Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture
This is Raising Joyful Children in an Angry World. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. Well, we've spent about 36 episodes dedicated to understanding the battle for identity for our kids and learning, hopefully, some parts of what it means to be a member of of the kingdom of God, while understanding we walk in the kingdom of man. Grasping the way that the world wants to replace God's identity with its own identity, learning to build your family in the kingdom of heaven, to have a Christian worldview, that is to see how God defines virtue, resilience, liberty, freedom, talent, teaching the basics of faith. Prayer, the gospel. And once a family commits itself to the kingdom of Jesus, we're then able to discuss the formation of character. See, once you've laid down this foundational truth, then it's time to transition into the building of character. And that's what I hope we can do over the next set of podcast is focusing on the issues of building godly character. The time in raising kids is short, and it's easy to get distracted. This weekend was interesting. Wall Street Journal writer Megan Cox Gergen reviewed Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation. Now, Hite's talking about the smartphone to Generation Z. He calls it the great rewiring. And he declares in his book that the smartphone generation was the greatest parental experiment ever and a total disaster. He talks about the spikes in suicide and mental health to support his findings. The same weekend, Rob Lytle in the Sunday Times provides his take on the growing mental health crisis in the UK. He seems to think it's related to the growth industry of counseling. political propaganda, and the decline of the Anglican church. And you start reading this stuff and yeah, I mean probably policing the smartphone is what's needed and being a little skeptical about some of this counseling stuff is probably okay. But these causation correlation stories They get us distracted. The reality is Jonathan Haidt and Rob Lytle are both probably partially right. But what do we do about it and how do we not get caught up in getting too worried about that and miss forming godly character, which is the true antidote. Well, I think you have to start with the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes in Bill Bennett's book, a letter to his daughter. He poses the question, what are you aiming for in the first place? I think what we're aiming for is that all of us want our kids to be Come men and women of integrity, hardworking, honest, loving, kind, courageous adults. Some collection of Christian virtues that we hope they develop. And as we've said many times, the best of parents are parents at best. We're busy, hardworking couples trying their best to raise great families. And it's going to take more than us. The Bible and the Great Minds and the Church Fathers would suggest three things at least that I think influence character. Story, adventure, and experience. Get the right stories, take the right adventures that reveal truth, participate and experience virtuous activities, and you get the kingdom view. Fill your head with the wrong stories, explore the darkness of the world, experience the vices of mankind, and the person you become will not be what you're aiming for. It's that old quote from Emerson, Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny. Stories are thoughts and characters. Adventures are acts. Experiences are habits. This all has to be done in the framework of Paul's words found in 2 Corinthians, chapter 318. And we, with unveiled faces all, contemplate and reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. See, we don't want to turn this into works righteousness. In fact, we cannot build godly character without trusting it is the Lord who transforms our kids. Without this understanding, we're not going to avoid the pride, judgmentalism, legalism, and all the nastiness that comes out of that soup. This is a parallel that's difficult for many in our faith. But it is our faith in God that encourages us in planting the seeds of story, adventure, and experience, not confidence in ourselves or the motivational flesh of our kids. In fact, you're going to find that the patience and at times you're going to, you're going to need that patience to the resistance to these practices. And that requires you to trust God. The importance of sharing great stories, including those in the Bible is because the world is going to tell your kids a different set of stories. Many popular influencers in our society will help kids become nihilistic and narcissistic zombies. The message will be something like the world sucks, so get all you can get out of it today. And most of us underestimate the power of story and we undervalue the importance of family stories, the ones that you share. I mentioned last time, I've been reading through Marco Polo, Venice to Xanadu. Polo describes many tribes and religious practices on his journey to the Mongolian empire of the great Khans. And as they make it across the desert, he needs a tribe, let's say they run a bed and breakfast, very hospitable. However, the tribe shares more than a bed and breakfast, but participates in what is called endogamy. Something I've never heard of, but it's the sharing of the wife. Goes completely against everything that you would think of in the natural instincts of a man and his wife. Polo says, Clavius Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson, is now the emperor and he hears about it. And he says, you got to stop. And so they stop because, you know, he's, he's Clavius Khan. He can kill you. But according to Polo, famine comes and illness. And so this tribe sends ambassadors to convince Khan to let them do it. risking their own lives to have this meeting and they convince Khan and he agrees. You see, the thing I'm telling you is that the thing that you would think is totally unnatural goes against all relational understanding. Yet when a culture is told a story over and over, it grabs some correlations to the causations. People start to believe what is a lie. It influences their character and their actions and they throw away the truth. And that is the power of story. And it happens in our culture all the time. The commentaries in our news media, the influencers on social media, podcasters, All these dystopic themes in music, film, and novels are coming at your kids all the time. The modern prophet, as we've said before, finds the flaws of our world, then they dismiss the entire institution whenever they see these cracks, and then they conclude this is why they deserve to be an influencer. And the effects to join this nihilistic view that the world's a mess, there's nothing that can be done about it, and you're stuck in it, are followed by the conclusion that, well, you may as well grab all the thrills you can, live your life, you do you. Pearl Davis is one of these influencers. I had never heard of her. But she has to be the most jaded 27 year old I've ever seen. She rants about marriage, family, traditional values as pipe dreams without ever having been married or had a family. Her ideas are the result of listening to story after story, interview after interview of families that failed and concluding, it's not worth it. For our families to be what we hope for, for our kids to grow up, to be virtuous people, to live out and have godly character, we're going to need an antidote to the poisoning of the American mind and the Western society. We're going to need to tell our children's stories. We're going to need to give them adventures that include virtuous moments, We're going to have to adopt some practices that allow them to experience what it means to practice virtue as the Lord transforms them. And so what I hope to do over the weeks ahead is share stories, talk about adventures, maybe some experiences that influence thoughts, acts, habits that lead to character and Christian destiny. The idea that the failure stats of this world should lead us to throw in the towel is foolish. The world failures that lead to these Hellenistic views are not new. They're as old as the world and they can be seen in any historical part of our society and world history. The Christian family is going to have to push to do things differently, dissect stories together, examine the adventures we take and practice and experience the virtues we hope to attribute to ourselves. In the kingdom. Now I've said before GK Chesterton his quote. It's not that Christianity has been tried and found lacking It's the Christianity has been found difficult and lacks trying and like all statements I would say there's some truth in this but Christianity in the long term It's not hard. Jesus says my yoke is light. See, being countercultural seems hard, but that too is a bit of an illusion. Being pulled into culture and letting it form your character is what is truly hard. And this is difficult to see as young parents and especially as children. But when you get older, really older, and you see how it ends, for those who believe the world's lies, who deny the truth of the gospel, you see the end of that road for those who took the wide path with these temporary thrills, and you realize that path was hard. Inviting Christ to explain story in our life, to enlighten our family adventure. to be part of our practices in our life together. That's what I'm hoping we can uncover in some stories and adventures ahead. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.