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Men behaving Daddly!

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I’ve had the privilege recently of sitting with some amazing young people and hearing their hearts, hearing where they are at, where they’d like to be at and just generally being allowed to listen to them sharing.

So much of what I hear seems to connect with their confusion of who God is, what He wants and how we should connect the two. I must say that for most of my life I struggled with this, to be honest, I still have days now, where I struggle with understanding Him and what He wants for my life. But for certain, one thing that God has solidified in my heart, chiselled into my very soul, is that He wants me to be a father, a husband and a man, and those are things He holds close to His heart. After all, He is a Father, he lives as a husband to his bride and he was a man!

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The Purpose of a Father! Part 1

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I’ve been formulating my own little list of the tasks or missions that are attached with the mantle “Father”. I’ve been tweeting them for the past week and so I thought I’d elaborate on my weeks’ tweets and then add them to a page on the site which I will call The purpose of a Father, so here we go.

Fathering is hard, for us anyway, and the job description exhaustive. I only need to look at my week and I come up with the following job titles that I held:

  • Comforter
  • Protector
  • Educator
  • Cleaner
  • Financer
  • Guidance counsellor
  • Pastor
  • Chef
  • Personal trainer etc

The list seems to never end, but then again neither does the joy I feel when my son looks at me and asks for a hug, a few minutes of my time to read him a book or to play cars with him. This past week I looked at 7 purposes which for me are real necessities in my life as a Dad. The 7 purposes from this week were:

  1. To validate masculinity and manhood.
  2. To instill a sense of value.
  3. To build up.
  4. To create boundaries within which his children have enough freedom to explore, but also enough safety so that the     consequences are learning experiences and not death sentences.
  5. To provide emotionally, educationally and financially.
  6. To be the first to praise and the last to criticise.
  7. To be a gate-keeper.

Lets look at some of these that I find need more focus today.

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