Grace at Home
I HATE HARRY CHAPIN'S popular folk tune of the mid-seventies, "Cat's in the Cradle." In case you are not familiar with it, it is about a father who reflects on how when his son was small he never took time to play with him because he was too busy. Well, the son grows up and because of his job and family he does not have time for his father. The grown son ends a phone call with: "It's sure been nice talking to you." The father realizes then that his son has become just like he was. The message is poignant: what goes around comes around. If we are too busy for our kids while they are young, someday they will be too busy for us. And that is why I hate the song. Perhaps I feel a little guilty, now that my daughters are grown. Many pastors struggle to spend adequate time with their children. Although we have always known that our family needed to be a priority, the consequences always seemed so far away. But not so at mid-life. I have a friend who feels so guilty about the time he missed with his children when they were small that now he is overcompensating. His well-intentioned penance is creating tension in the family. By attempting to be their buddy, he has relinquished his role as their middle-aged father. One of his children told me that his father wants so much time with him when he comes home that he dreads coming. They are in college, they have their own lives, and their response to him is something like, "Face it, Dad, we're too old to play catch in the yard. We're adults now." No matter how hard we try, we cannot make up for the amount of time we did not spend with our children. That can be difficult to accept. Our generation has probably preached more on the subject of family than the two generations of preachers before ...
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