  (I suppose I could've got my wife's eyelash curler and fought the ghost valiantly with that, but as the idea has only just occurred to me, I'm three days late with that bit of parenting brilliance.  Feel free to use it yourself if you haven't yet had your brush with 7-year-old eyelash ghosts.)


The whole incident would have passed with nothing more than a roll of the eyes if it hadn't been for the persistence of my daughters' fears after Friends#1, #2 and #3 had all left.  Suddenly we don't want to go to bed, because the ghost is in the room.  We don't want Dad to leave the room, because of the ghost.  What to do?


Plan 1.1, as usual, is: raise voice, issue ultimatum, and think up some suitably fearful consequence for disobedience (gotta be pretty big to compete with ghost-fear!).  Then I remember that I'm trying to wean myself off plan 1.1 - it just takes so long to do the job, and produces too much bad-parent-guilt.  So I try the newfangled plan 2.0.  It's hardly even out of the box, and I definitely didn't read the instruction manual, so I'm winging it.


"You know there's no such thing as ghosts, don't you?"
"But Friend#1 said she saw it."
"There are no ghosts.  I know, because they're not in the bible.  People think that a ghost is a dead person who has come back.   The bible says that when we die, with either go to be with Jesus if we love him (like you and me), or we go to hell if we didn't.  The people who go to be with Jesus stay there, and the bible also says that the people who go to hell can't get out of there.  So you see there's no way a ghost could come back to be here - they're all either with Jesus or in hell!"
(Brilliant!  This plan is working beautifully already!)


"But Friend#1 saw one!"
(Aha, I think, mistakes and misperceptions... )  "Whatever she thought she saw, it couldn't be a ghost, because they're either in hell or with Jesus."  (Quick, what else could it have been?)  "You know how God created angels, and some of them went bad like satan, well there are demons.  They're real."  (Uh, oh - this isn't going so well - from ghosts, which are a bit weird-scary, to demons which are, well, demonic.)
My poor scared little 5-year-old doesn't have any words left - just great big blue eyes.
"Here, lets read this promise that Jesus made" and so we read together from John 6:37-40.  We talk about how Jesus beat satan and demons, and that we now don't need to fear them because He keeps us safe.  We talk about how he promises never to let us go or lose us.  We sing the Colin Buchanan version of those verses.  And she settles down to sleep.  There is power in the word of God.


Epilogue
Driving last night in the car, the ghost theme came up again.  5-year-old protests: "There are no ghosts.  They're all in hell". 


Well, near enough.

Hearken to the evidence ...

I didn't catch the Q and A episode with John Lennox - it had started before it hove into my conscience, but some friends of mine on twitter were tweeting about it.  So it's in the iView queue, and I followed the thread on twitter for a while.  Two significant themes emerged from the tweets: One is an assertion that Christianity cannot be proved, and so should not be taught in schools at all; the second is that teaching any form of religion in schools is brainwashing.


Both views seem to be pretty widely accepted in our society, and both views are complete rubbish.  So I want to respond, and think about how we can inoculate our kids against these fallacies.


Firstly - evidence for Christianity.  The standard argument that there is no evidence is usually one that relies on there being no scientific evidence for Christianity: that the existence of God, or the occurrence of miracles, or the efficacy of prayer cannot be tested under laboratory conditions.  Therefore they are unprovable scientifically, and therefore there is no evidence for a belief system that includes these things.  But if we look at these statements, it's clear that there are many things that will fall outside the field of scientific enquiry.  I know that my wife loves me; I know that I can trust my close friends to keep my confidences; I know that I can believe what my parents tell me: but there are no scientific experiments that can prove these things.


Perhaps nearer the point, most of us only know what our children did at school today because someone who was there told us.  We only know that Hadrian built his wall, or that Stalin killed his millions, or that Hannibal crossed the alps on elephants because of historical documents that record what witnesses to those events observed.  Most of us only know that there are microscopic things like atoms, molecules and cells because someone has told us about them (and certainly not because we've undertaken the scientific experimentation ourselves!)


The fatal flaw in the "no evidence for Christianity" argument is that it overlooks other categories of evidence in exclusive favour of scientific evidence.  As a criminal lawyer for 8 years I saw this same error occur at times in jury trials.  Extremely persuasive and cogent eyewitness testimony was rejected because there was no forensic scientific evidence.  If we refuse to take note of any evidence that is not scientific, we exclude significant sources of reliable knowledge.


I think it is important to teach our kids about this!  Not everything can be known through science.  Not everything that science tells us is necessarily reliable.  Our kids need to be taught to sift through and evaluate the evidence.  Just as our kids need to be taught to sift through and evaluate other forms of evidence - eyewitness testimony, historical record and the like.


And that leads to the second false view circulating - that any teaching of any religion amounts to brainwashing.  In my view, the fact that the term is bandied about so freely in the religion-in-schools debate is either a display of ignorance about how religious education is (or can be) approached in modern schools, or else a misleading piece of rhetoric.


Let's assume ignorance to start with - I suppose that hangovers from the 40s or 50s might lead some to assume that any religious education in schools will be rigid, dogmatic, programmatic and allowing of no dissent.  Where belief (or expressions of belief) are coerced, then perhaps this does fit a description of brainwashing, such as occurs under some totalitarian regimes and in some times of war. It cannot seriously be suggested that Christians or the churches currently have the social or political power to coerce belief, even amongst children.  It cannot seriously be suggested that the churches would use a fear-based technique that would bring such fleeting and superficial results.  But do we truly believe that teaching kids the tenets and historical foundation for the world's greatest faith amounts to brainwashing?  Laying out a belief and providing reasons and evidence for that belief is not brainwashing - it is education!  


I suppose there might be some Christian parents who enforce belief in their children through objectionable means - but given that this is a universal parenting problem that spans all beliefs (and lacks-of-belief) - it's stretching things too much to credit this evil to the Christian side of the ledger.  The argument might more strongly be put that atheist parents are brainwashing their children by refusing to present the evidence for Christianity - certainly in the current prevailing culture those children are less likely to see both sides of the debate fairly presented.


Which brings us to the use of "brainwashing" as a rhetorical device.  If the real concern is coercive Christian education, why not say so?  We can understand that we are happy for our kids to learn about Christianity, but not to be pressured into a decision.  We can then truly agree, perhaps, that we want each person to make up his or her own mind by reference to all of the evidence and arguments.  I suspect, though, that this is precisely what many aggressive atheists do not want - they do not want every person to have the opportunity of fairly and individually assessing the evidence for and against Christianity: they want to push any discussion of Christianity out of the public sphere altogether.  They want the field to themselves.


Again, what to do for our kids?  Just as our kids need to know about different types of evidence, and need to learn how to evaluate such evidence, our kids need to know about different types of argument.  They need to be prepared to meet these different worldviews in their school yard, from their teachers, from their teammates.  They need to be prepared to present and defend their own beliefs (even as they are being formed and refined!), while they can carefully assess (and where appropriate, attack!) the beliefs that are being pressed on them.


Now how on earth do we do that!?

A gentle conquest

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.  So if you worship me, it will all be yours.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”

Luke 4:5-8 

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!"

Luke 13:34 

"[God] cannot ravish.  He can only woo."

C. S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters 

Jesus had a genuine opportunity to obtain, in an instant, all the kingdoms of the world (Jerusalem with her children included).  The devil's claim that he can give Jesus all those kingdoms is bold.  But Jesus does not deny the truth of that claim.  He does deny the legitimacy of the devil's methods.


Jesus goes even further, though, in his lament over Jerusalem.  He longs to gather up the children of Jerusalem, but cannot because "You were not willing".  Truly he will not ravish - he will only woo.


This struck me powerfully this week, as I've been thinking about how we raise the kids in the church where I work, and consequently how I raise my own kids.  I know that Jesus' words are life and light; I know that he is the only way, life and truth; I long for my children to know and love and follow Jesus; I long for my children to experience the joy I have in following Him.


But all that is entirely outside of my control.  If Jesus will not ravish - will not gather against the will of those to be gathered - how can I?  "Outside my control" is very hard for a Dad to handle.  But by God's grace, two things give me comfort - influence and influence.


I have the very great privilege to be able to influence God through prayer.  In writing that I immediately balk at the claim, but I cannot escape the clear words of Jesus:

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. John 15:16

I can and do pray frequently that my children will come to a loving, living relationship with Jesus.  And I believe that this is truly His will for my kids.


I also have the great privilege to be a role model for my kids.  I hope and pray I'm a good role model.  I know that I will mostly fall short, but I pray that I will pass on some of the great hope and joy of life with Jesus.  In this way, I hope that my kids get a taste of the love and goodness and richness of Christian life - of eternal, joyful life-to-the-full.  I hope they will choose freely to surrender to the rightful claims of their God, King and Saviour.  I pray that they choose the gentle conquest that leads to true freedom.

Bedtime prayers ...

Me: "God, thank you that you are kind, and loving.  Thank you that you created ..."
Daughter2: "One, Two, Three, Four, Five" (counting my fingers).
M: "... thank you that we can count.  One, Two, Three, Four, Five"
D2: (giggles)
M: "And thanks that five plus five always equals ..."
D2: "Ten!"  (More giggles).
M: "and thank you that ..."
D2: "Two plus two is four"
M: "Yes, thank you that two plus two is always four.  Thank you for maths."

I never, ever, EVER, thought that I would thank God for maths.

more than words ...

Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.  1 John 3:18

Did you see Apollo 13?  If so, you will remember that gripping 4+ minutes towards the end.  After days (was it only days) of things going consistently wrong in space, the 3-man team aboard are re-entering the atmosphere.  Houston knows that they will lose contact with the ship for the 3 minutes it takes to get from stratosphere to splash-down.  Mission control is tense, but not panicked.  But then the 3 minutes pass, and there is still no contact.


In my memory, the film makers slow the pace of the movie to real-life speed.  4 minutes is such a long time.  


"Apollo 13, do you copy?"
Silence.
"Apollo 13?"
Silence.


Radio crackle.  Heartbeats.


And then Tom Hanks' voice: "Houston? ..."


I'm sure that at every screening, every audience member unclenched his fists, sat back in her seat, breathed out long and slow.


The message was being broadcast - it wasn't being received.

Which is a long-winded introduction to the scene at the Oakley house this evening, in which Number Two bounded up to my lovely wife Sally with her hands peaked on top of her head.  "Goodnight Mummy.  That means 'I love you' in Squiffy language" she says.


After the "aww"-moment passed, I started thinking.  We tell our children often enough that we love them - we're broadcasting the message - but are we being received?  


My Eldest understands love through gifts.  I first realised this when she was raging about someone touching "her things".  Aha!  Now some of her other behaviour makes sense!  She loves to give little presents to me and Sally.  She's always at me to buy Sally flowers (I really should listen to her more.)  She always sneaks little things she's been given to school to show her friends.  


Suddenly a lot of the fights between her and Number Two made more sense.  Suddenly I wondered: has she been on a starvation diet for these last few years?  Not receiving the message of love I've been broadcasting?  As she grows she'll see my love for her in the day-to-day things, but for now, I'm trying to speak her language.  I'm praying that, in recent months, that message has been getting through.


And Number Two?  I think she's a cuddler, which is quite alright by me.


I found Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages a really helpful book to understand that Sally expresses and receives love differently from me.  He's also written versions specifically for kids and teenagers.