Aquinas & Arch Manning

The recent sports story surrounding Arch Manning reveals our society'd desire for shortcuts, and denial that Arch like most QB's needs playing time. 

Our kids and we as parents have the same issue as the media had in this story. We want short cuts, we want the fun and we hate the grind of making kids practice the basics. We deny Thomas Aquinas ontological reality that God made us, God gave us our domains, and we learn over time. 

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Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture

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This is raising joyful children in an angry world. I'm your host, Paul Osborne, Thomas Aquinas, and Arch Manning. What can the recent sports stories surrounding Arch Manning tell us about raising kids A. When you line it up with Aquinas, well, first this has nothing to do with Arch Manning's parents, really even Arch Manning himself, but rather, why did the American media that had watched countless quarterbacks for decades develop and improve through playing experience, suddenly believe that Arch Manning was exempt from the same experience that they had observed hundreds and hundreds of times. It was an historic denial of reality. Even the normally objective Las Vegas betting area had wagering as Arch Manning being the favorite without much evidence. Long time sports experts. Paul Feba, the most popular. Colin Cowherd with the herd joined this chorus that said something along the lines of Arch Manning will be the first pick in the NFL. Next year, he'll probably win the Heisman and probably win a national championship. And the only voice was Arch Manning's grandfather, who suggested that his grandson would be playing two years or at least another year of college football in Texas. The grandfather who had played in the NFL may have known something that the pundits and the fans did not know. He had also raised two sons that played in the NFL as well, and he was not in denial. Of the learning curve, but the question is, why and what does it tell us about ourselves and our kids? Well, I wanna say to you that you know, when you look at Aquinas, he talked about the ontological order that God created. In other words, who we are in our domain, according to our creator. You, you read the scripture, it takes time to plant seeds carefully. Over time, the seeds grow and produce fruit. This is the theme throughout the scriptures regarding God's creation and including us, and it begins with the understanding that we are not capable of doing everything we want to do the way we want to do them, but rather we are built. By a God, by a creator, and there are certain ontological realities that we deal with. You wanna learn to read, you wanna learn to do mathematics, to gain any skill. It comes over time incrementally. And this is the reality that God made us. Now some do learn faster than others, but all of us learn and grow over time. We instead have taught ourselves in this society that we can determine our domain, we can determine the speed and how effectively we manage and master anything. It, you know, it, it's, it's funny now that the new version, the new understanding of Arch Manning is suggesting that he has some sort of mental block that he eats one of these mind power gurus, these modern magicians, and one of them music can actually change this ontological process. It can change him into an athlete that can gain something faster than anybody. Has ever done before. And what I wanna suggest to you, it is our sin nature. We wanna learn fast and we as parents want our kids to learn fast. And it's why your son's football coach, when he's seven, has him wearing a wristband with 25 plays on it. It's 'cause we want instant success. The coach wants it, we want it. And our kids are often being groomed and taught that this is possible. And the problem is. We have to confront this. This is, this is hard to kind of talk about the reality of how we do math and how we do reading and, and sadly, this philosophy is even leaked into many educational institutions. So math tables one plus one is two, two plus one is three. And learning all the. The addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables is often being removed now, you know, 'cause it's not fun and it's kind of boring and there's shortcuts and AI's right around the corner. Things like phonics, vocabulary words in some schools have been greatly diminished or even removed. And so the question of really for us is, well, what do we do about it? And I think we have to first start with Genesis one, the first book of the Bible. This book, uh, tells us that God created a. The world right in the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And I'll talk about another section of this, uh, down the road. But this book, this book of Genesis, tells us about the four relationships that we are in within the world. There is God and his creation, God and humanity. There is humanity and God's creation, and then humanity and humanity. And we have to understand that God took a universe out of chaos and put it in order, and then placed us in it in a domain that he gave us. And he gives us some unique domains for each of us. We're not all gonna play a quarter pack, but this is how the world works because this is the way that God made it. Uh, it, it is what the Italian phrase, Che re. At his pleasure that has to be understood and, and and taught into our children. And so, you know, we want our kids to pay attention when we're learning to read. So we have to spend time reading with them and they're gonna fuss and they're gonna fidget, but we've gotta just grind it out. Uh, you want your kids to learn anything difficult, you're going to have to have this genesis mindset. in the back of your head because you're gonna have to battle because your temptation is, as a parent, you're gonna want to skip the, the line too. You're gonna want to be at that amusement park where you buy the pass and you don't have to stand in line. But it doesn't work that way in learning. It is hard to make them sit still. It's hard to make them learn the scales over and over and over. When learning to play an instrument, it's hard to sit down and master these basics and these fundamentals because they're not as much fun as going to a little game, a little league or football or flag where everybody cheers some play, and we all have a big party. So I want to say it starts for us is we have got to trust the simple sentence. In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. Too many people no longer believe this, and they have adopted theories of Big Bang, random chance math formulas with no power, no. Being at somehow this big, beautiful world that we live in came into an existence out of chance. And this belief system is then how you then conclude, oh, my child's a savant, or This person's a savant, this rare wise exception. And I'm telling you that a player who comes, uh, from the seed of NFL, this is what drove this whole narrative that this young man didn't have to go through the learning curve that everybody else has to go through. You've gotta start with Genesis number one, chapter one. And learn that God is the creator and teach your kids that God made them. And then you gotta understand a couple of verses out of Romans, and it's really throughout the scripture. I mean, look at any Bible story and it is a long traveled road. Romans, uh, chapter eight, uh, tells us that the whole creation waits for the sons of God to be revealed. Later in that chapter it says, not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruit of the spirits groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as son, the redemption of our bodies. You gotta go back to Genesis and, and to see what God is saying about the process of our humanity. And we've gotta go back to, uh, teachers like Aquinas and help us understand rational capacity is something that has to develop over time and, and go back to the classics in which you build the foundations being scales, timetables, vocabulary, phonics. In which our kids have to go through those disciplines in order to be able to gain the great success. I, I, I share this story not so much because it's uh, such a sports story, but because I think it reflects a mindset. Everybody wants to cut the line. Our kids want to go fast and we want them to go fast, and we don't realize we're not doing them a favor. It, it's interesting. In one Corinthians chapter one, verse 18, where Paul talks about the word of the cross to those that are perishing, and we translate it as foolishness, but it really would be more like moronic Just like these experts, these pundits in sports, they denied what they had observed their entire life because they believed in a shortcut and to give up the hard toil. Now you can hear them on a different day, they'll be giving you a different story. But I think it's critical to see this is part of the nature of our kids. It's part of our nature, and we have to commit to the grinding out the unfun part of parenting. Because as I probably have quoted too many times on this podcast, Frederick Douglas says it this way. It's easier to raise a boy than fix a man.

Paul 10:34

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.

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Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.