Dad, treasure your children

“The children God has graciously given your servant.”

Ge 33:5 NIV

We live in a day when kids have never been given more of the things they want, and less of the things they need. What do they need? You! Not trinkets, treasures, and toys, but your love and your time. Read these unsettling words in a Newsweek column entitled, “Dear Dads, Save Your Sons,” by psychologist Christopher Bacorn. He tells about an anxious mother in her mid-thirties who came to his office with her fifteen-year-old son. The boy’s dad had left four years before. Since then the teenager had descended into alcohol, gang membership, and violence. The mother had nowhere else to turn, and it was obvious the boy was at best a hostile participant. After attempting for thirty minutes to crack the steel vault of this boy’s heart, Dr. Bacorn realized the futility of it all. He wrote these poignant and sad words: “I’ve come to believe that most adolescent boys can’t make use of professional counseling…What a boy can use, and all too often doesn’t have, is the fellowship of men—at least one man who pays attention to him, who spends time with him, who admires him. A boy needs a man he can look up to. What he doesn’t need is a shrink…As a nation we’re racked by youth violence, overrun by gangs, guns, and drugs. The great majority of youthful offenders are male, most without fathers involved in their lives in any useful way.” In Genesis we read that Jacob was a successful businessman, but he discovered that his greatest earthly treasure was “the children God has graciously given to your servant.” Dad, have you discovered that?

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