The Thing About My Folks

When I was a kid, my folks were completely unreasonable. I mean, they were horrible, really. It’s amazing I made it through. When I think back now, as a parent myself, I may have called CPS on my parents several times. You have no idea.

Oh, sure, in public they were all nice and respectable... Actually, now that I think about it, they were equally as awful in public as they were at home.

You would like a few examples? Here you go:

• My parents never had cable or satellite TV. It was embarrassing. I had to go to my friend’s house to watch MTV. I never knew anything about Beavis and Butthead or Ren and Stimpy. I was a dork and it’s all their fault.
  
  And it didn’t stop with TV. We barely had video games. When someone pulled out their Nintendo, I had no idea what to do with it. I’m an inept gamer and it’s all their fault.

• My parents forced me to wear hand-me-down clothes. Never mind that I was the youngest of 4 kids and they couldn’t afford Hilfiger, Gap, or Structure. My clothes weren’t from the mall, usually not even from Wal-Mart. Most of the time I got to shop in MY BROTHERS’ CLOSET! I was mortified every time I walked down the hall at school.
  
  So when I saw A C Slater and his awesome stone washed jeans, I knew it was only a dream. I was a fashion don’t and it’s all their fault.

• My parents always had to know where I was and what I was doing. And we lived so far out of town that usually all I had available was MY BACK YARD! And I had a curfew at least an hour ahead of everyone else my age. Some of my friends didn’t have a curfew at all. You can guess where I went to spend the night as often as I could. I was a dweeb and it’s all their fault.

So you can see just these few examples of how bad my parents were at... PARENTING! I haven’t even gotten to how few times we ever went to Red Lobster or Olive Garden. I didn’t mention how my first jobs were when I was 9 years old. I can’t even think about not getting to go to cool places like Walt Disney World or Las Vegas. And, ugh, all that time we spent at CHURCH! Well, I didn’t actually mind that part so much. AWANA was kind of fun.

But because they gave birth to me, I was FORCED to follow my parents’ instructions. Because I have their DNA, I HAVE to show them honor, which is hard for me, given how my dad worked 12 hour shifts (supposedly to put food on the table and pay the mortgage) and my mom was always teaching at the same school as I was attending (again, EMBARRASSING).

It’s amazing to me that I turned out to be so well-adjusted. I’m incredibly cool for how I was brought up, even though I never got to hang out with drunks, drug addicts, or gangsters.

So thanks, Mom and Dad, for being such awful parents. No, seriously. Thank You.

Confessions of Matt Parker

I have a confession to make. I read teenage girl novels. I read all of the Twilight novels. I’m working on Hunger Games. I am not a teenage girl. And, get ready for this, I enjoy them. I realize that they are not the best crafted stories ever. I know that they are predictable and often trite. But I like to read them. I don’t know why, but I do, and always have. I read Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice when I was 12.

I’m glad to get that off my chest. Now you know one of my deepest, darkest secrets, and one of Misha’s favorite things to tease me about.

Confession is good for the soul.

I’ve not really been all that good at confession. I’m a fairly private person, and I want people to think well of me, to a fault. So I try not to offend against your expectations, and when I do, I try not to let you know about it. It’s also tempting, if the offense comes to light, to pass the blame on to someone else, even the person I’ve offended.

The older I get, the more I have the opportunity to practice confession. And when I do, I get sweaty palms and that jittery feeling in my chest, because when I confess for real, it’s not about a silly book I’m reading, it’s about things that require the giving and receiving of forgiveness, things that have the potential to harm relationships and hurt my reputation. But these would be hurt so much more by keeping them secret.

I clearly remember a few years ago when I was irresponsible with another man’s tool. I had to look directly into the face of a man I admire and respect and confess, and then ask for his forgiveness.

Confession is good for the soul.

I think we make mental assent of the fact, but when it comes to practice, we determine to keep things hidden and try to cover the dark corners of our lives so that people will think well of us. We project an image of how we want to be perceived, and for many people, the image doesn’t look much like the reality.

Confession closes the gap between our reality and our projection. Wouldn’t it be great if we really didn’t have anything to hide? Wouldn’t we live less stressful, more peaceful lives? Wouldn’t we get more and better sleep?

I’m not saying we should shout all the sordid events of our lives from the rooftops. It’s just that we often act like we don’t believe that Christ covered all of our sin. We act like there is judgment reserved for what we feel is too icky to be touched by His grace. Usually these things are what we judge in other people, but that’s a different article.

Confession helps us to experience grace in a tangible, face to face encounter.

Here are a few notes I’ve made about confession. Feel free to add to them or argue with me:

• Find a few people you can trust to reveal your entire life to, who will keep the information to themselves.
• Try not to leave anything out. The temptation is to go halfway, and thus diminish the benefit of the exercise.
• Your confessors should be people who will encourage you to do what is right.
• Don’t confess cross-gender with anyone except your spouse. There is great danger in that level of intimacy.
• If you need to confess and seek forgiveness from someone, do it right away, see Matthew 5:23-25. The longer you wait, the harder it will be.

There is great freedom in a life lived with integrity, and confession can go a long way in fostering that in our lives.

Life and Pain

Life IS pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Dread Pirate Roberts

I don’t like pain. I just want to be clear about this from the outset. In fact, I avoid pain at all cost. My heel hurts, I don’t run. My head hurts, I take an Advil. My tummy hurts, I eat something or take a Tums.

But pain is a part of life, it’s unavoidable. We come into life through pain, we often leave life with pain, and the living of life often brings pain. For something to which we are so averse, there is an awful lot of it. And we spend an awful lot of time and money avoiding something that is so sure to occur.

And it’s not just the physical pain we try to avoid, either. I, of all people, hate dealing with emotional pain, so I avoid confrontation, stuff negative emotions deep down inside, and try to help everyone around me get along. In spite of everything I know about human relationships and how to have healthy ones, my desire to avoid temporary pain trumps what I know to be true.

I guess you could say that I naturally tend to the comfortable. And you do, too.

Often my desire for comfort clouds my understanding of what God wants for me. The thought goes like this: God wants me to be comfortable, so if it hurts, then it must necessarily be out of the will of God. We talked a bit about this in our small group last night. When I think that God causes all things to work together for good, I act as if that means that I will be free from pain. And with plenty of funds to do the things that I would like to do. And with the new vehicle I have my eye on. And...(insert your own idea of comfort here)

Consider these words from guys much smarter than myself:

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. C. S. Lewis

I say this with care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle - - even a physical healing - sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world? Phillip Yancey

God does not promise to make bad things good, nor has He assured us that He will keep us from bad things. He has promised us that in all things--even those that are terrible--good can come out of it for all those who love Him. Neil Anderson

When it comes down to it, at some point my desire for comfort becomes an aversion to stepping out and enduring some discomfort, even pain, even suffering, for the cause of Christ. It is at that moment that I begin to live as if God is here for me rather than me for Him. He becomes my Santa Claus, existing only to fulfill my wishes and to swoop in to remove me from any and every uncomfortable situation.

I will continue to take Advil. I will continue to acknowledge my physical pain and try to alleviate it. But maybe instead of trying to avoid pain in favor of comfort, I will seek to understand what I can learn through the pain, and open myself up to what God wants to do in my life because of my circumstances. Maybe then I’ll experience a bit more of that completion that James talks about:

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

James 1:2-4

Bricked In

Last night I heard a radio interview of the author of a book who argues that humans were never meant to be monogamous. He says that since quite a lot of people cheat on their spouses, that it must necessarily be against our genes/nature as humans to remain committed exclusively to one person for life. Therefore, healthy partnerships and marriages must be “open” in order to be most fulfilled. He also says that people who do remain committed without cheating are either lying about the subject or don’t have the ability or opportunity to cheat because of age, looks, lack of sexual prowess, etc.

I suppose that this is the only logical conclusion of a certain worldview. IF humans are only animals, then our urges and instincts must therefore be our highest motivation and suppression of those urges will lead to an unhappy, unfulfilled existence. Fortunately for me, this has not been my experience.

In my experience, the people who live the most successful, happiest, most fulfilled lives are people who exhibit great self control and have a long-term, exclusive, committed relationship with their spouse. I’ve found it to be true in myself as well. The more self controlled I am and the longer I remain committed exclusively to Misha, the more fulfilling I’ve found our relationship, and not just on an emotional level, but a physical one as well. I can’t imagine a happier, more fulfilled existence for me.

Because when love is viewed purely from a physical cost/reward perspective completely removed from the metaphysical, then it becomes just an emotion, and I know all too well how fleeting and unpredictable my emotions are. Or it becomes just instincts and urges, and I know all too well how self destructive those can be when followed to their end.

So here’s what I’ll do: I will let this fella have his open relationship and let him remain true to his worldview, if that’s what he wants to do. And I will go right ahead and pursue all the things he says will keep me unfulfilled and restless in my marriage. At the end of our lives, maybe we’ll have the chance to compare.

I predict that my relationship with Misha will be unquantifiably better not in spite of self control and exclusivity, but because of it.

Why wouldn’t I remain exclusive with her? She is the one who knows me best and accepts me for all that I am, as imperfect as I may be. She is the one who is the mother of my children and the desire of my heart. She is the one with whom I made a covenant: No matter the circumstance, no matter the finances or health, no matter the place or time, near or far, I will remain committed to Misha Perkins Parker until I die. I have bricked myself in, and though the world may fly apart all around us, I will never break that covenant.

Youth Culture Then and Now

At one point during each of our Real World Parents seminars, I ask the question, “Are things better or worse at this point in our culture than they were 100 years ago?” It’s a trick question, because the answer is, in general, neither. Compared with any point in history, our culture is not better or worse, it’s just different. We have different challenges, possibilities, influences, and technologies, but, in general, we cannot say that our culture is better or worse than it ever has been. Of course, our preferences and our ideas of the ideal society play a large role in our perception of culture.

It seems like every time I talk with the older members of our church about what we do in our student ministry I hear the words, “Things are just more difficult/different/harder than when I was a kid.” This seems to me to be an odd statement, because I grew up in the an era of rapid change in youth culture, and the rate of change increases by the day. Of course things are different today. But for those who were born in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, however, it’s not so strange. We were a primarily agricultural society in the early 1900s, the average family size was larger, communication slower, cities smaller, and, with the exception of the 1920s, our culture was less materialistic than it is today. All of these together made for a less volatile culture, though every generation experiences upheavals of new wars, new technologies, and political strife.

Family life was also more stable than it is today. Children were perceived as assets rather than a drain on the budget. Television and other media were not the distraction they are today, and family meals were the norm rather than the exception. Walt Mueller, the foremost scholar of Youth Culture in the church, gives a list of six of the primary changes that affect our families today:

• The increase and acceptance of divorce
• The rise of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births
• The crisis of the fatherless
• The increasing number of mothers who work outside the home
• The decreasing amount of time parents are spending with their kids
• More teenagers are the victims of family violence

This is not to say that things were easy or better in the early 20th century, but we are certainly facing some significant challenges as we continue our discussion of ministry to students in our particular context. We look around and we can see, almost overwhelmingly, each of these factors affecting students and families all around us. No one seems immune.

Often we turn to the staff and volunteers in our church to help us know what in the world we can do to help our kids navigate these social pressures. But Youth ministry as we have come to understand it did not exist 100 years ago. These issues were addressed in the family context and the need for a specialized church ministry for adolescents was non-existent. Next we will trace Youth ministry as it has evolved to address the various and changing challenges of our culture.