Talking to my baby – Bex- the other day we discussed a broken romance, and I mentioned that the young man could not be a good husband yet, because certain aspects of his character hadn’t matured. We went on to discuss the origins of the word “husband” ‘husband’ comes from the word husbandry meaning to look after, to help develop and grow, and to manage. Interestingly the word “father” is more simply defined as – human male parent.
She said “But I still love him” – no only joking –

To be a husband should be to cherish & to care for, to help grow-- - things that some fathers and husbands fail to do. And these are things that none of us are taught how to do.

It is a lot easier to become a father than a husband.
You meet a nice looking sheilah. You talk. Sparks fly. You indulge in some serious snogging. And Hey Presto you are waking up on Father’s day morning 10 years later with a tribe of kids bringing you breakfast in bed.

2 weeks ago Pastor Di came to see me.
She had a funny look on her face – she looked a bit anxious, a bit on edge, she was serious about something, and, unusually for her, a bit uncertain.
Di looked at the photos on my desk and said, ”What lovely children you have. You have been such a good father to have brought them up so well.”

“Hmm”, I thought to myself, “What’s going on here?”
Then Di launched into what was on her mind.
She asked me to do the sermon tonight.

I said NO.
That was easy.
I am blessed, at 54 yrs, to know Gods calling on my life.
And add to the fact that asking me to preach is like asking me to sing.
Just as I don’t call myself a singer, so tonight is less about me preaching and more about my sharing the lessons that I have learnt in the process of parenting- so that maybe, you won’t fall into the same traps, -so that maybe you will learn how and where prayer and giving things over to God will bring a measure of peace and joy into our lives as ever anxious parents.

No looking back it is much harder being a husband than a father.

With Will as our firstborn it was no great shakes doing all the baby stuff for me. As the eldest of 5 and raised on a farm, I knew all about biology and anatomy and diseases and what parents do to look after babies.
Being a doctor I was streets ahead of the average father in both theoretical and practical knowledge… But I was still terrified and overwhelmed.

What were my lessons from this -the baby stage?
1 Choose your wife carefully
Jenny is a most wonderful loving and caring mother and wife. You have to work as a team – you have to be able to communicate
The next lessons were in patience, and to seek advice early, and to get supports through family and friends.

There is a certain pattern that I see repeated again and again. Groups of friends or siblings will all tend to have children at the same time, and these parents act as advisors, carers and baby sitters for each other – sought of like “Group therapy”.
And the kids grow up together, sought of like a “mobile zoo”.

Unfortunately it is only towards the end of the baby stage that you usually get it all together.
But by then they are in the ultra-destructive toddler phase.
I refer to as the “plastic stage” where you own nothing that cannot be bent, thrown, chewed, or sucked very wetly.
Nothing sharp is left out of a locked drawer, and you learn to hide the goldfish, the remote, the drain-cleaner, the matches and the precious glassware. Your carpets need replacing with something totally washable in a stain hiding colour and pattern. Pets like dogs and cats must be able to suffer terrible abuse without biting, scratching or snarling.

And you are still waking up 2-3 times a night.
And you are still changing pooey gooey nappies in shades of yellow-green and beige to brown.
Only now the problem is they kick and wriggle while you change them so that you have to wash your hands with industrial strength antiseptics, and change your pyjamas before you get back into bed.

And a warning- if you had thought that your spouse was perfect till now, you are in for a big surprise.

You realize you are not in control. Your life is in a downward spiral of work, bad sleep and a tetchy grumpy and frumpy looking spouse. You may even have had your first experience of what my middle sister Helen calls “hallway sex”.

So some of life’s truths are standing out
1 Every family is dysfunctional
2 You cannot be a parent and not fear being investigated by the Family services Dept.
3 Ordinary household items can become instruments of punishment- Jenny broke every one of our wooden spoons in the process of corporal punishment. I rarely actually wore my slippers as they fly though the air with a high degree of accuracy and leave little or no bruising.

I have learnt that I cannot be the perfect parent.

Early on in the quest to try to be a good father I drew on my memories of my dad and how he treated us, and how it all worked out in retrospect.

My dad showed his love for us in practical ways. Every morning he would bring us a yummy cup of tea in bed with a biscuit. Usually this was a homemade shortbread or Monte Carlo. The tea was milky warm and very sweet.

Dad expected a lot from me as far as work on the farm was concerned. And I don’t doubt that this strongly influenced my work ethic. All day I would work on the tractor, at night I would do my homework –leaving the most unpleasant homework like writing essays till the very last thing on Sunday night. Then the inspiration that came only from desperation would drive my pen.

Dad, in his later years, talked a lot about politics to me – I realize now that I was his lightning rod, where he worked things out as he talked.

My parents I love dearly. But it was only after my dads funeral that my sister told me a sad fact.
Dad had never said, “I love you” to any of us and most sadly my sister, Jay, had overheard him bragging about it. I thought back and could not ever remember him telling me that he loved me. I recalled the innumerable times of going up to him and hugging him and telling him I loved him.

This attitude of my father had a great impact at least on the eldest of my sisters and looking back may have contributed to some of the pathology that occurred in my brother and sisters’ lives.

My lesson from this is - unceasingly and unhesitatingly tell your children, brothers and sisters, and parents and grandparents that you love them.

Sadly my own attitudes of cynicism, sarcasm and judgementalism have impacted deeply and very badly on at least one of my children.
Blundering along like an ignorant bull I have induced anorexia and a secondary severe depression in one of my children. This was simply by off the cuff, unthinking statements about other people.

My lesson from this is summed up well in James 3:1,2,6-8.

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive stricter judgement. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body.
And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is so set among our members that it defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

How do you cope when you make a major stuff up that affects the lives of those around you ? I did my best to love my child through their tribulation. I tried not to be hard on myself. Jen and I prayed for my child and for myself and through understanding what had happened, and continuing to work to correct that faulty attitude, changes happened.

I learnt to listen quietly to others and to try to see beyond their words.
Most importantly I gained much needed peace when I prayed
“God” I asked “ I leave this child utterly in your hands. I cannot control anything here- neither the eating nor the depression- I cannot cure this illness. I rely on you.”

What about Will?
Always the eldest child forges the way.
Will was a fruitarian. He would eat only fruit.

I know nutrition, - he’s not getting calcium his bones are going to be deformed – he’s not getting protein his muscles are going to be weak, his brain is not going to develop.
Will stand up and where is Brady? Stand up for us please Brady.
Guys pick the fruitarian for me.

Will was fantastic at eating bananas -he could fit 3 bananas in his mouth at once.

Unfortunately he was also a head-banger not a pretty combination

I worried about him getting brain damage –again.
So I would gently explain to Will that this habit upset me and that I loved him a great deal and I wanted him to stop doing it.
I would explain this to Will each time I heard that little head go thump thump thump against his pillow as he lay in bed at night. I was consistent in this and fairly quickly- maybe over several months he gave it away.

Because I was the eldest in a family of 5 much of my parenting attitude has been in the form of being a big brother. To a large extent I have learnt to grow with my children, moving from my own hobbies and interests and taking on theirs, so that we have much in common, and so that they can see me try something and fail. I believe that our kids learn much more from seeing how their parents cope with failure than they can ever learn from seeing how we cope with success.

Taking on the kids interests and hobbies and sports have brought much challenge, joy, and unexpected delights into our lives – When Will became interested in athletics Jen and I joined the Maryborough club on the competition side of things; we became fitter and even ended up competing at international levels.

Another family activity that we now join in and get much fun out of is wakeboarding. We use my 20 year old fishing boat to tow us up and down the Mary river. My old fishing mates who know my boat well think I have gotten onto a secret patch of barra and keep on trying to pry my spots from me. As a family we all go wakeboarding together except for our youngest son – Lachlan.

Lachlan has in some ways, been the most difficult of our children, and maybe the one I have learnt the most from.

Each of our children have presented their own set of problems as they have grown- Will the fruitarian and head-banger.
Eliza was the most wilful. By the time Zize turned four years, she had slept through only 2 nights- That’s right we had 3 years and 363 nights of disturbed sleep by one child.

Ewen –the profoundly adventurous one would go until he ran out of energy -like a battery driven toy. When he ran out of energy he went to sleep- he would go to sleep in the act of putting food into his mouth, he would go to sleep on the toilet.
Ewen was compelled to try every sport that was being played in Maryborough but each for only one season- so we ended up with wicket keeping gloves, footballs, volley balls, BMX bikes, sprinters spikes, hockey sticks…

Lachlan worried me – He never talked.
The thought that he had a form of autism consumed me, until one day, on a whim, I reached out my index finger toward him while I smiled at him. He reached out his index finger to me and touched my outstretched finger and smiled at me.
So we often, from then on, touched fingers while smiling at each other.

As he grew older Lachlan would wilfully not join in any family activities whether it was fishing or athletics or wakeboarding. The only exception to this was soccer, which all the children played –so Jen and I didn’t have to be in 2 places at once just one place all day
woohoo.
Actually the exclamation “woohoo” comes from Locky.
But there was nothing in common between Lox and I – he wouldn’t fish, rarely played tennis. He rarely even talked to us, especially as a teenager.

What Lox loved to do most of all was play computer games and Nintendo games.
So, as a last resort, I got my own Nintendo game cube. I bought the same games that I know he loved playing and I learnt how to play them.

It has turned out to be not so much as a sacrifice of my time and energy but it has opened my eyes to the changing culture of our society. When I was growing up on the farm we played cards, chess, and board games as a social lubricant. It was what we played while we talked, joked and got to know each other.
The present generation of teens and twenty something’s have LAN nights – playing games with names like ‘Diablo’, or ‘Command and Conquer’.

What has Lachlan taught me?
To be flexible, to be willing to move way out of my comfort zone. In the process I might have gained some computer skills but I was able to relate to whole new group of exciting young people, and better understand our changing society.

Bex has been a completely different kettle of fish. With Bex I have learnt patience. In her teens she couldn’t accept the concept of time passing. It seemed clocks were an irrelevant decoration that adorned walls. Watches were jewellery for wrists.
Through Bex I have been reminded to give the people I love time – time to talk, time to listen, time to ask questions, time to tell me that they are worried, time to have a cuppa, time to share a prayer.

In my work Bex taught me to try to stop focussing only on problems and to try to understand the whole person, to share a laugh, and to not rush through life.

Then there are other peoples children.
I have been deeply humbled by the love and the attention that children show me.
One day I can give them a series of 3 painful injections and the following Sunday they run up to me in church and throw their little arms around me giving the most beautiful hugs.
I honestly fail to understand this.
All I can say is that this love, I regard as a very special blessing from God on my life. I cannot say to you do this and this and this and you will be blessed like me. The only advice I have is- To freely pass on what has been freely given – love with an open heart not expecting anything in return.
1John 4:16
God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

Never fail to pray with a child when the chance arises. One of my favourite memories is praying with little Brit.
She must have been 3 or 4 at the time and she had just come out of a kids session at the annual Wesley conference in Toowoomba. The children’s session must have been on prayer because she asked me to pray with her. So I did.

When you pray for others you can pray prayers of great blessing- you can ask God for many things because what you ask for is not yours to give but it is Gods, and it is not yours to receive but for someone else and it is up to God to give according to His full measure. So don’t be timid in your requests.

Lack of money shouldn’t be an excuse to not try to make your children’s childhood special.
When our tribe was young and we were paying off a mortgage, most weekends we would walk to our local billabong and have a picnic. There we would do old fashioned lobbying with a home made lobby trap. Our kids would swing on the rope, bomb-diving into the billabong.
They would do a balancing act on logs that straddled the billabong.
Holidays would be spent at my parents farm, or with friends camping.
But our house was always full of the kids and their friends, many sleep overs, their lives were kept full of creative activities with music and painting being the most common
For the whole of their childhood fast foods were very rare. Our kids might have had KFC or pizza once every 3 months. Instead Jen prepared home made pizza and I would cook Kentucky fried fish.

I grew up on a farm – my dad worked the farm and mum was purely all mum. 4 children slept in one bedroom and mum and dad in the other bedroom. I studied on the dining room table. On the weekends I worked to earn pocket money or just to help dad out. Mum and dad took us on a holiday once a year where we would go to the Sunny coast for 1 to 2 weeks. On our farm I worked a small Ford tractor preparing the soil for crops like lucerne and wheat, or sat on a horse minding the cattle. It was a greatly blessed childhood rich in experience, lots of cousins, and full of the wild fun country people can get up to. I had my choice of 3 horses and I rode bareback everywhere –fast. There were miles of twisting cow tracks on our farm and I ran over them fast.

Minding cattle and ploughing fields gives you lots of time to contemplate, and looking back there was no period in my life that I can recall where I did not know of Gods hand on my life. I have very early memories of being a very small boy at Sunday school, very early memories of learning bible verses off by heart.

Our lives are short and time passes quickly- It is too easy to plonk the kids down in front of TV. Invest your time in your children’s lives, play games with them, talk to them, listen to them, switch off the TV and create memories in their hearts and minds.
Grow with them.
Fall down.
Let them see you try something and fail and try it again. Don’t expect that you will out hit or out jump or out run them. It is the way of life that we will diminish and they will rise up.

Despite being bought up in a nominally Christian household, despite having God in my heart, despite going to Sunday school and church practically every Sunday of my early life, I couldn’t be considered to be a Christian until I had asked God into my life , and to give God charge over my life.
This has radically changed my outlook on life. Now I can say “God, you are in control. I cannot control my children but I can give them over to you. I cannot control my own attitudes or my bad habits but I can give them over to you”.
Maybe others would emphasize the 10 commandments as the way to bring up a child, but my view is to approach every child, every problem, every situation with love in my heart.

As the worship team comes up I’ll read 1John 4: 15 and 16
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.