Protect Your Family
Dear Pastors
Protect Your Family
We put locks on our doors, alarms in our hallways and these days even a CTV camera in our entrance ways and driveways. If an intruder should break in and threaten the safety of our family…..things could get ugly, right? And so they should. That’s what we do as Fathers, we protect our wives and children from danger and from harm.
Of course here I am talking about physical harm. But what about emotional and spiritual harm?
One of the many things that distress me these days is observing how many baby boomer pastors (some still pastoring, others retired) who are living with great sadness. The sadness is around their adult children and/or their grandchildren. So many aren’t doing well? Kids walking away from the Church, Marriages under great stress, grandchildren struggling to grow up in this so called brave new world.
Prioritise Your Family’s Needs Above All Else
To be honest this is hard and it is complex. Certainly this is no time for trite answers. The families I am talking about are ‘good families’. In these families there was and is a lot of love and acceptance. In these families parents worked darn hard to raise good kids. And for the most part they achieved exactly that.
Yet there is so much grief and sadness around these days……..so much.
In this blog today I want to say to younger pastors who are also Fathers with kids still at home (older pastors both male and female are free to lean in). Please prioritise your family’s needs above all else. What I mean is this, the needs of your wife and the needs of each of your children are more important than the needs of folks in your church or anything else at church. Your children’s needs are far more important in fact.
To be clear I am not saying you shouldn’t work hard at church. The challenge for you as it was for me is to work hard yet do all I could do to protect my family from the schemes and attacks of the ‘evil one’.
The devil hates Christians, and he hates Pastors even more. I know that sounds strong but I want to call a spade a spade at this moment. If he can mess with your family he has basically won the battle.
So, let me recommend two practises today
- That you and your wife regularly do a ‘needs assessment’ of each of your children. Write down what you come up with. Write down your worries, anxieties and concerns for each of your children. Having done that be sure you come up with an agreed upon strategy to address those needs. Update that list regularly and check in with each other often as to how things are playing out.
- Pray focused and intense prayers for your children, for their spiritual and emotional lives, their inner worlds. I would often take a family photo and pray over that photo and pray for each child individually and also for my wife. I would ask God to keep my kids from harm. I would pray against the schemes of the devil. I would pray that they would get the best teachers, that they would make great friends, that they would meet significant ‘others’ (it takes a village…….) and that they would meet the most suitable wives on the face of the earth. I would pray that they would have their own experience of Jesus, preferably as young as possible. And I would pray for wisdom in raising these youngsters that was far better than my own or that of Jeanette’s.
And now all these years later I am so aware that I need to keep on ‘praying without ceasing’ for my four kids marriages and my eleven grandkids. It takes a lot more time but it is perhaps the most important thing I can do.
Finally. I accept absolutely that no parenting practise or technique is ‘full proof’ and there are no guarantees. Parenting isn’t like a machine….do this and you get that…….put this in and this will come out. I wish it was. There is quite a bit about the parenting task that is a mystery quite frankly. But this one thing I know without a shadow of a doubt, God loves those kids of yours more than you do and He really wants them to live their lives with Jesus as their shepherd, friend and saviour.
Blessings
Alan
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